Merv Pritchard, 62, retired U.S. Forest Service fire spotter, has followed the exact same Saturday routine for eight years straight, ever since his wife Elaine passed from ovarian cancer. He wakes at 6 a.m., chops half a cord of fir for the winter, showers, pulls on the same faded 2018 fire season ball cap, scuffed steel-toe boots, and jeans with a frayed hole at the right knee from kneeling to fix his tractor, then drives the 12 miles into town for the farmers market. He only ever buys peaches from the old Mennonite couple at the far end, and a cup of black coffee from the food truck by the entrance, no detours, no small talk he doesn’t have to. His biggest personality flaw, one his old crew used to rag on him for constantly, is that he’s stubborn to a fault—once he sets a rule for himself, he’d rather walk through a wall than break it. For eight years, that rule has been no dates, no flirting, no even looking at another woman for longer than two seconds, because it feels like cheating on the woman he was married to for 34 years.
The second week of August, that rule gets cracked the second he walks past the new honey stand halfway down the market row. The air smells like cut clover, charred grilled corn from the taco truck, and thick, sweet raw honey that sticks to the back of his throat before he even gets close. A woman with auburn hair streaked sun-bleached blonde at the ends, freckles dusted across her nose, and a smudge of beeswax caked on her left forearm calls his name, and he stops short. It’s Lila Mae Carter, Elaine’s first cousin, 12 years younger than him, the kid who used to crash their beach trips every summer, drag them out to hunt for seashells at 5 a.m., who he hasn’t seen since Elaine’s funeral 8 years prior. She moved to Alaska to work on a fishing boat right after that, he remembers, and lost touch with most of the family.
She leans across the rough pine table of her stand, holding out a small plastic spoon dipped in dark, syrupy blackberry honey, and their fingers brush when he takes it. The contact sends a sharp, warm jolt up his arm, and he yanks his hand back fast enough that a drop of honey splatters on his jeans. He’s flustered, more flustered than he’s been in years, and mumbles an apology, but she just laughs, a low, throaty sound that he doesn’t remember her having when she was 20. The sample is sweet, tangy, tastes like the wild blackberry bushes that grow along the ridge behind his cabin, and he finds himself leaning against the table, talking to her longer than he’s talked to anyone who isn’t the cashier at the hardware store in months. She says she moved back three months prior, took over her dad’s bee farm after he had a stroke, has been meaning to reach out to him but didn’t want to intrude on his space.
When she asks if he wants to grab a beer at the dive bar downtown after the market closes, he almost says no, almost sticks to his routine, drives home with his peaches and eats them alone on his porch like he always does. But she’s looking at him like she sees him, not just Elaine’s widower, not just the old fire spotter who lives alone up on the ridge, and he nods before he can talk himself out of it. He spends the next two hours walking around the market in a daze, half convinced he hallucinated the whole interaction, the spot of honey still sticky on his jeans.
The bar is dim, smells like fried peanuts and cheap draft beer, and the jukebox is playing old Merle Haggard tracks when he walks in. She’s already in a booth in the back, sipping a wheat beer, her linen work shirt unbuttoned one button lower than it was at the market, showing a thin silver chain with a tiny bee charm around her neck. He slides into the booth across from her, and their knees brush under the table. He doesn’t move his leg away. They talk for two hours, first about Elaine, the silly old stories from those beach trips, the time she dared Lila to eat a whole jar of dill pickles and Lila threw up in the cooler, then about his years spotting fires from the 70-foot fire tower on the top of the mountain, where he’d spend 10-day shifts alone with nothing but a radio and a pair of binoculars for company, then her years working on fishing boats in the Bering Sea, the kind of hard, quiet work only people who don’t mind being alone for weeks at a time do.
Halfway through his second beer, she reaches across the table, swipes a fleck of peanut shell off his jaw with her thumb, and her skin is warm, calloused from working with hives and hauling fishing nets, and he freezes. She says she always had a crush on him when she was a kid, thought he was the coolest man she’d ever met, but he was always off limits, married to her cousin, too busy being the responsible one to notice her staring. He feels the old guilt rise up sharp, the voice in his head yelling that he’s being unfaithful, that he’s betraying Elaine, but then Lila says softly that Elaine used to tell her, back when she was first sick, that if Merv moped around alone for more than a year after she was gone, Lila had permission to come kick his ass.
The guilt melts, slow, like honey left in the sun, and he realizes for the first time in eight years he doesn’t feel like half a person, sitting across from her. He admits he’s been lonely, so lonely some nights he talks to Elaine’s old gardening gloves like she’s still there, that he thought being alone was the only way to honor her. Lila smiles, slides out of her side of the booth, sits down next to him, so their shoulders are pressed together, and says honoring her doesn’t mean he has to stop living.
The bar is almost empty when they leave, the sky dark purple, crickets chirping loud in the grass along the sidewalk, and the air is cool enough that he gives her his frayed work flannel to wrap around her shoulders. He walks her to his beat up 2007 Ford F-150 parked three blocks away, and when he opens the passenger door for her, she turns, leans up, and kisses him soft, her lips tasting like wheat beer and blackberry honey. He kisses her back, his calloused hand resting light on her waist, no guilt, no second guessing, just warm, quiet relief. He pulls back for half a second, reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out the jar of blackberry honey he bought from her stand earlier, and tucks it into the cup holder of the passenger seat before he climbs into the driver’s side.
