Manny Reyes is 62, spent 28 years as a smokejumper before a blown knee and a widow’s grief pushed him to retire to 12 acres of clover and pine outside Bend, where he keeps 47 hives of Italian honeybees and talks to exactly three people a week, max. His biggest flaw, if you ask the ladies at the local diner who slip him extra pie slices when they think he’s not looking, is that he’s stubborn to a fault, convinced any softness or new connection is a betrayal of his wife Linda, who died of ovarian cancer five years prior. He only agreed to enter his honey in the county fall fair because his 16-year-old granddaughter begged him, said her FFA club was running the contest booth. He planned to drop off the three jars and hightail it back to his hives before anyone could corner him into small talk.
The plan falls apart ten feet from the exit, when a group of kids chasing a runaway corn dog barrel into him, and he stumbles sideways into a woman holding a still-steaming peach pie. The tin is warm enough to seep through his well-worn flannel, leaving a faint cinnamon-sugar smudge on his forearm, and he tenses up before he even looks up, ready to apologize and bolt. It’s Clara Bennett, the new part-time librarian who’s been leaving tattered old beekeeping manuals on his front porch every other week for the last two months, books she dug out of the library’s archives that cover smokejumper beekeeping programs from the 70s, a niche interest he’d mentioned offhand once when he dropped off a jar of honey for the library’s silent auction. He’d never thanked her, never even acknowledged the books, just left them stacked by his front door like they were radioactive. He can see strands of copper in her dark hair where the late afternoon sun hits it, and he can’t remember the last time he noticed something that small, that soft, about anyone.
She laughs, soft and low, when she realizes who she’s run into, and doesn’t step back even when there’s plenty of room to do so, her boots almost touching his scuffed work ones. He can smell lavender hand cream mixed with the peach and cinnamon from the pie, and the faint, sweet tang of clover that sticks to every surface of his truck, his clothes, his skin this time of year. She lifts a hand to brush a crumb of pie crust off the chest of his flannel, and her thumb grazes the thick, raised scar there from the 2009 wildfire that burned 30,000 acres outside Salem, a scar he never shows anyone, never talks about. His breath catches, and he can feel his face heat up, a stupid flutter in his chest he hasn’t felt since he was 19 and asked Linda to prom.
Half of him is furious, disgusted that he’s even reacting this way, that he’s letting a woman who isn’t Linda get under his skin, that half the people at the pie contest booth are glancing over, gossiping already, everyone in this town knows he’s the widower who hasn’t so much as had a cup of coffee with a woman since the funeral. The other half of him is curious, hungry for the way she’s looking at him like he’s not some broken old man who hides out with his bees, like she actually cares about the stupid beekeeping books she left, the stories he could tell about jumping into wildfires, the way his honey tastes like pine and clover and sunshine after a long rain.
She holds his gaze, no shyness, no apology, and nods toward the row of picnic tables tucked behind the pie tent, shaded by a gnarled old maple tree, out of view of the main fair crowd. “I made this for the contest, but I already know I’m not gonna win,” she says, tilting the tin so the warm peach juice sloshes gently against the crust. “The judge is my ex-husband’s aunt, and she’s hated me since I forgot to bring green bean casserole to Christmas dinner in 2021. Wasted a perfectly good pie on her petty grudge if I don’t get someone to split it with me.”
He opens his mouth to say no, to make up an excuse about his hives needing checking, about his granddaughter waiting for him, about anything that will get him out of there before he does something stupid like say yes. But then he remembers Linda, sitting on their porch a month before she died, her hands thin and cold in his, telling him he couldn’t spend the rest of his life hiding from the world, that she didn’t want that for him, that he deserved to eat good pie and laugh and not be lonely. He closes his mouth, nods, and follows her to the picnic table.
The wood of the bench is rough under his jeans, and the distant whine of the ferris wheel mixes with the sound of kids screaming on the tilt-a-whirl, the crunch of fallen maple leaves under people’s boots. She hands him a plastic fork, and their fingers brush when he takes it, warm and soft against his calloused, honey-stained ones. He takes a bite of pie, and it’s perfect, sweet and tart and warm, the crust flaky enough to crumble on his tongue. He can feel her knee brushing his under the table, light, intentional, not an accident, and he doesn’t move his leg away.
He reaches into the pocket of his flannel, pulls out the small jar of sourwood honey he’d stuffed there that morning, the small-batch stuff he only makes for family, the kind that tastes like wildflower and summer rain. He slides it across the table to her, and when her fingers brush his as she takes the jar, he doesn’t pull away.
