“Yes!” Sophie said enthusiastically.
Yes!thought Alden. Carving three pumpkins should take some time, which pretty much guaranteed an invitation to stay and sample that chicken soup.
“You’re ambitious,” Arianna observed when they set their pumpkins on the dining table.
“Sophie couldn’t choose so we decided to make a family,” he said.
“This one is you, this one is Grammy and this one is me,” Sophie said, pointing to each.
“That’s a lot of carving,” Arianna said.
“Alden and me are good at it,” Sophie said confidently. “Huh, Alden?”
“You bet,” he said.
“I’ll carve another one with Daddy for his house,” Sophie said as Alden helped Arianna spread newspaper over the kitchen table to catch the pumpkin mess.
Daddy was lucky he even rated a pumpkin, considering how little time the tool spent with his kid. He’d only taken her a few times since the Fourth—never when it was helpful to Arianna, of course. It seemed to Alden that she let the guy walk all over her, never sticking to their schedule, usually bringing Sophie back later than he’d said he would. Arianna really needed someone in her corner. And Sophie needed a man in her life she could depend on. That man should be Alden.
Arianna produced a giant bowl for the pumpkin innards. “Be sure to save the seeds so we can toast them,” she said.
Pumpkin carving was high art as far as Sophie was concerned. Many faces had to be tried out on paper before they could draw them on the pumpkin. Arianna looked over their shoulders several times as Alden helped Sophie bring her ideas to life. “Nothing scary,” she’d say. Or, “That looks just like Grammy.”
“How about this one for you?” he asked, showing her his design. The pumpkin would have glowing eyelashes, and full lips like hers.
“Is that what I look like?” she joked.
“You look way prettier,” he assured her, and she laughed.
Once the pumpkins were done, it was time to put flicker candles in them and set them out on the porch. Arianna took pictures to post on Instagram—of the pumpkins, of Sophie with the pumpkins and then one with Alden and Sophie, the artists and their handiwork. It all felt so natural, like they’d been together for years, like they belonged together. He hoped he wasn’t imagining it because he was really loving being involved with this family. Especially Arianna.
“I’d better take Buster for a walk,” he said when they were done.
“Can I come?” asked Sophie.
Alden looked at Arianna.
“Sure,” she said. “After you’re done, come on back for soup and bring Buster over with you.”
Like a family, he thought. Like what he’d been wanting. How easy it all felt when you were with the right woman.
Alden was weaving himself so into the fabric of their lives Arianna couldn’t imagine him not being with them. It felt too good to be true. Later, after Sophie was in bed and Mia had gone to her room to read and it was the two of them and Buster on the couch, watching a movie, she wanted desperately to ask, “Does this feel as right to you as it does to me?”
She didn’t. She couldn’t take the risk of scaring him away, even though everything seemed so perfect, and she was so happy. Everything had seemed so perfect when she was with Wyatt. And then it hadn’t been. In the end she hadn’t been enough. In the end maybe she wouldn’t be enough for Alden, either.
And yet Alden kept coming back. On his next night over, he came bearing the game Candy Land to play with Sophie.
“We have that game,” she said. “That’s for little kids.”
“My bad,” he said.
“But I’ll play it with you, Alden,” she offered.
Mia, who was sitting on the couch, crocheting, chuckled. “Very noble of her.”
“And very thoughtful of you,” Arianna said to him. Alden, she was beginning to realize, was a big kid himself.
“You know who thought up this game?” he asked Sophie as they set it up. She shook her head and he continued. “It was made up by a lady who had polio.”
