Rafe Mendez, 62, has spent the last eight years sticking to a strict, uncomplicated routine: two days a week restoring vintage typewriters out of his sunlit workshop, three days tending his 12 honeybee hives in the wooded hills outside Asheville, Friday nights stopping at The Rusty Tap for one hazy IPA before heading home to his hound dog and reruns of 1970s westerns. He hates crowds, hates small talk, and has turned down every half-hearted set-up his sister has pushed his way since his wife Mary died of ovarian cancer, convinced any new romantic connection would be a betrayal of the 32 years they had together. He’s also carried a 12-year grudge against his former business partner, the guy who stole his entire client list and left him holding the bill for their shop lease, so when the partner’s ex-wife slides onto the bar stool two inches from his elbow, his first instinct is to grab his beer and leave.
She doesn’t recognize him at first, digging through her canvas tote for a leather wallet, her elbow brushing the scar on his left forearm—from a typewriter spring that snapped back on him when he was 28—hard enough to make him flinch. She mumbles an apology, looks up, and her face softens into a slow, surprised grin. Rafe knows her name is Lorna, she’s 58, she dyes her own linen to sell at craft fairs across the Southeast, and he’d spent three years in the 2010s deliberately avoiding any event she might be at, too raw from the business split to be polite. The jukebox is blaring Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” so loud the glasses on the bar rattle, so she leans in to talk, her shoulder pressing lightly against his, the scent of jasmine hair oil and cedar soap wrapping around him so sudden it makes his chest tight. She says she’s only in town for three days, selling scarves at the street swap meet out front, and she’d felt guilty for years that she never warned him her ex was planning to cut him out of the business.
He doesn’t mean to stay and talk, but he does. She knocks her tote off the edge of the bar when she reaches for her seltzer, and they both bend to grab it at the same time, their knuckles brushing as they lift the heavy bag together. The callus on the pad of her index finger, from pushing a weaving shuttle through linen for hours a day, lines up exactly with the callus on his own index finger, from tightening typewriter screws thousands of times. He holds his hand up next to hers for half a second, too long to be polite, before he passes her the bag, and he doesn’t pull away when her knee brushes his under the bar, warm through the thin fabric of her linen pants. She asks about the hives he’d mentioned once at a holiday party back when the business was still running, and he finds himself rambling about the new queen he’d installed that spring, how her honey tastes like wild blackberry, how he’d started selling jars at the local farmers’ market last year. He hasn’t talked that much to anyone who isn’t his hound dog in months.
The part of his brain that’s spent eight years screaming that he doesn’t get to be happy, that this is wrong, that Lorna is off limits because of her ex, is still yelling, but it’s getting quieter, drowned out by the way she laughs at his dumb joke about bee stings and terrible ex-business partners, the way she keeps leaning in like every word he says matters, the way she brushes a stray piece of hair off his forehead when a gust of wind blows through the bar’s open front door. It feels like a thrill he’d forgotten existed, sharp and warm at the same time, like the first sip of cold beer on a 90-degree day, like the first time a new queen bee takes her mating flight. He doesn’t overthink it when he asks her if she wants to walk two blocks down to the taco truck for carnitas, and she says yes before he’s even finished the sentence.
They leave their half-empty drinks on the bar, the air outside thick with the smell of cut grass and grill smoke, fireflies flickering low over the sidewalk. When she laces her fingers through his, callus to callus, he doesn’t pull away, doesn’t let the guilt win, doesn’t waste time worrying about what anyone from the old days would say. The taco truck guy yells that they just pulled a fresh batch of carnitas off the grill as they step up to the window, and Lorna squeezes his hand, grinning so wide the crinkles at the corners of her eyes show. He orders two tacos, extra cilantro, no onions, and she tells him that’s exactly how she likes hers.
