Rudy Gallo, 62, retired commercial beekeeper, hovered at the edge of the Willamette Valley farmers market like he was approaching a skittish swarm. Three years had passed since he’d last set foot here, since he’d sold his 42 hives and locked up his stall two weeks after his wife Elara died of ovarian cancer. His niece had begged him to come pick up her favorite peach jam, the only brand her toddler’s severe food allergies didn’t react to, and he’d caved before he could talk himself out of it. The air smelled like ripe blackberries, fried dough, and cut clover, and a ragged bluegrass band plucked a Johnny Cash tune from the picnic table stage at the market’s center.
He spotted the jam stall halfway down the row, stacks of glass jars glinting gold in the late August sun, and his boots felt rooted to the dirt when he saw the woman behind the counter. Lena Marlow, 54, Elara’s second cousin, the girl who’d shown up to their wedding in 1989 in a ripped leather jacket and tried to slip him her number under the reception table. He’d brushed her off then, told her she was too young, and she’d moved to Alaska a month later, vanishing from family gatherings entirely for 30 years. She looked up from labeling a jar of wild blackberry jam, and their eyes locked, no flicker of surprise on her face. She’d known he was coming.
He stepped closer anyway, his calloused hands stuffed in the pockets of his worn Carhartt jacket, the faint scar of a bee sting on his left wrist peeking out from under the cuff. She leaned against the counter, her hip propped against a stack of his old honey jars, the ones he’d printed with a little doodle of a bee wearing a cowboy hat. She’d kept the labels. “You’re still wearing that beat-up work boot on your left foot,” she said, nodding at his scuffed leather footwear, the one he’d refused to replace for 12 years because Elara had bought it for him for their 25th anniversary. His throat went dry. He’d forgotten how sharp her memory was, how she never missed a small detail.
He asked for three jars of peach jam, and when she reached across the counter to hand them to him, her elbow brushed his bare forearm. The contact was warm, soft, the fabric of her faded red flannel catching a little on the fine hair on his skin, and he jolted like he’d been stung. He hadn’t been touched by anyone who wasn’t his niece or a doctor in three years. She smelled like lavender and raw honey, not the heavy rose perfume Elara wore, something lighter, like the fields he used to hike to check his hives in the spring. She didn’t give him the sad, pitying smile everyone else in town did when they saw him, the one that said they knew he was still sleeping on his side of the bed, still making two cups of coffee every morning.
They talked for 40 minutes while the market wound down around them, vendors packing up their stalls, kids dragging their parents toward the exit with sticky cotton candy in their fists. She told him she’d moved back to Oregon two years prior, bought his hives from the guy he’d sold them to, kept his labels because regular customers still asked for his honey by name. She told him Elara had written her letters every year when she lived in Alaska, told her all about the time he’d gotten stung 17 times saving a swarm from a kid’s treehouse, about how he’d let Elara keep her last name when they got married when every other man in town had called him soft for it. When she laughed, the corners of her eyes crinkled the same way Elara’s did, and for the first time in three years, the tight knot of guilt in his chest loosened a little instead of pulling tighter.
He offered to help her load her heavy coolers of jam into her beat-up pickup truck when the market officially closed, the sun dipping low below the oak trees, painting the sky pink and tangerine. When he lifted a crate of honey jars, his sleeve rode up, and she reached out, her fingers brushing the old sting scar on his wrist. He didn’t pull away. “Elara told me if I ever got the nerve to stop being stubborn and ask you out, I should do it,” she said, her voice soft, no trace of teasing now. “Said she’d haunt me for the rest of my life if I let you waste away alone in that empty house of yours.” The last of the tension drained out of his shoulders, and he laughed, a real laugh, the kind he hadn’t let out since Elara’s funeral.
He followed her truck back to her small farm 15 minutes outside of town, the windows of his pickup rolled down, the smell of pine and clover drifting through the cab. She’d invited him in for a glass of the peach honey wine she made in her basement, and he’d said yes before he could overthink it. He parked next to her truck in the gravel driveway, stepped out, and followed her up the wooden porch steps, the screen door slapping shut behind them when they walked inside.
