Elias Voss, 62, retired commercial beekeeper, leaned against the scuffed folding table at the monthly VFW potluck, his calloused thumb picking at a loose thread on his faded Carhartt jacket. He’d driven 12 miles into town that night mostly for the smoked brisket one of the Marine vets smoked every month, and partly to avoid the quiet that settled over his cabin the second the sun went down this time of year. A persistent case of arthritis had forced him to sell his 42 hives two years prior, and he still hadn’t figured out what to do with the 16 hours of empty time he had each day now that he wasn’t tending to bees, mending hive boxes, or hauling jars of honey to farmers’ markets. His biggest flaw, he’d admit if pressed, was holding grudges longer than a bear holds a grudge against a porcupine that stung its nose. For 18 years, that grudge had been aimed squarely at Marnie Hale.
He’d blamed her for his divorce, convinced she’d ratted to his ex-wife about the weekend fishing trips he’d taken instead of attending her sister’s bridal shower and a handful of other tedious family events he’d rather have jumped in a hornet’s nest than sit through. He’d avoided her at every grocery store run, every town hall meeting, every public event for nearly two decades, even when she’d waved or tried to say hello. So when he spotted her across the room that night, a streak of silver cutting through her dark chestnut hair, wearing a knit sweater the exact color of the clover honey he used to bottle by the case, he tensed up, half ready to slip out the back door before she saw him.
He didn’t move fast enough. She wandered over to the table to grab a deviled egg, and their hands brushed when they both reached for the same one, dusted with paprika, sitting at the edge of the platter. He flinched like he’d been stung, and she paused, her dark eyes locking with his, no hint of the awkwardness he expected. “Before you storm off,” she said, her voice low and warm, like the radio he left playing old country in his workshop, “I never told her about those fishing trips. It was her cousin who saw you at the bait shop off I-40. I tried to tell you that back then, but you’d already made up your mind to hate me.”
Elias froze, his hand still hovering over the platter. All those years of anger, of scowling at her across parking lots, of making up excuses to leave any room she walked into, and it had all been for nothing. He could smell lavender and vanilla on her, faint under the smell of fried chicken and cigarette smoke that hung in the VFW hall, and he realized he was standing closer to her than he’d stood to any woman in six years. “I always thought you were kind of cute, even when you were giving me that death glare,” she said, a small, teasing smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, and he felt his ears get hot, the way they used to when he was a teenager talking to a girl he liked.
He didn’t have a witty retort ready, so he did the first thing that popped into his head, the thing he never would have done even a month prior. “You wanna get a beer at the dive down the street after this? The brisket’s good, but the company’s about as interesting as watching paint dry right now.” She laughed, a bright, throaty sound that cut through the noise of the room, and nodded.
They sat in a sticky vinyl booth at the bar, the neon Pabst sign above their table casting soft blue light across her face. She told him she’d moved back to town three months prior to take care of her mom, who was in the early stages of dementia, that she worked part time at the little independent bookstore on Main Street, that she’d missed the mountains more than she thought she would when she left for college 35 years earlier. He told her about selling the hives, about the arthritis that made his left hand ache so bad some days he could barely hold a coffee mug, about how he still went out to the old orchard near his property every spring just to listen to the wild bees hum. Their knees brushed under the table halfway through her story about a regular at the bookstore who only bought westerns, and neither of them pulled away. When he reached for his beer, his hand brushed hers where it rested on the edge of the booth, and this time he didn’t yank it back. She laced her fingers through his, her palm soft but with a faint callus on her index finger from turning thousands of book pages, and he felt that tight pull in his chest, half disgust at himself for wasting 18 years being mad at her for no reason, half warm, slow desire he’d thought had died with his marriage.
They left the bar an hour later, the air crisp enough to make his lungs burn a little when he stepped outside, crickets chirping in the bushes along the sidewalk, dry oak leaves crunching under their work boots. He walked her to her beat-up old Toyota pickup parked at the curb, and she stopped when they got to the driver’s side door, leaning in just close enough that he could smell the peach hard cider she’d been drinking on her breath. She kissed him slow, soft, tasted like cider and mint gum, and he wrapped his good right arm around her waist, pulling her closer, no hesitation, no overthinking, for the first time in years. She pulled back after a minute, brushing a stray piece of hair off his forehead, and said she was making apple pie the next afternoon, if he wanted to come over and help peel the apples. He said yes before she even finished the sentence.
He stood there on the sidewalk long after her taillights faded around the corner at the end of Main Street, his left hand tucked into his jacket pocket, the faint taste of peach cider still on his lips.
