Manny Ruiz, 53, has spent the last twelve years tending 42 hives tucked in the oak groves outside Medford, Oregon, and avoiding every local event his ex-wife organizes. That’s most of them. His personality flaw is that he’d rather go three months without a face-to-face conversation than risk someone asking why he split from the town’s most beloved baker, even if the answer is she ran off with a guy who wanted to pave his hives for a discount wine tasting room. He only agreed to set up a honey booth at the weekly farmers market this year because his accountant threatened to audit his write-offs if he didn’t start generating more direct sales.
The August sun bleaches the wooden booth slats at 9 a.m. He’s wiping sticky wild blackberry honey off his calloused palms when he spots her. Clara, the new town librarian who moved up from Sacramento last month, is weaving through the crowd in a faded linen sundress the color of clover, iced coffee in one hand, a crinkly paper bag from his ex’s baked goods booth in the other. He’s been half-terrified of her stopping by all week, half-hoping she would. She’s come to his booth every Saturday since he set up, asking too many questions about hive maintenance, about the difference between sage and blackberry honey, leaning in so close the hem of her dress brushes the toe of his work boot when she leans over to sniff the sample jars.
She stops six inches from the edge of his booth, close enough he can smell lavender lotion mixed with the buttery peach scent wafting from the bag in her hand. “Your ex gave me this turnover,” she says, holding it up, no preamble. His jaw tightens automatically. He hasn’t eaten anything his ex baked since the day she moved out, hasn’t even walked past her storefront on Main Street if he can help it. The disgust hits first, sharp and familiar, followed by the hotter, quieter pull of desire, the way his chest tightens when she holds eye contact like she’s daring him to say no.
He doesn’t say no. He reaches for the paper bag at the same time she does, his sticky honey-crusted fingers brushing her cool, coffee-chilled ones. He freezes for half a second, doesn’t yank his hand back like he would with anyone else. She doesn’t move either, just smiles slow, the corner of her mouth tugging up higher on one side. “She told me your grandma used to make these,” she says, letting go of the bag so it rests in his palm. “Said you two would bake them every Sunday when you were a kid. I adjusted the cinnamon. She always put too much in, right?”
That’s the thing no one else has bothered to get right in twelve years. Everyone always says his ex’s peach turnovers are perfect, no one remembers he’s the one who taught her the recipe, no one remembers he hated how much extra cinnamon she dumped in to cover up the fact she used underripe peaches. He sits down on the wooden crate he keeps behind the booth for slow hours, takes a bite. It tastes exactly like his grandma’s kitchen, like summer afternoons chasing his little sister through the orchard, like none of the anger he’s carried around for a decade matters right now. He laughs, loud and rough, he can’t remember the last time he laughed that hard.
Clara sits down on the crate next to him, so close their shoulders press together through their thin t-shirts. The hum of the market fades a little, the chatter of customers, the jingle of the ice cream truck down the block, the distant buzz of his hives parked in the lot behind the market. “I knew you’d like it,” she says, leaning in so close her breath brushes the edge of his ear when she talks. “I also knew you’ve been avoiding this market for years because you didn’t want to deal with the gossip. Figured a good turnover was the easiest way to get you to stop hiding.” A stray honeybee bumbles past his ear, lands on his shoulder, and she swats it away gently, her palm brushing the fabric of his faded work shirt, the heat of her hand seeping through to his skin even through the cloth.
His ex walks over a minute later, wiping flour off her gingham apron, and he doesn’t tense up like he expects to. He just holds up the half-eaten turnover, grins. “Clara’s got your recipe beat,” he says, and his ex laughs, loud and bright, no awkwardness, no old resentment hanging in the air. “Told you she’d get you to stop being a hermit,” she says, and waves, walking back to her booth before he can think of a retort.
He looks over at Clara, who’s twisting a wooden honey dipper between her fingers, golden clover honey dripping slow off the end onto a paper napkin. She says she gets off work at 5, if he wants to bring a few frames of comb over to the library, she’s got a back room they can use to extract it, no crowds, no questions, just the two of them. He nods, reaches out, wipes a smudge of peach filling off the corner of her chin with his thumb, his finger lingering on the soft line of her jaw for a beat before he pulls away. When he hands her a free jar of blackberry honey a second later, his fingers brush hers again, and neither of them pulls away this time.
