Moe Sorrentino, 61, retired commercial fishing net mender with knuckles crisscrossed with thin, pale scars from nylon line cuts, hunches over his cast-iron chili pot at the annual Astoria Lions Club cookoff, stirring the smoky beef blend slow enough that none of the kidney beans stick to the bottom. He’s worn the same faded Astoria Salmon baseball cap to every cookoff for 12 years, the brim frayed along the edge where he picks at it when he’s bored, and his work boots are still caked with mud from fixing a neighbor’s net the night before. The air smells like cumin, charred hot dogs from the food cart by the entrance, and salt carried on the wind off the Columbia River three blocks away.
He’s half listening to a retired longshoreman rant about the new bridge tolls when a shadow falls over his chili station. He looks up, and his jaw tightens before he can stop it. Elara Voss, 59, widowed beekeeper who he’s openly hated for 40 years, stands there holding a jar of wildflower honey, her work boots caked with even more mud than his, a red flannel tied around her waist, silver streaks threading through the dark braid slung over her shoulder. He’d spent four decades blaming her for ratting out his underage beer stash at senior prom, the suspension that made him skip graduation entirely to take a job on a king crab boat up in Alaska, derailing the community college scholarship he’d barely worked for anyway.
She reaches for a paper sample cup on the edge of his table at the same time he does. Their hands brush. He feels the rough callus on the side of her index finger, the same kind he has on his thumbs from years of pulling heavy line and twisting net twine, and he yanks his hand back like he’s been burned. She snorts, wiping her palm on her jeans, and says she’s been waiting 40 years to tell him it was his dumbass cousin Joey who ratted him out, not her. She’d seen the beer in his trunk, sure, but she’d never told a soul. Joey had gotten mad Moe wouldn’t share, ran and told the vice principal himself.
Moe blinks. He’d never even considered that. All those years of snarking at her at the grocery store, leaving the room when she showed up to neighborhood potlucks, muttering under his breath when she won the honey contest three years running, and he’d been mad at the wrong person. He opens his mouth to apologize, but a fat raindrop hits him square on the cheek, and then the sky opens up. Everyone at the cookoff scrambles, grabbing pots and coolers and prize entries, running for their cars. Elara’s truck is parked on the far side of the fairgrounds, past the 4-H barn, so he grabs her jar of honey off the table and nods for her to follow him.
They run through the rain, laughing so hard they’re both gasping by the time they dive under the tin awning of the old rabbit show shed to wait out the downpour. They’re pressed shoulder to shoulder under the narrow overhang, his wet flannel sticking to her wet flannel, and he can feel the heat radiating off her hip through the soaked fabric. The rain drums so loud on the tin roof they have to lean in close to hear each other talk, their faces inches apart. She smells like clover and beeswax and rain, and her hazel eyes have little gold flecks he never noticed before, not when he was too busy glowering at her across a room.
She admits she’d had a crush on him since 10th grade, when he’d carried her little brother’s broken bike home for her after he crashed it on the boardwalk. She’d never said anything because he was dating her best friend at the time, and then the prom thing happened, and he’d made it clear he hated her, so she’d never bothered to correct the record. Moe stares at her, and he realizes the anger he’d carried all those years was just a stupid, convenient shield, because he’d been attracted to her back then too, felt guilty for liking his girlfriend’s best friend, so he’d convinced himself she was the enemy to make the guilt go away.
He brushes a strand of wet hair that’s stuck to her forehead off her face, his calloused thumb grazing her cheekbone, and she doesn’t flinch. The rain slows to a drizzle a few minutes later, and he walks her to her beat-up Ford pickup, the jar of honey still clutched in his hand. She asks him if he wants to come over to her place for dinner, says she’s got a loaf of honey cornbread cooling on her counter, and a six pack of the same dark lager he used to sneak in high school. He nods before she finishes the sentence. He tucks the jar of honey into the inside pocket of his jacket, where it’s warm against his chest, and follows her truck down the road toward her small farm on the edge of town.
