Manny Ruiz, 57, spent 28 years teaching high school woodshop before a slipped disc forced his early retirement three years back. He now carves custom live-edge cutting boards out of his backyard workshop, selling them at regional farm stands and small town festivals, and his biggest flaw is that he’s turned gruffness into a defense mechanism ever since his wife left him for a travel nurse she met on a girls’ trip to Florida. He avoids family gatherings, turns down invites to post-festival cookouts, and snaps at anyone who handles his work without asking first, convinced every friendly overture comes with a hidden catch.
He’s folding burlap sacks at his booth at the Maplewood Fall Harvest Festival when it happens. The air smells like fried apple pies and burnt hay, kids scream as they chase each other out of the corn maze, and a finger brushes the wavy grain of a black walnut board he spent three weeks sanding. He opens his mouth to snap, looks up, and the words die in his throat. It’s Lena Marquez, his ex-wife’s younger cousin, the one who used to sneak into his workshop during Thanksgiving dinners to beg him to carve tiny wooden rabbits for her bookbags. He hasn’t seen her since the divorce papers were signed, when she slipped him a six pack of craft beer under the table at the final family mediation and said his ex was making a mistake.
She’s 44 now, runs her own beekeeping operation outside of town, just moved back from Oregon six months prior. Her flannel shirt is tied around her waist, work boots caked in mud and clover, a chipped brass bee barrette holding her curly dark hair back from her face. She laughs at his wide-eyed stare, leaning further over the table so their shoulders brush, and he catches a whiff of clover honey and lavender hand salve mixed with the faint, sharp scent of bee smoke. She says she’s been looking for his booth all afternoon, needs a set of small boards for her honey stand to hold sample jars, and she’d rather buy from someone who knows what they’re doing than order cheap garbage off Amazon.
He tenses up immediately, glancing over her shoulder like he expects his ex to pop out from behind the cider tent and start yelling. He tells her it’s a bad idea, that his ex would lose her mind if she found out they were doing business, let alone talking. Lena snorts, picking up the walnut board to run her thumb along the live edge, her nail chipped from prying honeycomb frames loose that morning. She says his ex lives three states away in Tampa now, spends all her time posting beach selfies with her new boyfriend, and she hasn’t spoken to her in two years anyway, after a fight over their grandma’s inheritance. She tilts her chin up, eyes bright, and asks if he’s too scared of a woman who can’t even be bothered to text her own family on birthdays to have a warm cider with her after he closes up his booth.
He can’t think of a good comeback. He nods, and she grins, tucking a small jar of wildflower honey into his hand before she walks back to her own booth, her jeans fitting snug over work-worn thighs. He stares at the jar for ten minutes straight, forgetting to greet the couple that stops to look at his maple boards, his palm still tingling where her fingers brushed his when she handed it over.
He closes up his booth an hour early, stacking the unsold boards in the back of his beat up Ford F150, then walks over to the cider tent where Lena’s waiting, two steaming paper cups in her hand. She hands him one, their fingers brushing when he takes it, and the cider is sweet and spiked with a splash of bourbon she snuck in in her purse, just sharp enough to cut through the crisp October chill. They walk past the hay bale maze, over to the gnarled old white oak at the edge of the fairgrounds, where no one else is hanging around, the string lights from the main tent glowing soft gold through the turning leaves.
She sits down on a fallen log, patting the spot next to her, and when he sits, their knees press together through their jeans. She admits she’s had a crush on him since she was 17, thought he was the only person at those stuffy family dinners who didn’t treat her like a dumb kid who didn’t know what she wanted out of life. He tells her he always thought she was too wild, too eager to see the world, to ever stick around this boring small town, let alone look twice at a guy who spends 10 hours a day covered in sawdust and wood glue. She leans in closer, so their boots are almost touching, and she doesn’t flinch or pull away when he lifts a hand to brush a dry oak leaf out of her hair, his thumb brushing the soft skin of her cheek for half a second.
They talk for an hour, about his workshop, the new batch of hives she’s setting up in the apple orchard west of town, the time he accidentally glued his ex’s favorite ceramic mug to the Thanksgiving dinner table and lied about it being a prank by one of the kids. When the festival’s closing announcement blares over the speakers, warning attendees the grounds will be locked in 15 minutes, he asks her if she wants to come back to his workshop the next afternoon. He says he’s got a stack of hard maple he’s been saving for something special, thinks he can carve her a custom honey dipper that won’t drip all over her counter the way the cheap ones do. She nods, tucking a slip of paper with her phone number into the front pocket of his flannel shirt, her palm lingering warm against his chest for a beat before she turns to walk back to her pickup truck.
