Manny Rios, 53, has spent the last eight years treating small-town social events like a skunk treats a campfire: he avoids them at all costs. The beekeeper and raw honey purveyor built his 12-hive operation outside Asheville with his late wife Elaina, and every church potluck, harvest festival, and farmers market he’s skipped since her car crash has been a small act of self-preservation. He hates the pitying side glances, the “you doing okay, Manny?” questions that always lead to nudges about when he’ll “start putting himself out there” again. His only flaw, if you ask his 22-year-old niece Lila, is that he’s so stubborn he’d let his whole world shrink to the size of his bee yards before he’d admit he’s lonely.
He’s only at the fall harvest festival on Main Street because Lila begged him, said she needed his help manning the honey booth to raise money for her vet tech tuition. He showed up an hour late, baseball cap pulled low, the tiny bee-sting pin he’d stolen off Elaina’s old jacket stuck to the brim, and fully planned to duck out by 3 PM. That plan goes out the window when a gust of mountain wind sends a case of habanero hot sauce tumbling off the booth next to his, and he lunges to catch the top jar before it shatters on the hay bale-lined sidewalk.
Their hands brush when she grabs for it too. His are calloused from prying open hive boxes, scarred from a hundred bee stings, and hers are rough too, a thin callus on her index finger from twisting hot sauce lids all day, a faint smudge of chili powder on her knuckle. The jolt is so sharp he almost drops the jar anyway. He looks up, and she’s grinning, silver hoop earrings catching the golden hour sun, strands of chestnut hair streaked with gray blowing in her face. She’s Jules, the woman who runs the hot sauce stand on the other end of the county, the one all the town gossips have been trying to set him up with for a year, ever since her husband left her for a 28-year-old paralegal at his law firm.
He tugs his hand back fast, mumbles an apology, and pretends to be busy wiping honey smudges off his jars for the next ten minutes. He’s furious at himself for the flutter in his chest, for noticing her laugh when a kid drops a fried Oreo at her feet, for the way her lavender hand lotion cuts through the sharp fumes of chili and vinegar coming off her booth. He feels guilty, like he’s cheating on Elaina just for looking, like everyone walking past is staring and judging him for even being in her orbit.
She doesn’t let him hide for long. She walks over a few minutes later, holding two pretzel sticks, and holds one out to him. “For saving my best batch of habanero,” she says, and when he takes it, their fingers brush again, intentional this time. She dips her pretzel into his wildflower honey jar, slow, like she knows exactly what she’s doing, and licks the honey off the end of the pretzel, her eyes locked on his the whole time. He’s so flustered he dips his own pretzel too hard, gets honey all over his thumb, and shoves it in his mouth to wipe it off, making her laugh loud enough that a few people glance over.
They banter for the next hour, leaning against the edge of their booths, their shoulders inches apart, knees brushing when they shift their weight. He tries her ghost pepper sauce, coughs so hard his eyes water, and she hands him a honey stick to soothe the burn, her thumb brushing his lip when she passes it to him. He offers her a sample of his chili-infused honey, the one he still makes every year even though Elaina’s gone, and she tastes it, hums, says it’s the only thing that’s ever made her hot sauce taste like it’s missing something.
The turning point hits when the group of church ladies from the town’s Baptist congregation walks past, all of them staring, murmuring to each other, the same ladies who cornered him at the feed store three months prior to tell him Jules was “a nice woman, good for him.” He tenses up, fully expecting her to step back, to act like they’re just casual acquaintances, but instead she leans in, her face inches from his, and wipes a smudge of honey off his jaw with her thumb. She licks the honey off her thumb right there, winks, and says “Tastes better off you, honestly.”
He doesn’t even glance at the ladies. He just laughs, a real laugh, the kind he hasn’t let out in years, and leans in a little closer, so their shoulders are pressed together now, no space between them. The gossip doesn’t matter. The guilt doesn’t feel as sharp as it did an hour ago. For the first time since Elaina died, he doesn’t feel like he’s betraying her by wanting to be happy again.
They close down their booths together when the festival ends at 7, the bluegrass band packing up in the background, the smell of funnel cake fading as the vendors lock up their stalls. He asks her if she wants to come back to his farm, try the honey mead he’s been aging in oak barrels for three years, the one he made with Elaina’s recipe but never had anyone to share it with. She grins, says she’ll bring her extra spicy reaper sauce to pair with the charcuterie Lila bought him last week to “get him out of his funk.”
He slings her folding chair over his shoulder alongside his crate of leftover honey jars, and doesn’t even bother glancing to see if anyone’s watching as they walk toward his beat-up Ford F-150.
