Roland Voss, 57, swipes a bead of sweat off his forehead with the back of his flour-dusted wrist, the sweet, yeasty scent of fresh fried cider donuts curling thick around the stand he’s manning at the west Michigan county harvest festival. He’s been there since 6 a.m., already sold out of three varieties of his wildflower honey, and the crowd’s only getting thicker as the afternoon wears on, kids darting between booths with caramel apples oozing syrup down their wrists, bluegrass floating soft from the stage at the far end of the park. He built this 40-acre heirloom apple orchard from half-dead trees and three scraggly beehives 20 years ago, still runs it almost entirely alone save for Javi, his part-time seasonal hand, a sharp 22-year-old studying sustainable agriculture at the community college 20 minutes away. For 12 years, since his wife packed her bags and drove to Chicago for a marketing executive job she’d never mentioned wanting, he’s lived by one non-negotiable rule: don’t mix the orchard, the only thing he’s ever gotten right, with personal life. No dates with regular customers, no small talk that runs longer than 10 minutes, no exceptions.
He spots her when he’s reaching for a fresh stack of paper donut bags, sunlight catching the thick silver streak in her dark wavy hair, her head tilted as she squints at the handwritten label on a jar of his late-summer clover honey. She’s Clara, Javi’s mom, moved back to the area three months prior after her ex-husband retired to Florida without her, Javi had mentioned her a dozen times, said she used to bake prize-winning apple pies for the 4-H fair when he was a kid. She walks over to the stand, sets the honey jar down on the scuffed wooden counter, and the first thing he notices is her laugh, warm and rough around the edges, like she spends half her time yelling across a soccer field or singing off-key to old Merle Haggard records. “Javi says you keep your hives up in the old northwest section of the orchard, no pesticides, no artificial sugar feed for the winter,” she says, leaning forward across the counter, the frayed cuff of her faded denim jacket brushing a jar of chunk honeycomb. He can smell lavender hand cream on her, mixed with the cinnamon sugar dusted thick over the donut stack next to him, and his throat goes dry for a second. He’s spent 12 years avoiding exactly this: a woman who looks like she doesn’t have time for nonsense, who asks questions about the bees like she actually cares about the answer, who’s tied directly to the only part of his life that feels stable.
He answers her question, rambles a little about how the old crabapple and Winesap blossoms make the spring honey taste like pear and faint citrus, and she nods like she’s following every word, not just being polite. When she reaches for a donut sample resting on a napkin between them, their hands brush, her fingers warm and calloused from gardening, and he yanks his hand back like he’s been burned, embarrassed at how jumpy he is. She smirks, wipes a fleck of powdered sugar off her lower lip with her thumb, and teases him about the smudge of donut grease on his left jaw. He fumbles for a crumpled napkin, misses the spot twice, and she leans in further, swipes it off with her thumb, her skin brushing the gray stubble on his jaw for half a second. A group of rowdy teens yells as they run past, jostling her shoulder, and she stumbles forward, her hip pressing tight against his for a beat before she catches herself on the counter. He’s torn clean in half, the same split he’s felt every time he’s even thought about going on a date in the last decade: half sharp, hot disgust at himself for even considering breaking his own rule, for risking the quiet, drama-free life he’s cobbled together for a pretty smile and a good laugh, half thrumming, low desire, the kind he’d forgotten he was even capable of feeling. He wants to ask her out, wants to take her to the diner on the edge of town where they make pie with his apples, wants to show her the hives at sunset when the bees are slow and the light turns the orchard gold. But he can’t. She’s Javi’s mom. That’s a line he promised himself he’d never cross.
The sky darkens out of nowhere, the first fat, cold raindrops splattering against the glass honey jars, and the crowd erupts into yells, everyone scrambling for cover under awnings and oak trees. The stand’s awning is tiny, only big enough for two people pressed tight, and she huddles under it with him, their sides pressed flush from shoulder to hip, rain drumming so loud against the metal awning they have to lean in almost to touching foreheads to hear each other talk. “I was gonna ask you out before the rain hit,” she yells over the noise, grinning, rain dripping off the end of her hair onto the sleeve of his red flannel shirt. “Javi’s been nagging me for weeks, said you’re the only person in this whole county who gets as excited about weird 100-year-old apple varieties as he does. Said you’d never make the first move, though, because you’re too stubborn about keeping work and life separate.” He blinks, stunned, the rain still pounding around them, her shoulder warm and solid against his, and he laughs, loud and rusty, the first real laugh he’s had that didn’t involve Javi making a dumb joke about bee stings in months. All that panic, all that internal fighting, for nothing. Javi was trying to set them up.
The rain lets up as fast as it started, leaving the park smelling like wet grass and cinnamon, a faint pastel rainbow arching over the oak trees at the edge of the field. He packs up the last of the honey jars and the half-empty box of leftover donuts, tosses them in the bed of his beat up 2008 Ford F-150, and opens the dented passenger door for her. She pauses before she climbs in, brushes a wet maple leaf off the shoulder of his flannel, her fingers lingering on the fabric for a beat longer than necessary. He asks if she wants to stop at the diner on the way to her place, says they’ve got fresh peach pie that’s even better than the apple, and she nods, sliding into the passenger seat, her knee brushing his when he climbs into the driver’s side next to her. He turns the key, the truck rumbles to life, and she reaches over, twists the radio dial to the old country station he keeps preset, the first low notes of a Johnny Cash song drifting soft out of the speakers.
