Manny Ruiz is 62, retired air traffic controller, spent 28 years yelling over static to keep planes from bumping into each other. His biggest flaw is he’s clung to routine like a life raft since his wife Elaine passed eight years prior: same scrambled eggs for breakfast at 6:30 a.m., same 3-mile walk around the lake at 4 p.m., same spot at the farmers market every Saturday selling the wildflower honey his hives produce, no exceptions. He’d turned down three separate setups from friends in the last year alone, convinced any new romantic entanglement was a slight to Elaine’s memory, even when his best friend pointed out Elaine would have whacked him upside the head for moping that long.
The first time he sees Clara at the market, mid-April, oak pollen dusting every surface so thick his sinuses burn before he even unlocks his truck, he almost drops the case of honey jars he’s carrying. She’s Elaine’s former sister-in-law, divorced from Elaine’s older brother 10 years prior, moved to Austin after the split and never came back, until now. Her dark hair has more silver streaks than he remembers, she’s wearing a faded Willie Nelson t-shirt under a denim jacket, and she’s setting up a jam and pickle stand three spots down from his.
He avoids looking her way for the first two hours, fumbling with jar labels, chatting with regulars, pretending he doesn’t notice when she walks past twice, glancing over at him. She finally approaches him around 10 a.m., when the crowd thins a little, the bluegrass band at the end of the row switching to a slow cover of *Pancho and Lefty*. “Manny Ruiz,” she says, leaning on the edge of his table close enough he can smell lavender hand cream and the sweet, tart scent of peach jam on her clothes. “I heard you took up beekeeping after you retired. Figured I’d get the good stuff directly from the source.”
Their hands brush when they both reach for the same jar of wildflower honey, his calloused from prying open hive boxes and twisting wrench handles back when he did his own car repairs, hers softer, a little sticky from sealing jam lids. The contact zings up his arm so sharp he almost yanks away, but he doesn’t. He holds eye contact longer than he should, notices the little crinkles at the corners of her eyes when she smiles, the tiny scar on her left cheek from a horse riding accident when they were all at a family ranch weekend 20 years prior. He’d forgotten about that scar.
He charges her half price for the honey, tells her to tell him how the jam is sometime, and feels guilty for the rest of the day, like he snuck something past Elaine. He sits on his porch that night, sipping beer, staring at the hives in his backyard, fighting the urge to drive over to her new rental house and return the jar of peach jam she’d slipped into her bag before she left, unasked, no charge. He doesn’t return it. He eats it on toast the next morning, and it’s the best thing he’s tasted in years.
They fall into a routine, after that. She stops by his stand before the market opens every Saturday, brings him a cup of black coffee, he slips her a free small jar of honey for her tea. They talk about the weather, about the idiot high school kids who keep knocking over her pickle barrels as a prank, about the time Elaine convinced them both to enter a couples’ chili cookoff when her brother was out of town on a work trip, and they won second place. The accidental touches get more frequent: her hand brushing his bicep when he tells a story about a hive that swarmed onto a neighbor’s patio furniture, his knee bumping hers when they sit on the curb eating tacos during their lunch break, their gazes locking across the market crowd when a customer makes a dumb joke, holding for three, four, five beats before they both look away, grinning.
He’s torn so bad some nights he can’t sleep. He knows everyone in town would talk if they found out they were seeing each other, knows half his family would call it disrespectful, knows the voice in the back of his head that sounds just like Elaine is yelling at him for being an idiot and overthinking everything. The conflict comes to a head on a rainy Saturday in mid-May, when a thunderstorm rolls in out of nowhere, drenching the market so fast most vendors pack up and leave within 10 minutes. Manny and Clara huddle under his heavy-duty pop up canopy, watching rain pound the gravel parking lot, lightning flashing over the trees at the edge of the lot.
She admits it first, quiet, over the drumming of the rain on the canopy fabric. “I had a crush on you back then, you know. At that chili cookoff. You were the only person who didn’t laugh when I spilled an entire pot of beans all over my shoes.” He stares at her for a long minute, then laughs, quiet, because he remembers that day, remembers thinking she was the prettiest woman he’d ever seen, even covered in bean juice, even though he was married to her sister-in-law, even though it felt wrong. “I thought about you, too,” he says, before he can talk himself out of it. “A lot. I just felt… guilty.”
She leans in then, slow, so he has time to pull away if he wants, and kisses him. It’s soft at first, he can taste the peppermint gum she’s always chewing, a hint of peach jam, and when he tangles his hand in her hair, pulls her closer, the guilt he’s been carrying for eight years melts right off his shoulders, like the rain washing the pollen off the canopy.
They drive back to his house once the rain lets up, his truck tires splashing through puddles, the bluegrass CD he keeps in the dash playing low. He makes coffee, they toast slices of sourdough, slather them with her peach jam and his wildflower honey, sit at his kitchen table talking until the sun comes out, streaking the room gold through the kitchen window. He wipes a smudge of jam off her chin with his thumb, and for the first time in almost a decade, he doesn’t feel guilty for smiling.
