Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. She performs tales of food, family, strong women. Internationally published as an essayist, poet, short story writer, and novelist,  she’s a 2021 and 2022 Pushcart nominee, Best of the Net 2022 nominee, and  2022 runner-up in Robert Frost Competition. Her essays, poems, and fiction appear in Impspired, Ekphrastic Review, Verse Visual, Verse Virtual, anti-heroin chic, Gargoyle, Active Muse, Silver Birch, Yellow Mama, Mystery Tribune, Ovunquesiamo, MacQueen’s Quinterly and others.  Her poetry chapbooks are Languid Lusciousness with Lemon and  Feathers on Stone.

The Pumpkin Perp

I take a certain pride in using fresh pumpkin to make Thanksgiving pies. I carefully boil fresh pumpkin, season it, and then scoop it into luscious buttery crusts to bake. Served with ice cream, or whipped cream as each diner desires, my work received universal acclaim. Until last year.

In my new city for a new job, no one knew me or my reputation for pie power. My kindly next-door neighbor, Lil, a woman whose toddler twins, a truculent nine-year-old, and an amiable Golden Retriever leave her little time for baking was thrilled to accept my offer of pie when she invited me to join her husband and several cousins for Thanksgiving. She was a repository for good advice about places to shop and neighborhood “doings.” She told me the best place to go for pumpkins, and reminded me, “Be careful, Bridgit, about putting anything, especially statues or pumpkins out on your porch this year. A group of neighborhood kids have been breaking and scattering them around the neighborhood.” She told me that this happens every year between just before Halloween and Christmas. “We call them the Pumpkin Perps.”

I took her advice and put my Halloween gnomes in the hall instead of on the porch and went shopping for pumpkins on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving—work having made it impossible to go before then Fortunately I got the last two cooking pumpkins and stayed up late preparing the mash. I had planned to take off Wednesday to cook but was called to the office which mean another late session in the kitchen.

Usually, a hot kitchen, in the southern clime of Wilmington NC is not an issue for Thanksgiving, However, last year, the temperature was in the seventies! I had to open my window. It was almost nine at night when I finished and realized I needed to buy ice cream to take along with the pie. The store would be closed on Thanksgiving Day, so I put the pies near the window and ran out to the car to get the ice cream and a new can of whipped cream too.

When I returned, after being gone only twenty minutes, the window screen had been pushed in  and my beautiful pies were outside, on the ground. I guessed that the thief heard my car in the drive, dropped his prize in favor of escape.

After slamming the window shut, vowed to fix the screen at a later date, and drove back to the store. I searched for canned pumpkin. Not the filling. All sold out anyway. I managed to find two cans and the appropriate amount of milk and eggs. Well, so I thought—but I was tired and in a hurry and overdid the milk.

I was up late working on the pies but finally finished them near midnight. Afraid to put them near the window, I placed them on –coasters—trivets –on the table to cool, and then after an hour, in the refrigerator, and went to bed. When I came downstairs, I noticed that the pies looked strange. They had never properly set.

It was Thanksgiving morning. My local grocery store was closed for the holiday. I googled for an open store, drove over, and reached into the store’s  freezer case for yes, you got it, the last frozen pumpkin pie in a slightly damaged box that would guarantee a less than pretty crust.

 I followed the line of the other  hand up the sleeve to a handsome face wearing an enormous grin that highlighted sparkling hazel eyes looking down at me through impossibly long eyelashes.

“Should we do rock paper scissors to determine who gets to take this home?”

Wishing I had taken time to give an additional swipe of the brush to my mop of curly brown hair or at least had added some lipstick to my impossibly pale lips.

“Uh, tell you what, I’ll take another kind to my friend’s house.” I knew they were counting on my pumpkin, but hoped they would be happy with the story of my flops and that a raspberry and a pecan pie along with my funny story would distract them from missing out on pumpkin.

He said I should take it. I insisted that he take the pumpkin and carried my two pies to the checkout. Mr. Handsome was still wandering about the bread section when I left. An accomplished flirt would have had her name and number in his phone by now. A good baker I am, a good flirt, no. I’d never see him again, I was sure.

