Delmar Pritchard, 62, leans against the splintered wooden pole of the street fair’s craft beer tent, sipping a hazy IPA that tastes more like citrus than beer and wondering how he let his sister bully him into coming. He’s an antique map restorer by trade, spends 10 hours a day alone in his garage with magnifying lenses, acid-free adhesive, and 1990s grunge playing low on a beatup CD player, so crowds make his skin itch. His flannel shirt still has a faint smudge of archival glue on the cuff, his work boots are scuffed from hauling boxes of 19th century survey maps earlier that morning, and he’s already lied twice to women his sister tried to set him up with, saying he’s got a sick dog waiting at home.
He smells burnt sugar first, thick and sweet with a sharp, spicy undercurrent, before he hears the laugh. It’s loud, unapologetic, the same laugh he remembered from family cookouts 20 years prior, when he was still married, still kept bees, still thought his life would follow the neat line he’d drawn for it. He looks up, and there she is. Marnie Carter, Janice’s younger cousin, the one he’d spent half his married life pretending he didn’t glance at across the picnic table, the one who’d brought him a jar of her homemade honey when Janice left, before she moved out of state and he lost all contact.
She’s 58 now, silver streaks cutting through the dark curly hair she used to pull back in a tight braid, a tiny bee tattoo inked on her left wrist, linen button down tied at the waist over paint-splattered high waisted jeans. She’s arranging jars of honey on a folding table, the sign above her booth reading “Marnie’s Hot Honey: Spicy Enough To Make You Regret It, Sweet Enough To Come Back For More.” He steps forward before he can stop himself, his boot catching on a loose tent stake, knocking a full sample jar off the edge of her table.
They both reach for it at the same time. Their hands brush, hers warm, faintly sticky with honey, and he flinches like he’s been stung, half pulls his hand back before he catches himself. She grabs the jar before it shatters on the asphalt, holds it up with a smirk, and her eyes lock onto his, dark and warm, no trace of the polite awkwardness most people give him when they find out he’s Janice’s ex. “Del Pritchard. I’d know that glue-stained flannel anywhere. You still wear that thing to every family event you can’t escape?”
He feels his face heat up, something he hasn’t felt since he was a teenager fumbling through his first date. For a second he wants to lie, say he’s not Del, say he’s got to go, that this is a bad idea, that getting involved with your ex-wife’s cousin is the kind of small town gossip that gets talked about at Thanksgiving dinners for 10 years running. But then she pops the lid off the sample jar, dips a tiny wooden spoon into it, holds it out to him, and he can’t say no.
The honey hits his tongue sweet first, then a slow, building burn of cayenne that makes his eyes water a little. He coughs, and she laughs again, leaning in to hand him a paper napkin, her shoulder brushing his, the heat of her arm seeping through the thin cotton of his tee. She smells like jasmine and burnt sugar, and for the first time in 18 years, he doesn’t feel the urge to step away, to put three feet of personal space between himself and anyone who might want to get close.
She nods when he says it, no judgment, no “she had her reasons” that he’s heard from every other member of her family for almost two decades. “She always was an idiot who got bored if something didn’t come with a shiny new label,” she says, and her hand brushes his where it rests on the edge of the table, and this time he doesn’t flinch.
She says she’s closing up the booth in 10 minutes, asks if he wants to come back to her farm to try the honey-infused bourbon she’s been aging in an oak barrel for a year. No one has to know, she says, like she can read the war going on in his head, the part of him that’s terrified of being the subject of family gossip, the part of him that’s tired of going home to an empty house every night, tired of eating frozen dinners alone, tired of punishing himself for a mistake he didn’t make.
He hesitates for half a second, thinks about the map he left half restored on his workbench, the dog he lied about having, the way Janice would scream if she found out, the way half the family would disown him. Then he nods, says yes.
He helps her load the heavy boxes of honey jars into the back of her beatup Ford pickup, she hands him a full jar of her hottest honey as a thank you, he tucks it into the inside pocket of his flannel. He climbs into the passenger seat, she turns the key, the radio blasts that old Tom Petty song they both used to blast at cookouts back when they were both younger, both married, both convinced they were stuck in lives they didn’t choose. She rests her hand on the center console, palm up, and he laces his fingers through hers, her skin still faintly sticky with honey, warm against his.
