Ronan O’Malley, 67, spent 32 years tending the Whitefish Point lighthouse on Lake Superior before he retired, and he’d rather wrestle an iced-over hatch in a January gale than make small talk with strangers at the Marquette fall craft festival. He’d only agreed to set up a booth selling his hand-carved wooden buoys because his 16-year-old niece had begged him, saying the extra cash would cover her competition robotics fees. His knuckles still bore a faint white scar from that 2019 hatch incident, and he worried at the raised edge with his thumb as he leaned against the rickety folding table, sipping spiked spiced cider and ignoring the families jostling past.
A sharp gust of wind hit the line of booths without warning, sending a stack of glass honey jars from the stand next to his tipping over. He moved before he thought, snatching the top two jars before they could shatter on the leaf-strewn asphalt. When he looked up to hand them off, he froze. Clara Marlow. Ex-wife of his late wife’s cousin, the woman he’d written off as flighty and selfish 20 years prior, when she’d bailed on his wife’s 40th birthday party without a word and filed for divorce from her husband three months later.
Their fingers brushed as she took the jars from him. Her skin was warmer than he expected, calloused at the fingertips from beekeeping, a tiny faded black bee tattoo peeking out from the cuff of her flannel shirt. She smelled like clover and vanilla lip balm, not the sickly sweet perfume he remembered from family gatherings. “Thanks,” she said, her laugh lower and rougher than the high, tinny giggle he’d associated with her for decades. “Thought I was gonna spend the next hour mopping honey off my boots.”
He grunted a reply, fully intending to turn back to his booth and ignore her for the rest of the day, but she leaned against the edge of his table instead, crossing her boots at the ankle. Their knees brushed when a group of drunk college students stumbled past, and he didn’t move away. She teased him first, about the permanent scowl on his face, about the fact that everyone in town still talked about the time he’d chased a group of teens off lighthouse property with a fog horn in 2017. He found himself snorting at the story, even though he’d hated retelling it for years.
When she brought up the birthday party, he tensed, ready to snap, but she cut him off before he could speak. “I was in the ER that day,” she said, picking at a chip in her amber nail polish, not meeting his eye. “Miscarried our first kid. I didn’t tell anyone. Your cousin bailed on me at the hospital to go drinking with his friends. I filed for divorce the next week.”
The words settled heavy in his chest, and he felt like an idiot for carrying a grudge for 20 years over something he’d never bothered to ask about. They talked for the rest of the festival, the crowd thinning around them, the air growing sharper as the sun dipped below the treeline. When people jostled the table, their shoulders pressed together for a few seconds at a time, and she held his eye contact a beat longer than casual, the corner of her mouth tugging up when he told her about the time a seagull stole a sandwich right out of his hand while he was up in the lighthouse catwalk.
By the time the festival organizers announced they were closing up for the night, a light drizzle had started to fall, spotting the wooden buoys stacked next to his table. He loaded them into the bed of his beat-up 2008 Ford F150, his flannel shirt already damp at the shoulders, when he heard her footsteps behind him. She held out a quart jar of raw honey, the label handwritten in loopy cursive. “For saving the jars,” she said, her fingers lingering on his wrist when he took it from her. “Diner off Highway 41 has that blueberry pie you used to rave about at family dinners. You wanna split a slice?”
He hesitated for half a second, the voice in the back of his head screaming that he was better off alone, that he hadn’t eaten a meal with anyone who wasn’t his niece in 12 years, that this was too much too fast. Then he looked at her, the silver streaks in her auburn hair stuck to her forehead from the rain, her eyes crinkling at the corners when she smiled, and he nodded.
She climbed into the passenger seat, and he turned the heater on full blast to chase the chill out of the cab. When a Gordon Lightfoot song came on the old radio, she reached over to turn the volume up, her forearm brushing the hair on his, and he didn’t flinch away. He watched the raindrops streak the windshield as he pulled out of the festival parking lot, the jar of honey warm in the cup holder between their seats.
