Manny Ruiz is 62, a retired commercial beekeeper who moved to Oregon’s Rockaway Beach three years prior after selling his 40-acre apiary outside Modesto. His wife Elaina passed from lung cancer eight years before, and he hasn’t so much as had a cup of coffee with another woman since, convinced any move in that direction would be a betrayal, plus the tiny coastal town’s gossip mill runs faster than a swarm of agitated Africanized bees. It’s 7pm on a Tuesday, post-farmers market, and he’s parked himself at the corner stool at The Driftwood, the only dive bar in town that doesn’t blast EDM on weekends. He’s nursing a cold Coors Banquet, still sticky from hauling crates of honey all morning, the back of his faded flannel dotted with bee pollen he hasn’t bothered to brush off.
She slides into the stool next to him, the wood creaking under her weight, and their knees knock hard enough that he jolts a little, his beer sloshing over the rim onto his calloused, scarred hand. He’s about to snap an apology before he looks up, recognizes Clara Bennett, the new town librarian who moved here six months prior, widowed seven years. Everyone at the senior center has been badgering him to ask her out for months, and he’s avoided every single one of those conversations like they were a nest of yellowjackets. She smells like lavender laundry soap and old paper, the kind that crumbles at the edges if you handle it too rough, and she laughs, soft and low, when she sees the beer on his hand, dabbing at it with a crumpled napkin from her purse before he can stop her. Her fingers are cool against his sun-warmed skin. “Sorry about that,” she says, her voice low, graveled a little from decades of occasional smoking. He notices the chipped sage green polish on her nails, the exact same shade he used to paint his beehives to deter bears. “Stools are crammed tighter than a church pew on Easter here.”
He grunts, nods, wipes his hand on his frayed jeans, planning to go back to staring at the jukebox spinning Merle Haggard’s *Mama Tried* like it’s the most interesting thing in the room, but then she orders a gin and tonic with extra lime, leans back against the bar, her shoulder brushing his bicep when she shifts to get comfortable. “I bought a jar of your fireweed honey at the market last week,” she says, no preamble, holding eye contact for two beats longer than polite, no shyness to it, like she’s been waiting to say it for weeks. “Tasted just like the stuff my grandpa used to keep on his kitchen counter when I was a kid. Best I’ve ever had.”
He can’t help but soften a little at that. Honey’s always been his love language; Elaina used to tease him that he cared more about his hives than he did her, even though he knew that wasn’t true. He mentions he’s been monitoring native bumblebee populations around the town’s hiking trails, pulls out his beat-up old iPhone to show her photos of the fuzzy black and gold bees he snapped the weekend before. His thumb brushes hers when he passes the phone over, and the spark of it runs up his arm straight to his chest, he freezes for half a second before he realizes she’s not pulling away. She’s leaning in closer, her silver-streaked auburn hair brushing his wrist, pointing at a photo of a queen bee, asking questions about how long she lives, how many eggs she lays a day.
He spots old Jim Henderson at the end of the bar, the guy who runs the bait shop, staring at them, waggling his eyebrows like he just caught them making out in the backseat of a car. Manny tenses up, pulls his shoulder back, about to shift away from her, but she just rolls her eyes, leans even closer, her breath warm against his ear when she says “Pay him no mind. He’s got nothing better to do than spread rumors about anyone who’s not home in bed by 8pm. He told everyone last month I was running a book club out of the library that was just an excuse for wild orgies. As if half the people in this town could even stay awake long enough for that.”
Manny snorts, laughs louder than he has in years, and the tension seeps out of his shoulders. He doesn’t move away when her knee presses back against his, warm and solid through the denim of her high-waisted jeans. They talk for another hour, about the pollinator garden she’s trying to plant behind the library, about the black bear that broke into his greenhouse last month and ate half his raspberry bushes, about how they both hate the town’s annual crab festival because the crowds are too loud and the lines are too long. When he asks her if she wants to come over to his place tomorrow to look at the native milkweed and lavender starts he’s got growing in his greenhouse, he’s half expecting her to laugh it off, half terrified the whole town will be talking about it by sunrise, but she nods, pulls a ballpoint pen out of her purse, scribbles her number on a napkin, presses it into his palm. Her fingers linger for three long seconds, her thumb brushing the thick, pale scar across his knuckle he got when a bear swiped at him 12 years prior. “I’ve been wanting to ask you for help with that garden for three months,” she says, holding his gaze, no hesitation, no embarrassment. “I just didn’t want you to think I was listening to all the stupid gossip.”
She finishes her gin and tonic, stands up, squeezes his knee before she turns to leave, says she has to go feed her fat tabby cat that thinks he owns the whole house, walks out the door into the misty coastal dusk. Manny stares down at the napkin in his hand, the ink smudged a little from the condensation off her glass, the numbers looping and messy, and he tucks it into the breast pocket of his flannel, pats it once to make sure it’s secure. He flags down the bartender, orders another Coors, leans back against the bar, doesn’t even glance over at Jim Henderson at the end of the bar, even when he hears the guy snicker to his friend. The jukebox switches to Johnny Cash’s *Folsom Prison Blues*, the fried cheese curd smell from the kitchen mixes with the faint leftover lavender scent on his sleeve, and he smiles, slow and soft, before taking a long, cold sip of his beer.
