Moe Pritchard swipes sweat off his brow with the back of a calloused hand, sawdust caught in the creases of his knuckles sticking to the damp skin. He’s 59, runs a small custom reclaimed wood sawmill out of his property outside Traverse City, and he’s spent the last three hours at the weekly farmers market selling hand-carved cutting boards and shelf brackets, avoiding the hot honey stand three stalls down like it’s handing out free tax audits. He’s known the woman running that stand since she was 11 years old, pigtails stuck together with popsicle juice, yelling at him for tracking mud on her dad’s porch when he came over for football film sessions with his old high school coach.
The air smells like grilled sweet corn and cut grass, the hum of the crowd bouncing off canvas awnings strung between gnarled oak trees. He’s just fumbling with a new stack of neon price stickers when a shadow falls over his table, and he looks up to see Lila Marlow standing right in front of him, holding a jar of her habanero wildflower honey, sun turning the ends of her auburn hair almost gold. She’s 27, just moved back to town last month after a divorce from a tech bro in Chicago, and Moe’s brain short circuits for two full seconds when she leans over to set the honey jar down, her bare forearm brushing his, the coconut sunscreen she’s wearing wrapping around him like something soft and warm he hasn’t felt in years.
He sits up straighter, his worn work jeans scraping against the metal folding chair, and tries not to stare at the freckles scattered across her shoulders, the thin strap of her yellow sundress slipping down one arm. “Figured you’d want a sample,” she says, grinning, and her laugh sounds exactly the same as it did when she was 12 and he fixed her broken tree swing for free, only lower, warmer, sending a jolt up his spine he hasn’t felt since before his ex-wife left for a Florida golf instructor four years prior. She pulls out the folding chair across from him, sits down, and her knee brushes his under the table, light, accidental, but he feels it all the way up to his chest.
She tells him she wants a custom cutting board for her stand, big enough to hold cheese and cracker samples, engraved with her tiny hand-drawn bee logo. He mumbles through pricing, can barely meet her eyes, half his brain screaming that this is wrong, that her dad would kick his ass if he knew Moe was even thinking about her the way he’s been thinking about her all morning, the other half replaying the way she leaned over the table, the neck of her dress falling just low enough to catch a flash of the silver sunflower necklace she wears around her throat. She leans forward, elbows on the table, and says she remembers that tree swing day clear as anything, that she cried all over his work shirt because she thought her dad was going to make her get rid of it, that Moe was the first grown man who ever listened to her instead of patting her on the head and telling her to stop being dramatic.
His face goes hot, and he picks up the honey jar, twisting the lid back and forth, the cool glass sticking to his sweaty palms. They talk for 20 minutes, the crowd thinning out around them, her knee brushing his every time she shifts in her seat, her eyes never leaving his when he talks about the mill, the old dairy barns he’s been taking apart lately, the 100-year-old white oak he’s got stacked out back that’s perfect for her board. He stops feeling like a creep halfway through, stops worrying about what the other vendors will say if they see them laughing together, stops hearing his ex-wife’s voice in his head telling him he’s too boring, too set in his ways, too much of a workaholic for anyone to actually like.
When she stands up to leave, she leans in for a quick hug, her chest pressing against his shoulder for half a second, her breath warm against his ear when she says her dad’s been nagging her to ask him out for coffee for weeks, that he’s always said Moe’s the only man in this town he’d ever trust not to waste her time. She winks, tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and walks back to her stand, her sundress swishing around her calves as she goes.
He sits there for 10 minutes after that, holding the honey jar, the spot on his shoulder still tingling. He packs up his stall an hour early, loads the leftover cutting boards into the back of his beat up 2008 Ford F-150, and drives back to his property, the windows rolled down, the smell of pine and lake air blowing through the cab. He pulls into his gravel driveway, carries the honey jar inside, sets it on the kitchen counter next to his dented old coffee maker, then walks out to the mill, grabs the big slab of old oak he’d stashed that morning, and runs his hand over the smooth, warm grain, already mapping out where he’s going to carve her little bee logo right in the center.
