Javier Mendez, 53, has made a fine art of avoiding small town social events for the last three years. The vintage camper restorer works 12 hour days out of the cinder block shop on his 5 acre property outside Boulder, spends his nights eating frozen burritos and sanding rust off 1970s Airstream frames, and only talks to other humans when he has to meet out-of-state clients to drop off finished builds. His high school buddy Ray all but dragged him to the downtown Oktoberfest block party that Saturday, bribing him with a promise of homemade brats and a case of the spiced lager Javier brews himself but never shares with anyone. Javier had planned to stay 20 minutes, max, no small talk, no answering questions about why he’s still single, no awkward run-ins with his ex-wife’s cousins who all live within a 10 mile radius.
He’s leaning against a weathered pine picnic table, half done with his first beer, watching a group of kids chase each other with glow sticks, when he feels someone stumble into his left side. Beer sloshes over the rim of his plastic cup, splatters on the cuff of his faded red flannel, and a warm hand presses firm to his chest to steady the other person. He looks down, meets the crinkled hazel eyes of Clara Bennett, his new neighbor who runs the beekeeping supply shop three roads over. He’s only ever waved at her from the cab of his beat up Ford F-150, never spoken more than a quick “howdy” when she was pulling weeds in her front yard back in June. There’s a smear of raw wildflower honey on her left wrist, and she smells like lavender soap and cut clover, and when she laughs, her voice is rough, like she spends half her day yelling over the hum of hives.
“Jesus, I’m so sorry,” she says, pulling her hand back slow, like she’s in no rush to move away. “The cooler by the table leg got me, I wasn’t watching where I was going. Let me buy you another beer, to make up for it.”
Javier almost says no, almost says he was just heading out, but he finds himself nodding instead. She turns to grab two fresh cups from the beer tent, and he stares at the faint outline of her handprint on his flannel, still warm through the fabric, and feels a jolt he hasn’t felt since he was 22 and his ex-wife had kissed him for the first time in the back of that same Ford truck. He’d written that feeling off as dead, buried under three years of rust and divorce papers and quiet nights alone.
They lean against the picnic table together after that, no awkward silences, no small talk about the weather. She teases him about the permanent grease stain under his right fingernail, the scuff on the toe of his work boot that he knows came from kicking a rusted sewer pipe on a 1969 Scotty he’d restored back in spring. He teases her about the bee stinger stuck in the cuff of her knit sweater, the way she keeps adjusting the jar of wildflower honey she’d won in the 50/50 raffle like it’s the most valuable thing in the world. She tells him she inherited that same Scotty model from her dad, who died last year, and she’s been driving past his shop for six months trying to work up the nerve to ask him to fix it, because everyone in town says he’s a hermit who hates taking local jobs. When she leans in to point out a guy in a lederhosen costume tripping over the same cooler she did, her shoulder presses firm to his, and he can smell cinnamon on her breath from the spiced beer she’s drinking. Their fingers brush when he passes her a napkin to wipe the honey off her wrist, and neither of them pulls away for a beat, the stickiness of the honey transferring to his knuckle, warm and sweet.
He’s fighting the pull the whole time, telling himself this is just a neighbor being nice, telling himself he doesn’t need the drama of a small town relationship, telling himself he’s better off alone with his campers and his beer and his quiet. But when the local cover band strikes up a slow, twangy version of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” and she turns to him, her eyes glinting under the string lights strung across the street, and asks him if he wants to dance, he says yes before he can talk himself out of it.
They don’t go to the middle of the crowd, don’t draw attention to themselves. They stay right there by the picnic table, his hand light on her waist, hers resting on his shoulder, swaying slow off beat. She laughs when he admits he hasn’t danced since his wedding, 22 years prior, and he laughs when she admits she once accidentally stepped on her dad’s foot so hard during a father-daughter dance at her high school prom he had to wear a boot for two weeks. By the end of the song, their faces are inches apart, and he can feel her breath on his neck, and he doesn’t care if anyone is watching, doesn’t care if the gossip mill starts churning first thing Monday morning.
The party’s starting to die down when they leave, the air crisp enough that he can see his breath when he laughs. She says she lives 10 minutes away, would rather walk than drive, and he offers to walk her home, no second thoughts. Their hands brush three times on the walk over, and by the time they get to her front porch, he laces his fingers through hers, calluses scraping against the soft skin of her palm, and she doesn’t pull away. She holds up the jar of honey, grins, asks him if he wants to come in for a cup of coffee, see the photos of her dad’s old Scotty, maybe taste the honey if he’s interested.
He says yes. He steps over the welcome mat dotted with hand-painted bee decals, the jar of honey tucked under his arm, and lets the screen door click shut behind him.
