Moe Petrakis, 58, spent 32 years gillnetting salmon out of Astoria before a herniated disc forced him to sell his boat and retire. His biggest flaw, the one his late wife used to nag him about until the day she died of lung cancer 8 years prior, was that he held grudges longer than he held ice in a cooler. For the last three years, he’d run a tiny smoked fish stand at the Portland Saturday Market, only working weekends, spending weekdays sanding the hull of a beat-up 1978 Boston Whaler he planned to take up the Columbia once he finished restoring it.
The last market of the season hit mid-September, spitting cold rain that turned the parking lot mud the color of rust. Most vendors had packed up an hour early, but Moe took his time wiping down his alder-smoked salmon display, his left knuckle crinkled with a thick pale scar from a winch accident back in ‘09. The honey stand next to his had been run all season by Lena Voss, 54, the ex-wife of his old fishing partner Jake, who he’d had a screaming falling out with 12 years prior over a botched king salmon haul that cost both of them $40,000. Moe hadn’t spoken to Jake after that fight, not even when he heard Jake had died of a heart attack three years earlier, fixing a hive box out in Hood River. Being within ten feet of Lena felt like a betrayal twice over: first to his wife, second to the man he’d once considered a brother. He’d limited their interactions all season to grunted greetings, nothing more.
He looked up when he heard a stack of glass honey jar boxes teeter, then start to topple off the edge of her folding table. He moved faster than he had in years, catching the whole stack before any jars hit the mud. One wildflower honey jar rolled free, skittering to his boot, and he bent to grab it, his hand brushing hers when he passed it over. Her hands were calloused, sticky with a thin film of honey, and she smelled like beeswax, rain, and clover, sharp and sweet all at once. He noticed a tiny burr stuck in the gray streak running through the braid slung over her shoulder, her cheeks pink from the cold.
She tried to hand him the jar as thanks, and he shook his head, fumbling for his wallet to pay for it. She laughed, a low warm sound that cut through the patter of rain on the vendor tent awnings. “Don’t be stupid. I’ve been sneaking samples of your sockeye every Saturday since May. We’re even.” He hesitated, then took the jar, his fingers brushing hers again. The twist of guilt in his gut was still there, but it was tangled up with something lighter, something he hadn’t felt since his wife was alive. She wiped a smudge of honey off his wrist with her thumb, and he didn’t flinch away.
She asked if he wanted to get coffee at the food cart across the street, since they were both done packing. He almost said no, almost made up an excuse about needing to get home to feed his hound dog Red, but he nodded before he could think better of it. They huddled under the cart’s awning, paper cups of black coffee steaming in their hands, rain tapping loud enough that they had to lean in close to hear each other. She brought up Jake first, out of nowhere, and he tensed, ready to walk away. “He told me, a month before he died, that the haul mess was his fault,” she said, her voice steady, no pity in it. “He lied to the insurance company to make you look bad. Said he regretted it every day after. Said you were the best deck boss he ever worked with.”
Moe’s throat went tight. He’d spent 12 years carrying that anger, that guilt, convinced he’d been the one who’d messed up, who’d ruined a friendship. She reached across the folding picnic table, touched the scar on his knuckle, her thumb rough against the old scar tissue. “I waited all season to say something. Didn’t know if you’d want to hear it.” He looked up at her, her eyes dark and warm, no trace of judgment, and he didn’t pull his hand away.
They walked back to their trucks 20 minutes later, the rain coming down harder now, soaking the cuffs of Moe’s flannel shirt. She handed him a second jar of honey, this one with a handwritten label scrawled in blue ink: For the fisherman who catches more than salmon, with a tiny doodle of a bee in the corner. He grabbed a whole side of smoked sockeye, wrapped in brown butcher paper, from the back of his truck and handed it to her, no charge. She leaned in, kissed his cheek, her lips warm against his cold rain-chapped skin, and told him if he got bored restoring that Whaler before next season, the address to her bee farm was on the back of the honey jar label. He nodded, watched her pickup pull out of the parking lot, taillights fading into the rain. He got in his own truck, turned the key, and instead of pulling out toward his empty trailer in Gresham, he tapped the address on the honey jar label into his phone, saved it to his favorites, and pulled out onto the rain-slicked road.
