Clay Bennett, 58, retired U.S. Forest Service wildfire crew lead, leaned against the sun-warmed brick of the town’s only hardware store and wiped barbecue sauce off the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. He’d moved back to his rural Ohio hometown 11 months prior, after 32 years fighting blazes out west, 7 of those years spent alone after his wife Diane died of ovarian cancer. His flaw, one he’d admitted only to his 8-year-old granddaughter during a late-night ice cream run, was that he’d turned stubbornly, deliberately boring, turning down every dinner invitation, every set-up, every chance at anything that might crack the quiet, unremarkable routine he’d built for himself. The scar across his left knuckle, from a 2017 axe mishap on the Salmon River fire, twitched when he saw the woman behind the honey booth glance his way for the third time in 10 minutes.
He knew who she was. Lila Marlow, 42, the pastor’s wife, married 12 years, the kid sister of his high school best friend who’d moved to Alaska back in 2005. Town gossips whispered she’d slept on the parsonage couch for two years, that her husband hadn’t called once in the six weeks he’d been on a Haiti mission trip, that she’d told the church deacons to go to hell when they shot down her proposal for a community bee garden behind the fellowship hall. She wiped down her booth edge, sun catching amber honey streaks in the mason jars lined up behind her, flannel shirt rolled to the elbows, nails chipped pale yellow, no rings on her left hand. When he spilled a glob of sauce on his wrist, she grabbed a wet wipe and crossed the three feet of grass between them before he could move.
Her hand brushed his when she passed it over, cool, smelling of beeswax and lavender, and she held eye contact a full beat longer than small town politeness allowed, a tiny, knowing smirk tugging at her mouth. “Clay Bennett. Mom still tells the story about you stealing the homecoming float to drive to the lake senior year.” Her voice was low, a little rough, like she smoked a cigarette on the porch after everyone else went to bed. He grunted, wiped the sauce off, and found himself walking over to her booth before he could talk himself out of it, the roar of the fair’s funnel cake fryer and distant kid screams on the Ferris wheel fading to background noise.
They talked for 40 minutes, leaning across the rough pine counter, close enough he could smell coconut shampoo in her hair when she leaned forward to grab a jar of sourwood honey to show him. He told her about the two hives he kept in his backyard, how beekeeping post-retirement calmed the jumpy, hyper-alert edge 30 years of fire season had left him with. She told him about the feral hive that had moved into the oak tree behind the parsonage, that the queen had vanished a week prior, that she didn’t know how to fix it, that the deacons had threatened to call an exterminator if she didn’t “deal with the pest problem” by month’s end. When he reached for the jar she held, his forearm brushed hers, warm through her thin cotton shirt, and she didn’t pull away.
He spent the drive home fighting with himself, equal parts disgusted and hungry. Disgusted because this was the pastor’s wife, for Christ’s sake, the town’s golden girl, everyone watched her every move, and he was supposed to be the quiet, grieving widower no one had anything bad to say about. Hungry because no one had looked at him like that, like he was something more interesting than a dusty old relic who used to fight fires, since Diane died. He showed up at the parsonage at 10 a.m. the next day, hive tool in his back pocket, a jar of his own wildflower honey on the passenger seat, long after morning service let out, when the only people left in the church parking lot were deacons taking down folding tables.
She met him on the back porch, wearing cutoff jeans and a faded Johnny Cash tank top, no makeup, a smudge of charcoal on her cheek from lighting the hive smoker, a cold Pabst in her hand for him. They walked out to the oak tree together, the low hum of bees growing louder as they got closer, sun warm on the back of his neck. He showed her how to lift frames slow, how to spot the queen’s longer, striped abdomen, his calloused hand covering hers when she fumbled the frame. When they turned to each other, less than a foot apart, bee hum loud enough to drown out any other noise, she kissed him first, slow, tasting like honey and citrus seltzer, and he didn’t pull away. He didn’t feel guilty, not even a little. He knew what it felt like to be stuck in a story everyone else had written for you, to be expected to grieve forever, to stay in a dead marriage for appearances.
They found the queen an hour later, hiding under a clump of wax in the far hive corner, and moved her back to the center where worker bees could tend to her. She walked him to his truck when they were done, bare feet dusty from the grass, and he handed her the jar of his wildflower honey. She tucked a sprig of white clover behind his ear, told him to bring his granddaughter by the next weekend to see the bees, to bring peanut butter crackers to dip in fresh honey. He climbed into his truck, rolled the window down, and pulled out of the driveway, the smell of cut grass and clover pouring in, faint honey stickiness still on his fingertips. He turned up the Johnny Cash song on the radio, and for the first time in 7 years, he didn’t feel like he was just waiting for something to end.
