Rafe Marquez, 62, spent 28 years as a US Forest Service smokejumper before a blown rotator cuff from a 2017 jump into the Mendocino Complex forced his retirement. Now he keeps 42 hives of Italian honeybees on his 17-acre spread outside Weaverville, sells raw honey at the weekly farmers’ market, and avoids nearly every local event that doesn’t involve his bees or fixing the split-rail fence around his property. His biggest flaw? He’s spent 8 years convincing himself that letting anyone new get close is a betrayal of his late wife Ellen, who died of ovarian cancer six months after their 30th wedding anniversary. He turns down every half-joking set-up from the waitstaff at the Main Street diner, says his bees are all the company he needs, and hasn’t stepped foot in the town’s annual summer beer festival since 2014, the last year he and Ellen went before she got sick.
His buddy Tito, the county road foreman, dragged him to this year’s festival anyway, saying the town was celebrating dodging the 2023 wildfire season that’d torched 40,000 acres 20 miles west, and Rafe owed it to the community to show up. Rafe had agreed mostly to get Tito to stop leaving passive-aggressive jars of pickled okra on his porch, and he’d been 10 minutes away from bailing entirely when he turned too fast to avoid a group of teens toting overfilled yard glasses, slamming straight into a woman holding a flight of sour ales.
Half the pale, frothy liquid spilled down the front of his faded charcoal Carhartt work shirt, the other half splattering the ivory linen blouse she wore tucked into high-waisted jeans. He fumbled for an apology, grabbing a stack of rough brown napkins off the nearby tri-tip truck counter, and froze when he looked up at her. She had thick silver streaks woven through the dark braid slung over her shoulder, round tortoiseshell glasses perched on her nose, and she was laughing, not mad. “That’s on me,” she said, wiping a bead of beer off her cheek with the back of her hand. “I was staring at the bee patch on your sleeve, didn’t even see you coming.”
She was Clara Bennett, the new town librarian, moved to Weaverville six months prior after her husband died of a sudden heart attack in 2021. She’d been asking around for the local beekeeper for weeks, she said, because she’d secured a small state grant to plant a native pollinator garden behind the library, and needed someone to advise her on what plants would draw the most bees and monarch butterflies. They stood so close Rafe could smell lavender lotion on her wrists when she leaned in to dab at a splotch of beer on his chest, their knuckles brushing when they both reached for a napkin to wipe splatter off her forearm. He held eye contact longer than he had with anyone who wasn’t a grocery store clerk in years, noticed the tiny constellation of freckles across her nose, the way her left cheek dimpled when she teased him for looking like he’d rather be stuck in a lightning storm on a fire line than at the festival.
He admitted he’d avoided the festival for nearly a decade, that it felt like a space that belonged to Ellen, not him. She didn’t push, didn’t give him the soft, pitying look most people did when he mentioned Ellen. She just nodded, said she still avoided the town’s 4th of July parade because she and her husband had run the hot dog booth there for 17 years, and she knew what it felt like to think a place would break you if you stepped foot in it again.
They sat on a smooth, sun-warmed granite rock half a mile from the festival, cold river water lapping at the toes of his scuffed work boots, making his old jump-related ankle ache. He was telling her which native milkweed and lupine varieties would grow best in the library’s partial shade when she reached over, brushed a crumb of tri-tip off his chin, her fingers lingering for half a second on the thick, silvery scar that ran across his left cheek from a 2009 jump accident. He didn’t flinch, like he usually did when people touched the scar. He leaned in slow, gave her every chance to pull away, and she didn’t. The kiss was soft, tasted like sour ale and peppermint gum, and for the first time since Ellen died, he didn’t feel a flash of guilt for feeling happy.
They stayed on the rock until the sun dipped below the pine tree line, painting the sky pink and orange, the roar of the festival fading to a low hum. He walked her to her beat-up 2008 Subaru Outback, watched her scribble her phone number on the back of a crumpled library book sale receipt before tucking it into the breast pocket of his Carhartt, right next to his bee hive tool. He got in his truck, pulled out his phone to text her before he even turned the key, and smiled when she replied 10 seconds later with a photo of a fuzzy bumblebee perched on a sunflower she’d taken that morning. He turned the key in the ignition, the low rumble of the truck’s engine mixing with the distant sound of the crowd, and for the first time in 8 years, he didn’t drive straight home to his hives.
