Aris Moustakis, 62, retired Oregon Department of Agriculture bee inspector, has held the same grudge for 18 years. He wears the same frayed navy flannel to every local event, rolls the cuffs up to his elbows to show the thin, silvery scar wrapping around his left wrist from a 2019 Africanized bee attack that put him in the ER for three days. He’s lived alone in the same 1972 ranch home since his wife Lena died in a 2005 solo road trip crash, and he’s avoided Elara Voss, Lena’s childhood best friend, every single day since the funeral. He was convinced she’d talked Lena into driving alone to Spokane to visit her sister, that if Elara had said no, Lena would still be here.
He’s manning a rickety folding table at the annual Willamette Valley harvest festival when she walks up, and his jaw tightens immediately. The table is lined with half-pint honey jars, each with a crumpled handwritten label he scrawled with black Sharpie the night before, the wild blackberry batch stacked higher than the clover and fireweed varieties. The late September air is unseasonably warm, thick with the smell of fried cheese curds and crushed clover, and the bluegrass band set up 20 feet away is halfway through a wobbly cover of Folsom Prison Blues. Elara’s dark hair is streaked with sun-bleached silver, tied back with a frayed lavender ribbon, and her work boots are caked with half an inch of farm mud. She runs the 10-acre lavender farm three miles west of town, has for 12 years, and Aris has driven past the entrance at least 400 times without ever stopping.
She leans against the edge of his table, her shoulder six inches from his, and doesn’t step back when he shifts to face her. Her forearms are crisscrossed with tiny scratch marks from pruning lavender stems, and there’s a smudge of deep purple lavender oil smudged across her left cheekbone. He notices she’s wearing the thin silver hoop earrings he picked out for Lena to give her for her 40th birthday, the ones he’d argued were too expensive until Lena laughed and told him to stop being cheap.
“Give me one of the wild blackberry honey jars,” she says, and her voice is lower than he remembers, rougher from years of breathing in lavender dust and farm wind. He nods, reaches for the jar on the table behind him, and when he hands it to her their fingers brush. Her skin is cold from holding a cup of iced apple cider, and the jolt that shoots up his arm is so sharp he almost drops the jar. He hasn’t felt anything close to that since Lena was alive.
His first instinct is to pull back, to snarl some bitter comment about how she’s got a lot of nerve talking to him after all these years, but he stops when he sees the way her eyes are fixed on the small photo of Lena taped to the corner of his table, the one taken at the 2004 harvest festival, Lena covered in peach juice, grinning so wide her eyes crinkled shut. “I tried to talk her out of driving that night,” Elara says, so quiet he almost misses it over the sound of the band’s fiddle. “She was determined. Said she needed space to figure out how to tell you she was sick, that she didn’t want to burden you with it until she knew for sure.”
Aris blinks. He had no idea. Lena had never mentioned feeling off, never said anything about doctor’s appointments, never gave any hint she was hiding something. The anger he’s carried for 18 years feels like it’s melting in his chest, heavy and warm, replaced by a sharp, dizzying mix of grief and something else, something he hasn’t let himself feel in decades: want.
He stares at her, at the way she worries her bottom lip between her teeth, at the way her fingers twist the ribbon in her hair, and he realizes she’s been just as scared of him as he’s been angry at her. The festival is winding down around them, vendors folding up their tables, kids chasing each other with glow sticks, the string lights strung between the oak trees flickering on one by one, painting the grass gold. He finishes the last of the fried cheese curd he’d been holding, wipes the grease off his thumb on his jeans, and reaches out, brushes the purple lavender smudge off her cheek with the pad of his thumb.
She doesn’t flinch. Leans into the touch, just a little, her eyes never leaving his. He can smell her perfume, lavender and cedar and the faint sweet tang of the cider she’s been drinking, and he can hear the way her breath catches just a little when his thumb lingers on her cheekbone for half a second too long.
He offers to walk her to her truck, and she nods. They take the long way, past the old peach orchard where Lena and Elara used to pick peaches every August, canning them for winter, laughing so loud they’d scare the deer out of the underbrush. The air is cooling off now, carrying the smell of wood smoke from the bonfire set up at the far end of the festival grounds, and their hands brush every three or four steps, neither of them pulling away.
When they reach the parking lot, he stops, turns to her, and asks if she wants to come back to his place. He says he baked sourdough that morning, still warm, that they can eat it with the honey she just bought, that he’s got a bottle of Lena’s favorite peach wine in the fridge he’s been saving for no reason at all.
She smiles, the same crinkly-eyed smile Lena used to get when she was happy, and slips her hand into his, calloused palm against calloused palm. He turns toward his beat-up 2008 Ford F-150 instead of her truck, and she follows, squeezing his hand once as they walk.
