Ray Voss, 62, spent 30 years as an antique map restorer, his knuckles crinkled with acid burn scars and the faint smudge of ink that never fully washed off, even after years of scrubbing. Seven years prior, his wife Clara had died suddenly of a heart attack in the middle of making coffee, and he’d shut down every potential advance since, convinced anyone showing interest was just pitying the quiet widower who spent most days alone in his converted garage workshop, talking to 100-year-old paper. He’d only agreed to set up a booth at the Asheville fall harvest festival after his niece begged him to get out of the house, and he’d already turned down three well-meaning attempts from the church ladies running the adjacent jams and jellies stand to set him up with their recently single friends by 10 a.m.
The drizzle that had threatened all morning picked up as he adjusted the stack of 1920s Appalachian survey prints propped against his table leg, and he glanced over at the booth next to him, where a woman in a faded plaid flannel and work boots was stacking glass jars of golden honey. He recognized her immediately, even with the streaks of gray threaded through her dark braid and the faint laugh lines fanning out from her dark eyes: Elena Marquez, Clara’s first cousin, 58, who he’d only met once, at Clara’s funeral. She’d hugged him then, her hands warm on his back, and whispered that Clara always said he was the only man who ever actually listened to her, and he’d pulled away so fast he’d nearly knocked over a vase of lilies, convinced the comment was wildly out of line, that he had no business feeling that spark of something other than grief in the middle of a wake. He hadn’t thought of her in six years, not once, until that second.
She looked up and caught him staring, and a slow, knowing grin spread across her face. She wiped her hands on her jeans, grabbed a paper plate with a slice of cornbread slathered in thick, amber honey, and crossed the three feet between their booths, her boots squelching in the damp grass. When she held the plate out to him, her forearm brushed his, and he smelled cedar perfume and the faint, sweet tang of beeswax on her skin, his throat going tight for a second he couldn’t explain. “Figured you’d be hungry,” she said, holding his eye contact a beat longer than strictly polite, no hint of awkwardness. “Moved up here three months ago, got a little apiary out in Black Mountain. Had no idea you were still running the map shop.”
He took the cornbread, their fingers brushing again, and bit into it, the heat of the infused chili hitting the back of his throat hard enough to make him cough. She laughed, a low, warm sound, and handed him a bottle of water, leaning against the edge of his table while he got his breath back. He told her about the shop, about the new collection of Civil War era survey maps he’d just acquired, about his niece pestering him to get out of the house, and she told him about her 20 beehives, about her messy divorce from a corporate lawyer in Miami that had pushed her to move north, about how she’d always wanted to live in the mountains, like Clara used to talk about when they were kids. He fought the conflicting feelings roiling in his chest the whole time: part of him felt sick with guilt, like talking to her, enjoying her company, was a betrayal of the 32 years he’d spent with Clara. The other part couldn’t stop staring at the way the ends of her braid were dotted with rain, at the callus on the edge of her thumb from handling hive tools, at the way she bit her lower lip when she was explaining the difference between wildflower and sourwood honey.
The sky opened up all at once, a torrential downpour that sent festival attendees scrambling for cover, and the wind gusted hard enough to yank half his unmounted prints off the table, sending them skittering across the wet grass. They both dove for them at the same time, knocking their heads together gently when they reached for the same tattered 1930s trail map, and ended up huddled under the edge of his pop-up canopy, their sides pressed tight together to stay out of the rain, their arms full of crumpled paper. Rain dripped off the brim of his worn forest service baseball hat onto her cheek, and she wiped it away with the back of her hand, looking up at him so close he could feel her breath on his jaw. “I thought about you, off and on, after the funeral,” she said, quiet enough that only he could hear it over the patter of rain on the canopy. “Never wanted to overstep. But I’m glad we ran into each other.”
He froze for half a second, every instinct screaming at him to pull away, to apologize, to tell her he couldn’t do this. But he could feel the heat of her through both their flannel shirts, could taste the lingering honey on his tongue, could hear Clara’s voice in the back of his head, the way she’d always teased him for being too stubborn for his own good, for shutting the world out when things got hard. When she brushed a wet strand of hair off his forehead, her thumb grazing his cheekbone, he didn’t pull away. He laughed, a rough, rusty sound he hadn’t heard come out of his own mouth in years, and leaned in, kissing her slow, the rain making her lips cool and sweet, the faint heat of honey still clinging to them. No guilt, no overthinking, just the quiet, sharp thrill of something he’d thought he’d never feel again.
The rain let up 20 minutes later, leaving the air smelling like wet pine and turned earth. They packed up their booths early, most of the other vendors already bailing for the day, and he carried half her crates of honey jars to her beat-up pickup truck, his boots squelching in the mud. She leaned against the door of her truck when they were done, pulling a set of keys out of her pocket, and told him she had a bottle of 12-year bourbon back at her place, plus a stack of vintage 1950s bee colony survey maps she’d picked up at an estate sale a month prior, that she’d been meaning to get restored. He nodded, pulling his own truck keys out of his jacket pocket, already mentally clearing his schedule for the next day. He tucks a crumpled print of a 1930s map of the local hiking trails into his jacket pocket, already thinking about how he can frame it for her kitchen wall.
