Elias Voss, 53, has made a quiet living keeping bees on 12 acres outside of Boone, North Carolina, for the past 18 years. Since his wife, Clara, died of ovarian cancer eight years prior, he’s perfected the art of vanishing after small town events, ducking out before neighbors can corner him to beg for free honey or ask invasive questions about when he’ll “get back out there.” His biggest flaw? He assumes everyone only wants something from him, and he’s spent nearly a decade making himself hard to reach to avoid the letdown.
He’s leaned against the splintered oak support of the harvest festival beer tent at 9 PM, most of the crowd long gone, a half-empty IPA sweating in his grip. He’s got beeswax crusted under the edges of his fingernails, a faint, itchy bee sting swelling on the left edge of his jaw, flannel sleeves rolled up to his elbows to show the faint white scars crisscrossing his forearms from decades of stings. He’d stayed late because he didn’t feel like hauling 40 cases of honey jars back to his truck alone in the dark, not yet.
The stool next to him scrapes across the dirt ground before he sees who’s sitting down. He glances over, recognizes Mara Carter immediately, the 48-year-old county extension agent who’s been blowing up his email for three months begging him to lead a regional pollinator workshop next spring. He’d deleted every one of her messages unread. She’s got work boots caked in clover mud, a flannel shirt unbuttoned over a faded UNC tee, a few strands of chestnut hair stuck to the sweat on her neck from the unseasonably warm October afternoon. She’s close enough that he can smell lavender hand salve mixed with the pine sap from the white pine saplings she’d been handing out to festival attendees all day.
“Figured I’d catch you here if I waited long enough,” she says, flagging the bartender for a hard seltzer, grinning like she knows she’s caught him red handed avoiding her. When she reaches for the salted peanut bowl between them, her forearm brushes his, warm and solid, and he flinches so hard a drop of his IPA sloshes over the rim onto his wrist. He hasn’t been touched by anyone who isn’t his primary care doctor in close to seven years.
He mumbles an apology, wipes the beer off on his jeans, expects her to launch right into her pitch for the workshop. Instead, she pulls a tattered, dog-eared paperback out of her canvas bag, slides it across the table to him. It’s Clara’s old native wildflower guide, the one he thought got lost when they moved the extension office 10 years prior. His name is scrawled in messy blue ink on the inside front cover, right under Clara’s faded lipstick stain on the opposite page.
“Found it when we were cleaning out the back closet last week,” she says, popping the tab on her seltzer. “Recognized your handwriting from the labels on your honey jars. I used to check that book out from the library every summer when I was a kid, had no idea it was yours. Used to copy the diagrams of milkweed varieties for 4-H projects.”
Elias stares at the book, fingers brushing the worn, sun-faded cover, and for the first time in years, he doesn’t feel the urge to shut the conversation down. He tells her about how Clara used to carry that book everywhere, how she’d plant native flowers all over their property to feed the bees, how she’d teased him for being more gentle with his hives than he was with most people. Mara laughs at his dumb joke about how bees are better conversationalists than 90% of the town, leans in when he talks about the new wildflower plot he planted this spring, her knee brushing his under the table. He doesn’t pull away.
By the time the bartender yells that last call is in 10 minutes, Elias has already forgotten he was supposed to be avoiding her. He tells her about the grant he’s been thinking of applying for to turn half his property into a public pollinator habitat, the one he’d been too scared to submit because he didn’t want to deal with the public attention. She offers to help him fill out the paperwork, says she’s got contacts at the state wildlife commission that can fast track it.
He asks her if she wants to come out to his property at sunrise tomorrow, says the goldenrod is still blooming heavy, the bees are extra docile this time of year when the nectar flow is strong, that he’ll make her the blackberry pancakes Clara used to make after early morning hive checks. She nods, grinning, slides her phone across the table so he can plug his number in.
When he taps save, he notices the faint smudge of yellow beeswax he left on her screen from his fingers, and for the first time in eight years, he doesn’t rush to wipe it off.
