Woody Rainer, 59, third-generation wild honey beekeeper outside Asheville, North Carolina, was wiping down the inside of his stall at the weekly Main Street farmers market when she approached. He’d seen her every Saturday for three months straight: mid-50s, silver streaks in her chestnut braid, always in a linen button-down and scuffed white sneakers, the new town librarian who’d moved here from Chicago after her divorce. She never stayed more than 30 seconds, bought one small jar of sourwood honey each week, paid in exact change, mumbled a quiet thank you before drifting off to the peach stand. The last thing he expected was for her to hold out a dripping peach popsicle, still wrapped in its paper sleeve, when she stopped in front of him that 86-degree August afternoon.
He hesitated, first instinct to say no, he had 12 hives to check before the thunderstorm rolling over the Blue Ridge hit, his left knee throbbing from hauling 40-pound hive boxes since 6 a.m. “The peach stand guy gave me two by mistake,” she said, shaking it a little, the condensation beading down her wrist. He noticed then the tiny, faded bee tattoo on the inside of her forearm, right next to a scar that looked like it came from a childhood bike crash. He reached out to take it, their fingers brushing for half a second, her skin cool against his sweat-slick, calloused knuckles. The guilt hit him first, sharp and hot, before the fizz of attraction even registered: he hadn’t so much as touched a woman who wasn’t his sister or his niece since Ellen died four years prior, had convinced himself any kind of interest in someone else was a betrayal of the 32 years they’d had together.
They leaned against the side of his beat-up 2004 Ford F-150, parked at the edge of the market lot, eating their popsicles while the last of the vendors packed up their stalls. The air smelled like cut hay, roasted peanuts, and the sweet, sharp tang of overripe peaches left in crates by the road. She told him she put his sourwood honey in her chamomile tea every night before bed, that it was the only thing that helped her sleep through the noise of the crickets and the coyotes she still wasn’t used to after a lifetime in the city. She leaned in when he rambled about how sourwood trees only bloom at 3,000 feet or higher, how their honey tasted like clover and burnt sugar if you harvested it at the exact right time, her shoulder brushing his bicep every time a group of kids ran past yelling. She didn’t look away when he talked, like his stupid bee facts were the most interesting thing she’d heard all week, not the useless small talk most people indulged him in out of pity for the widowed beekeeper.
He was mid-rant about the county’s new pesticide ban that still didn’t cover the golf course two miles from his hives when a drip of popsicle slid down his jaw, sticky and sweet. Before he could wipe it away, she reached up, swiped it off with her thumb, and wiped it on the leg of her khakis like it was the most natural thing in the world. He didn’t flinch. For the first time in four years, the guilt didn’t win, didn’t drown out the quiet buzz of excitement in his chest. He realized, all at once, that the promise he’d made to himself to stay alone forever wasn’t loyalty to Ellen, it was fear of being happy again, fear of losing someone all over again. She was still looking up at him, her eyes crinkling at the corners, like she knew exactly what he was thinking. “I’ve been curious about your hives,” she said, soft enough that only he could hear it over the hum of a pickup driving past. “If you ever give tours.”
He didn’t hesitate this time. Told her he had a spare hive suit hanging by the back door of his cottage, she could come out tomorrow around 10, if she brought that chamomile tea she liked, he’d show her how to spot the queen bee without getting stung. She laughed, loud and warm, said she’d bring extra sugar cubes for the bees, and he shook his head, said they got enough nectar from the wildflowers, but he was smiling so wide his cheeks ached. She scribbled her phone number on the back of a library hold slip for a book about native Appalachian pollinators, tucked it into the breast pocket of his grease-stained work flannel, patted it once before she stepped back.
She waved when she got into her dusty blue Subaru, honked once as she pulled out of the lot. He stood there for another five minutes, holding the empty popsicle stick in one hand, the paper slip crinkling under his fingers through his flannel pocket. A bumblebee buzzed past his ear, slow and lazy, before landing on a clover sprig growing up through the asphalt at his feet. He pulled out his beat-up flip phone, squinted at the smudged ink on the hold slip, and punched her number into his contacts list before he lost it.
