Manny Ruiz is 53, spent 22 years teaching high school woodshop before a mild stroke pushed him into early retirement four years back. He’s got a scar snaking up his left forearm from a table saw mishap his first year teaching, a habit of chewing on the end of a carpenter’s pencil when he’s focused, and hasn’t so much as held another woman’s hand since his wife Linda died of breast cancer six years ago. His biggest flaw, if you ask his sister, is that he’s spent those six years hiding behind stacks of walnut blanks and weekly trips to the farmers market, convinced he’s used up all his shot at anything good in life.
The October air at the Eugene Saturday market smells like pressed cider, fried apple fritters, and the damp pine drifting down from the Willamette National Forest. Manny is wiping smudges off a set of end-grain cutting boards when he spots the woman setting up honey jars in the booth next to his, the one that’s been empty for three weeks after the jam seller moved to Idaho. She’s wearing a faded flannel tied around her waist, work boots caked in mud, and a silver bee necklace glinting at her throat. It takes him three full seconds to place her: Clara, Linda’s youngest cousin, the one who’d run barefoot through the wedding reception back in 1998, begging someone to teach her how to carve wood.
He’s still staring when she looks over, her face lighting up like she just found a $20 bill in an old coat pocket. She crosses the three feet between their booths before he can pretend he was looking at something else, and when she pulls him in for a hug, her palm brushes the raised edge of his forearm scar. He flinches, not from pain, from the sharp, unexpected zing that travels up his arm straight to his chest. She smells like clover and beeswax, nothing like Linda, and the guilt hits him so fast his throat tightens. He shouldn’t be noticing that. She’s family.
They chat while the first trickle of customers filters through the market. She moved up from Sacramento two months prior, she says, inherited her dad’s bee operation when he retired to Arizona. She remembers the little oak jewelry box he carved for her high school graduation, she says, still keeps it on her nightstand to hold her grandma’s earrings. He’d forgotten he made that. When she leans over his booth to run her finger along the grain of a dark walnut board he finished three nights prior, their knuckles brush. Neither pulls away for a full beat. The sunlight catches the gold flecks in her brown eyes, and he has to look away to ring up an old guy buying a board for his wife’s birthday.
By the time the market wraps up at 3pm, his pockets are full of cash and his head is full of thoughts he knows he should be ashamed of. She’s leaning against the leg of his pickup truck when he’s done loading his unsold boards, kicking a loose rock across the asphalt. “I got a shelf in my extraction shed that’s half falling off the wall,” she says, tilting her head up at him. “I’m garbage with power tools. You wanna help me fix it? I’ll pay you in honey and a six pack of that IPA you like.” He hesitates, the little voice in his head screaming that this is wrong, that every person in Linda’s family would talk behind his back if they found out, that he’s betraying her memory. But he hasn’t had anyone ask him to do something that doesn’t involve selling a cutting board in years, so he nods.
Her cottage is on five acres on the edge of town, surrounded by clover fields and rows of wooden bee hives humming so loud you can hear them from the driveway. The extraction shed is warm, the walls lined with glass jars full of golden honey, the air thick and sweet enough to taste. He’s holding a metal shelf bracket up against the wall while she passes him a cordless drill when their hands brush again, this time deliberate. She doesn’t move away. She looks up at him, her lower lip tucked between her teeth, and says, “I always thought you were too good for her, you know. She never saw how soft you were under that gruff teacher act.”
The words hang in the air for a second. He should argue. He should tell her he loved Linda, that their marriage was good, that she has no right to say that. But he doesn’t, because it’s true. Linda had grown distant the last five years of their marriage, spent more time at work than at home, never asked about the projects he spent hours on in the garage. He leans in just an inch, slow, like he’s approaching a skittish stray cat, and she meets him halfway. The kiss is soft, tentative at first, her peppermint lip balm sticking a little to his chapped lips, the distant hum of the bees thrumming in the background. He doesn’t feel guilty. For the first time in six years, he feels like he’s allowed to want something.
They pull back after a minute, both grinning like stupid teenagers. “We can take this as slow as you want,” she says, brushing a stray piece of sawdust off his flannel shirt. “No one has to know unless we decide we want them to.” He nods, picks the drill back up, but not before he brushes a strand of wind-tousled hair off her forehead, his thumb grazing the soft skin of her cheek. The shelf takes 20 more minutes to hang, and she sends him home with three jars of wildflower honey and the six pack of IPA, plus a scrap of paper with her phone number scrawled on it tucked under the lid of one jar.
When he pulls into his driveway an hour later, he sits in the cab of the truck for five minutes, staring at the jars sitting on the passenger seat, the crumpled note tucked in his jeans pocket. He lifts one jar to his face, breathes in the sweet, clover-and-beeswax scent, and the smile on his face is so wide his cheeks ache.
