Rafe Holloway, 59, has made a career out of staying out of other people’s business. A wild honey purveyor with 120 hives scattered across north Georgia’s rolling oak and sourwood stands, he’s spent the last 12 years avoiding anything that resembles personal entanglement after his wife packed her SUV and drove to Atlanta for a real estate broker who wore custom suits and never came home with bee stings crisscrossing his forearms. His only consistent social interaction is the weekly Saturday farmers market outside Athens, where he sells 8-ounce jars of honey labeled with hand-stamped stickers, grunts at regulars, and leaves as soon as his stock runs out, no detours, no small talk.
The first time he spots Clara, the new pottery instructor who moved into the clapboard cottage three miles down the rutted dirt road from his 1978 Airstream, he’s loading hive boxes into his beat-up F-150, and she waves from the passenger seat of a pickup driven by a guy in a construction vest. He nods, assumes it’s her husband, files her away as another person he doesn’t need to get to know. For the next three weeks, he sees her at the market, setting up her stall of speckled stoneware mugs and misshapen serving bowls, clay crusted under her fingernails, cutoff denim overalls slung low on her hips, thin white tank top sticking to her shoulders when the mid-morning humidity climbs. He looks away every time she glances over, feels stupid for noticing the way her sun-bleached blonde hair falls in loose waves past her collarbone, for wondering what the clay smudged on her forearm would feel like under his calloused fingers.
She approaches his stall at 9:17 a.m. on a sticky mid-May Saturday, right after the first rush of early shoppers dies down, a half-empty iced coffee in one hand, a crumpled $10 bill in the other. “Sourwood, right?” she says, nodding at the jars stacked behind him, and her voice is lower than he expected, rough around the edges like she’s spent the last hour yelling over pottery wheel motors. He fumbles a jar when he reaches for it, and their hands brush when she leans forward to steady it before it clatters to the table. Her palm is warm, smudged with terracotta clay, and he feels a jolt shoot up his arm that has nothing to do with the static from the plastic tablecloth. He hasn’t felt that kind of spark since he was 17, sneaking into his high school girlfriend’s backyard after curfew.
He makes awkward small talk while he bags the jar, mentions he saw the guy in the construction vest helping her move in a few months back. She snorts, takes a sip of her iced coffee, says that’s her deadbeat older brother, who crashed on her couch for two weeks after his girlfriend kicked him out for forgetting their three year anniversary to go on a fishing trip. “Single three years and counting,” she says, and she’s looking directly at him, no shyness, no game playing, and he feels his chest go tight, like he’s holding his breath without realizing it. She asks if he wants to grab a beer at the dive bar down the road after the market closes, says they serve fried pickles that are so greasy they leave a stain on the paper basket, worth the inevitable indigestion. He almost says no, almost falls back on the excuse that he has to check the hives before the sun goes down, but he nods before he can talk himself out of it.
The bar smells like old beer and cigarette smoke, even though smoking indoors has been banned in Georgia for 10 years, and the neon Pabst Blue Ribbon sign behind the bar flickers so bad it makes his eyes water if he stares at it too long. They sit in a booth in the back, far away from the group of college kids playing pool in the front, and split a basket of fried pickles, wash them down with cold draft beer. They talk for two hours, about the time a swarm of bees landed on the hood of his truck while he was driving down the highway, about her worst student who made a mug that looked like a disfigured potato and tried to sell it for $40, about how his ex-wife hated the smell of honey, said it stuck to his clothes and his hair and she could never get it out of the sheets. She leans forward when she laughs, and her knee brushes his under the table, stays there, doesn’t pull away. She reaches across the booth after he tells her about the bee swarm, runs a finger along the thin, pale scar across his left knuckle, the one he got when he pried open a hive box too fast and got stung 17 times in the same hand. “Bee stings heal faster than clay burns,” she says, and her thumb brushes the edge of his knuckle, slow, intentional, and he doesn’t pull away.
He follows her back to her cottage in his F-150, windows rolled down, the smell of pine and jasmine drifting through the screen, and when she unlocks the front door, the kitchen smells like fresh cornbread and lavender candle wax. She sets the jar of sourwood honey on the counter, turns to face him, and she’s smiling, the dim light from the overhead fixture catching the flecks of clay still stuck to her jawline. He steps forward, closes the three feet of space between them, rests his calloused hand lightly on her waist, the rough pad of his thumb brushing the bare skin above the waistband of her overalls.
