Ray Voss, 62, retired forest fire spotter, leans against the scuffed cinder block back wall of Silver Creek’s only bar, sweating through the collar of his faded fire tower flannel. He’d only shown up to the wildfire relief fundraiser because his old fire crew chief twisted his arm, and his trailer’s AC died that afternoon, leaving him with nowhere cooler to pass the 92-degree evening. He’s avoided the bar for the four years he’s lived in town, hates the nosy questions, the way everyone knows everyone else’s business before the person in question knows it themselves. He hasn’t dated since his wife left him for a realtor in Seattle 12 years prior, has told himself he’s fine with the quiet: his beat-up 1998 Ford F-150, his hound dog Mabel, the 40 acres of pine he owns on the edge of town, no one to answer to but himself.
He spots Clara Marlow across the room, and his grip on his beer bottle tightens half an inch. She’s the 58-year-old beekeeper who moved into the cottage next to his property six months prior, the woman the town gossips call “the bee witch” because she doesn’t attend the local Baptist church, because she keeps 72 hives and sells honey out of her porch and once told the town mayor to go to hell when he tried to make her get rid of her hives for a new housing development. He’s spoken to her exactly twice: once when she left a jar of wild blackberry honey on his porch with a note saying sorry his dog got stung when he wandered into her hives, once when he helped her pull a fallen pine branch off her hive stand after a storm. He still has that jar on his kitchen counter, hasn’t even opened it, like it’s something too nice to touch.
The auction starts, and the third lot up is a three-gallon cask of her homemade honey mead, aged six months in oak. The loudmouth rancher three stools over starts hooting, making crude jokes about getting a taste of Clara’s “sweet stuff”, and before Ray even thinks about it he’s raised his hand. He bids against the rancher for three rounds, pays the $280 winning bid without flinching, and when he steps up to grab the cask it’s heavier than he expects, solid oak, still sticky with a faint coat of beeswax. Clara steps over to help before he can protest, her calloused, pine-sap-stained fingers brushing his when they both curl around the cask’s metal handles. He catches a whiff of lavender and smoke and raw honey off her flannel, notices the faint pink bee sting on her left wrist, the way her dark hair has streaks of gray pulled back in a messy braid, a single bee charm dangling from the silver hoop earring in her left ear.
She laughs when he grumbles about the rancher being an idiot, says she noticed he was bidding, says she’s glad it’s him taking the cask home instead of some guy who’ll chug it all in one night and brag about it at the diner for a month. She says she’s watched him working on his pickup in his driveway every weekend for the past two months, says she thinks it’s nice he’s taking the time to fix it up right instead of trading it in for some shiny new truck. He feels his neck go hot, something tight in his chest loosening a little, the part of him that’s spent years telling himself no one pays attention to him, no one cares, melting just a little.
A group of drunk fire crew volunteers stumble past, slamming into Ray’s shoulder hard enough to make him stumble forward, his chest pressing flush against Clara’s shoulder for half a second. He freezes, expects her to step back, to act awkward, but she doesn’t. She tilts her chin up to look at him, her dark eyes glinting in the neon beer sign light, her breath smelling like peppermint and mead, and she doesn’t move an inch. She says she has a cooler of chilled mead back at her cottage, and a porch swing that faces the mountains, if he wants to bring the cask over, split a glass, no one has to know.
For a second he hesitates, thinks about the town gossips, the way they’ll whisper if they see him walking home with her, the way he’s spent 12 years building a wall around his life to avoid exactly this kind of messy, complicated thing. He thinks about the quiet of his trailer, the way Mabel will be passed out on the couch when he gets home, the way he’ll drink a beer alone and watch old westerns and go to bed at 9 like he always does. He thinks about the honey jar on his counter, about the way she didn’t flinch when he stumbled into her, about the way she laughed at his bad joke about the rancher’s terrible cowboy hat.
He nods, hefts the cask over his shoulder, holds the bar’s screen door open for her. The air outside is warm, thick with the smell of pine and cut grass, crickets chirping loud in the ditches along the street. She brushes her hand against his elbow when they cross the main road, to get his attention to point out a fox darting across the field next to her property. He doesn’t look around to see if anyone’s watching.