Never say never.

I baked my bought offerings at home, put them on a tray, covered it with a cloth and walked over to my neighbor’s house later that afternoon.  She directed me to place the pies on the sideboard.

“Mmmm. They look good.” I was about to explain why they were not pumpkin, but she turned to speak to her nine-year-old, Cary. “Time to walk the dog and don’t let him off-leash today.” Then she popped the toddler twins into their highchairs and wheeled them, pushing one, and pulling the other, into the dining room.

As I set my pie down on the desert table, I noticed a pumpkin pie, now warm from the oven but bearing a tell-tale ruined crust and squashed in look on one side. Could it be? Yep!

In a minute, my suspicions were confirmed. Lil introduced me to her brother, Carl, the handsome stranger. Together we regaled the group with our tale of meeting over the crushed pie. And I added to the merriment with the sad but humorous tale of how my batch of fresh pumpkin pies were wrecked by the Pumpkin Perp and then how, “I was so tired when I got back home with the canned pumpkin, I doubled the milk and wound up with pumpkin soup instead of pie, which is what sent me to buy a frozen pie this morning.”

“And how we met,” chimed in Carl.

Our hostess went into the kitchen to bring the bird out of the even where it was resting before carving time. As we seated ourselves at the table, a crash alerted us to turn to the sideboard—where we saw that hostess’ Golden Retriever had pulled down the pumpkin pie, and had his nose buried in the plate. Lil’s husband, James,  jumped up and pulled the dog away. “No, Squeeky! That is bad for you!” He rushed the dog into the kitchen. Our hostess got up to help him.

Lil returned and explained: “Squeeky loves vegetables and the smell of cinnamon and nutmeg—and nutmeg can be toxic for dogs. The sugar is bad for him, but nutmeg, now that could really hurt  him.”

Cary started to cry. Lil jumped up and went over to hug her daughter. “What’s wrong, dear?” James asked. “I got all of the pie off of her and I don’t think she swallowed any. She’ll be ok.”

“Oh Mom, Dad. If Squeeky gets sick it’s my fault. The other night when I walked her before bedtime, I let her off leash and she ran away and then came back to me with pumpkin all over her face. I sneaked in and washed her. But I’m not sure I washed her enough. If she dies it will be my fault.”

Lil smiled. “I think she would have already been sick if she had eaten any substantial amount of the pie.”

I chimed in: “I think I scared her off when I turned into my drive. I found he pies on the ground, and they were overturned so I think he got more on himself than inside himself.”

Carl began to laugh. “So, Squeeky is the Pumpkin Perp! Has he been knocking down statues and rolling over jack-o-lanterns lately too?”

“Oh, Uncle Carl, I think so. Only statues that were next to jack-o-lanterns. I was afraid to tell Mom and Dad that I’ve been letting him go off-leash at night. I’m kind of scared to walk more than a block away from our house. I clean up after him, but Squeeky needs more exercise, so I allow him to run. I was worried he might be the one knocking over statues, but…”

James was trying to look stern. “So our golden is the perp in the neighborhood vandalism. A pumpkin-colored perp who loves pumpkins.”

Trying to intervene before Cary started to cry, I said, “Well, I forgive him. And if I can find any fresh pumpkins when the farmer’s market reopens, I’ll make him some pumpkin mash with no sugar or spices in it just to let him know he is forgiven”

Lil was not successful in suppressing a laugh, but she followed it up with a stern word for Cary: “You will have to go to every neighbor and confess that it was Squeeky and ask if there is anything you can do to repay them for the squashed jack-o-lantern and any broken statues. OK?”

Carl looked over at his niece. “I’ll help if the money gets too much for you. After all, I’m the one who gave Squeeky to the family as a puppy.”

Then he leaned over and whispered to me, “And if he hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have learned what a generous person you are—trying to bring a pumpkin pie to this dinner and then giving up that honor to a stranger when there was only one left.”

I blushed—pink, not orange.