Page 18 of The Pumpkin Spice Proposal
The textfrom Ben was cryptic, which usually meant trouble.
Olivia’s Halloween costume is a five-alarm emergency. She’s in tears. Your particular skill set is required. Don’t be a stubborn mule.
A domestic emergency involving cardboard and glitter was not a scenario I had ever trained for. My skill set involved carbon fiber and wind tunnels, not construction paper and Elmer’s glue. But the “she’s in tears” part landed with a weight I didn’t expect. The image of Olivia’s face, usually so bright and determined, clouded with disappointment, was…inaccettabile. Unacceptable.
I found myself knocking on Lily’s door, toolbox in hand, feeling like the most absurd prop imaginable. I expected … I didn’t know what I expected. Chaos, probably. The kind of overwhelming, fragrant, colorful chaos that seemed to emanate from Lily Sage wherever she went.
I was not disappointed.
The living room looked like a craft store had exploded. And in the center of it all, sitting amidst the wreckage of a collapsed cardboard box, was a despondent Olivia. Her lower lip trembled, and she looked up at me with eyes so full of heartbreak you’d think her world had ended. In a way, it had. Her racecar was adisastro. A pancake.
“You can fix it,” she stated, her voice thick with tears but laced with a faith so absolute it was terrifying. “You know about fast cars.”
I knew about machines worth millions of dollars, engineered to within a micron of perfection. I did not know about “Lil’ Lightning,” a concept currently represented by a glitter-coated rectangle that had clearly lost a fight with gravity.
I crouched, the movement automatic, my engineer’s brain switching on despite the absurdity of the medium. I picked up a piece. Flimsy. No structural integrity. The design was fundamentally flawed. “The weight distribution is all wrong,” I muttered, more to myself than to them. “You’ve got no support along the central axis.”
Lily stared at me. “The central axis?”
Right. Florist. Not an engineer.I rephrased. “It’s a simple structural problem.” And it was. This, I could do. This was a problem with a solution. A clear, logical, fixable problem. Not like the messy, emotional, unpredictable problems that had driven me to this town. This was just physics and applied force.
For the next hour, I was no longer Mario Marrone, the washed-up driver hiding from the world. I was Chief Engineer of Team Lil’ Lightning. I drafted a quick schematic. I identified stress points. I instructed Lily to “hold here” and “apply pressure there,” my voice taking on the familiar, clipped tone of the garage. The world narrowed to the task. The scent of Lily’s perfume—something like rain and flowers—mixing with the sharp tang of spray paint was just data. The feel of corrugated cardboard under my fingers was just a material property to be managed.
It was the most peace I’d felt in months.
Olivia was a surprisingly competent foreman, her earlier tears forgotten. She watched my every move with a serious, technical curiosity that reminded me of a young engineer. “The flames need to be on the side,” she dictated. “So when I run, people see the zoom.”
The zoom.Aerodynamics. She understood the concept, if not the terminology. “The zoom is critical,” I agreed, taking the brush from her. My father would have had an aneurysm.A Marrone, painting flames on a cardboard box.But for the first time, the ghost of my father’s disapproval felt distant, muffled by the more immediate need to get these flames just right. I showed her how to drag the paint to create a sleeker effect. “Così.Like this.So it cuts through the air.”
Her smile was a reward more genuine than any trophy I’d ever held.
Then she held up the bottle. Glittery. Pink. “For the speed boost.”
Everything screeched to a halt.
The world, which had narrowed so perfectly to a solvable problem, suddenly expanded again, messy and terrifying. She held up a bottle of glittery pink nail polish. This was not physics. This was not engineering. This was … something else entirely. Something childish and frivolous and utterly, completely outside my experience.
My childhood hadn’t prepared me for this. There were no Halloweens. No costumes. There was karting. There was fitness training. There was the relentless pursuit of the perfect lap time. Fun was a variable measured in milliseconds shaved off a sector. It wasn’t …glitter.
I looked at Lily, a silent plea in my eyes.This is not in the contract. This is not part of the deal.I hadn’t signed up for this.
But Olivia’s face was a picture of pure, unadulterated belief. She wasn’t asking for a world championship. She was asking for a painted thumbnail. A speed boost.
With a sigh that felt like surrendering a part of my armor, I held out my hand. “Va bene,” I murmured. “Alright.”
The process was agony. The smell of the polish was cloying and chemical. The tiny brush was an instrument of torture. She painted with the intense focus of a micro-surgeon, her little brow furrowed, her tongue peeking out. I sat, frozen, feeling more exposed than I ever had on a starting grid in front of 100,000 people. This was a different kind of spectacle.
When she was done, I looked at my hand. My left thumbnail was a shocking, glossy pink, dotted with specks of glitter. It was ridiculous. It was…assurdo.
“Well?” I asked, my voice rough. “Will it be fast enough?”
Her beaming smile was the only answer that mattered. “The fastest.” Then she did the unthinkable. She threw her arms around my neck. “Grazie, Mario!”
I froze. Physical contact in my world was either a celebratory clap on the back or the desperate grip of a medic. It was never … this. This small, trusting,piccola, and totally unconditional. My body went rigid, every instinct shouting to retreat, to establish distance.
But slowly, awkwardly, my other hand—the clean one—came up and patted her back. It was a clumsy gesture, mechanically executed. But for me, it was a monumental effort. A leap of faith far greater than taking a corner flat-out.
Later, at the sink in Lily’s kitchen, I scrubbed at the polish with a coarse sponge. The pink stain held fast, the glitter clinging to my cuticle like a persistent secret.
