Ronan O’Malley, 53, owns and operates 12 honeybee hives on seven overgrown acres outside Allegan, Michigan, hasn’t willingly attended the town’s annual late-summer street fair in eight years. His ex-wife left him two weeks before the 2015 fair, and the next three years he’d been cornered no less than six times per visit by well-meaning neighbors offering pitying head tilts and phone numbers for their divorced cousins, so he’d stopped showing up entirely. The only reason he’s here now is his 16-year-old niece, Lila, who’d begged him to enter his wildflower honey in the fair’s homemade goods contest, threatening to hide all his hive tools if he bailed. He’s wearing a faded charcoal Carhartt jacket dotted with beeswax stains, work boots still crusted with pine pollen from checking hives that morning, and he’s got one hand curled around the cold glass jar of honey he dropped off an hour prior, already scanning the crowd for the fastest exit route.
A hard elbow to his ribs makes him fumble the jar, and he catches it one-handed before it shatters on the asphalt, his palm brushing the hand of the woman who bumped him. “Shit, I am so sorry,” she says, laughing, dark brown eyes crinkling at the corners when she looks up at him. She’s wearing a linen button-down tucked into high-waisted jeans, a lanyard around her neck that says ELARA MENDEZ, COUNTY EXTENSION AGENT, and she smells like jasmine lotion and lemon Pledge, the same stuff his grandma used to dust her kitchen table with. She says she was chasing a runaway toddler who’d almost knocked over an entire stack of peach jam jars, and she didn’t see him standing there.
He mumbles that it’s fine, no harm done, and tries to step back, but the crowd pressing in around the contest table shoves her closer, her shoulder pressing firm against his bicep through his jacket. She leans in to squint at the handwritten label on his honey jar, her hair brushing his jaw, and says she’s been looking for local wildflower honey to feed the research hives she’s setting up for the county’s pollinator protection program. He finds himself rambling about his hives, how half the bees forage in the state game area two miles west, how he doesn’t use any pesticides on the clover growing on his property, how a black bear broke into three of his hives last spring and ate 40 pounds of honey before he scared it off with a leaf blower. She snorts when he gets to the leaf blower part, not a polite, performative laugh, a loud, snorting cackle that makes a few people nearby glance over, and she taps his forearm with her fingers when she says that’s the most creative bear deterrent she’s ever heard of.
He tenses at the touch at first, unused to anyone who’s not Lila or his sister touching him, then relaxes, can feel the weight of her fingers through the thick Carhartt fabric. He’s half-embarrassed at how fast his heart is beating, annoyed with himself for even noticing how her dimples show when she smiles, how her nail polish is chipped pale green, like she’d been working in a garden and forgot to touch it up. He’s spent so long telling himself he’s too set in his ways, too rough around the edges, too old to bother with any of this, that the spark of interest feels like a foreign thing, sharp and warm all at once.
The contest announcer calls his name a minute later, first place in the liquid honey category, and the crowd around the table claps. Elara cheers louder than anyone, leaning up to hug him before he can react, her hair brushing his cheek again, that jasmine scent wrapping around him, and she whispers in his ear that she snuck a taste of his entry when the judges weren’t looking, and she knew he’d win. His face heats up so fast he’s sure he’s bright red, and before he can talk himself out of it, he asks her if she wants to get a fried dough and a lemonade after she’s done working the contest table. She says yes immediately, no hesitation, grinning so wide her dimples show again.
They’re sitting on a splintered wooden bench by the ferris wheel an hour later, sharing a fried dough dusted with cinnamon sugar, the warm grease seeping through the paper plate onto their thighs. She wipes a smudge of sugar off his chin with her thumb, holding his gaze for a full two seconds before she pulls her hand away, popping the thumb into her mouth to lick the sugar off. The sun is dipping below the cornfields at the edge of town, painting the sky pink and tangerine, the sound of the ferris wheel’s creaking motor mixing with the shouts of kids playing carnival games and the first chirps of crickets coming from the nearby treeline. He picks up the second jar of honey he’d stuffed in his jacket pocket earlier, the one he’d brought to give Lila, and slides it across the bench to her, his fingers brushing hers again when she takes it.
