Ray Voss, 62, had avoided every small town social event in Athens, Georgia, for eight straight years, ever since his ex-wife left him for the local Pentecostal pastor mid-divorce mediation. He’d sold his 120-hive beekeeping operation three years prior, after a brutal varroa mite infestation wiped 70% of his stock, and now spent most days alone in his cinder block garage restoring vintage bee smokers for collectors across the Southeast, surviving on Social Security and the occasional $200 check for a fully restored 1950s brass model. His only consistent social interaction was a weekly beer with the owner of Hive & Tap, the town’s only craft beer bar, so when the guy begged him to come to the annual honey beer tasting, he caved, figuring he could hide in the back corner and leave before the pastor showed up with his ex.
He was three sips into a wild blackberry honey ale, leaning against a cinder block pillar and staring at the scuffed rubber of his work boots, when he caught sight of the couple across the room, the pastor’s arm slung loose around Ray’s ex’s waist, both of them laughing like they hadn’t gutted half his life for a cheap midlife crisis. He was halfway to the door when a woman stepped in front of him, holding two taster glasses of golden, foamy beer, her left hip propped against the pillar next to him. She was mid-40s, had a tiny scar slicing through her left eyebrow, streaks of silver threading through the dark brown hair she’d pulled back in a messy braid, and Ray recognized her instantly as Lila, the pastor’s stepdaughter, the kid he’d pulled off a spooked horse when she was 12, back when her mom was still married to her first dad, a farm hand who’d moved to Texas for oil work.
She didn’t mention the pastor or his ex. Just held out one of the tasters, her fingers brushing his for a full two seconds when he took it, the heat of her skin seeping through the cold glass. “Experimental batch,” she said, leaning in so he could hear her over the bluegrass band’s wailing fiddle, her forearm pressing lightly against his bicep when she pointed to the tiny handwritten label on the side of the glass. “Clover honey from the hives up on Highway 441, added a hit of orange zest. Thought you’d appreciate it, given your line of work.” The beer was sweeter than the blackberry one, bright, the honey taste sharp enough to take him back to spring days hauling hives across the north Georgia hills, the buzz of thousands of bees humming in the back of his truck. He’d forgotten what that felt like, to not be angry, to just taste something good.
They drifted to the back patio as the bar got more crowded, sitting on a weathered wooden bench next to the fire pit, the wood smoke curling around them and carrying the faint smell of burnt marshmallows from a group of college kids at the next pit over. Lila told him she’d moved back to town two months prior, fresh off a 15-year marriage to a lawyer in Atlanta, was working part-time at the bar while she helped her mom sort out her finances so she could leave the pastor, who’d cheated on her twice in the last three years and was hiding half their savings in a secret bank account. Ray told her about the smoker restoration gig, showed her a photo of a 1947 brass model he’d just finished on his flip phone, and when she laughed at his dumb joke about the pastor’s off-key Sunday singing, she rested her hand on his knee for three full seconds before she pulled it away, her palm warm through the worn denim of his jeans.
He didn’t flinch. For eight years, he’d written off anyone even tangentially connected to the pastor, had turned down dinner invites from old friends who still went to that church, had skipped his own niece’s high school graduation because the pastor was speaking. He’d thought the grudge was protecting him, but sitting there next to Lila, watching the fire light catch the silver streaks in her hair, he realized it had just locked him in a tiny, bitter box of his own making, one he’d been too stubborn to climb out of.
When the bar closed up at 11, Lila scribbled her phone number on a napkin, drawing a lopsided doodle of a bee next to the digits, and handed it to him, her thumb brushing the back of his knuckles as he took it. “I want to come see the smokers sometime,” she said, holding eye contact long enough that his ears went warm, the way they hadn’t since he was a teenager asking his first girlfriend to prom. He tucked the napkin into the breast pocket of his faded flannel shirt, patted it once to make sure it was secure, and walked back through the bar to the front door, not even glancing at the table where his ex and the pastor were still sitting, bickering over the tip.
He cranked the key in his rusted 1998 Ford F-150, the radio flicking on to a Johnny Cash song he’d danced to at his first wedding, and he smiled so wide his cheeks ached.
