Leo Mendez, 59, has made his living keeping bees on 12 acres of rolling Tennessee hill country for 22 years. His biggest flaw? He’s hidden himself away from every small-town social event since his wife, Ellen, passed eight years prior, convinced any casual connection would feel like a betrayal, or a waste of time, or both. He only agreed to set up a honey booth at the county fair this year because his 16-year-old granddaughter begged him to, said her 4-H club needed more local vendors to hit their fundraising goal.
The August air is thick enough to sip, humidity sticking his linen work shirt to his back by 10 a.m. Kids keep knocking over glass jars of wildflower honey, and he’s already had to swat three wasps away from the open sample dish when he hears a sharp cackle from the booth next door. He glances over. The woman manning the fried peach pie stand swats a fourth wasp out of midair with a metal spatula, leaving a streak of flour in its wake, and he recognizes her immediately. It’s Lila Carter, 47, the little sister of his high school girlfriend, the girl he used to babysit when she was 10, the kid who once stuffed a dead frog in his lunchbox to get back at him for making her eat broccoli.
He looks away fast, heat creeping up his neck for a reason he can’t name, and spends the next two hours pretending he doesn’t notice her. He tells himself he’s being ridiculous, that she’s still the snot-nosed kid who used to follow him around the farm begging to ride his four-wheeler, until she saunters over to his booth holding a still-warm pie slice on a paper plate, bare feet scuffing the sawdust under the awning. She teases him about the time he let her drive that four-wheeler and she crashed into a hay bale, covered in alfalfa for three days, and he laughs before he can stop himself.
When she hands him the pie, their fingers brush. He feels the rough callus on the pad of her thumb, earned from 15 years of rolling pie crust at her family’s bakery, and she pauses, tapping the back of his calloused hand, worn rough from prying beehive frames apart for decades. “Still haven’t started wearing gloves, huh?” she says, and he shrugs, his throat a little tighter than it was a minute ago.
A gust of wind picks up mid-afternoon, yanking the hand-painted “Mendez Wild Honey” sign off its post and sending it skittering under her booth. They both bend to grab it at the same time, her shoulder pressing firm against his, the scent of coconut sunscreen and peach filling and cinnamon wrapping around him so fast he almost forgets to stand back up. He can see the faint smatter of freckles across her nose, the tiny scar above her left eyebrow from that four-wheeler crash, and he’s hit with a dizzying mix of disgust and want: disgust because he feels like a creep, lusting after a girl he used to tuck into the backseat of his old pickup when she was 8, want because no one has looked at him like he’s just a regular guy, not a grieving widower, not a grandpa, in years.
They keep talking as the crowds thin, swapping stories about the farm, about his bees, about her new bakery space in town. She tells him she’s been single for three years, after her ex-husband left for a truck driving job and never came back. He tells her about Ellen’s sunflower garden, still growing behind his house, planted the year before she got sick. She listens, no pity in her eyes, just quiet attention, and he finds himself saying things he hasn’t told anyone else.
The sky darkens fast around 8 p.m., thunder rumbling low over the hills, and the fair organizers announce they’re closing early as the first raindrops start to fall. Everyone else scrambles to pack up and run for their cars, but the rain hits so hard, so fast, that Leo and Lila are both stuck under the combined awning of their two booths, water pouring off the edge in sheets so thick they can barely see the parking lot 20 feet away.
Lila yanks a cooler out from under her pie table, pulls out two cold cans of beer, and passes one to him. They huddle close to stay out of the spray, passing the cans back and forth, and she admits she’s had a crush on him since she was 16, used to hang out at his farm for hours just to watch him work, never said anything because he was married, then after Ellen died she didn’t want to push him into something he wasn’t ready for. Leo sits quiet for a minute, staring at the rain, then admits he’s been fighting the same pull all day, felt like a pervert at first for even noticing how pretty she is, but he can’t remember the last time he felt this light, this seen.
The rain slows to a drizzle 20 minutes later, the sky turning soft pink and orange as the sun dips below the hills. She slings her canvas tool bag over her shoulder, wipes the last of the flour off her jeans, and asks if he wants to come back to her place. She’s got a fresh peach pie in the fridge, she says, and a porch swing that looks out over the same hills he’s lived on his whole life.
Leo nods, grabs his half-full box of leftover honey jars, and follows her to her beat-up pickup truck. When she reaches across the cab to turn up the old Merle Haggard song playing on the radio, her knee brushes his thigh, and he doesn’t look away when she grins at him over the center console.
