Ray Voss, 58, retired county lineman, wipes a bead of sweat off his brow with the back of a calloused hand, the stickiness of spilled clover honey clinging to his forearm. It’s 82 degrees at the July county farmers market, the bluegrass band off by the corn stand sawing through a cover of “Jack & Diane,” kids chasing each other with popsicles that drip neon pink onto the gravel. He’s manning his honey booth, the same spot he’s held every Saturday for seven years, half watching for regulars who buy a quart a month for their tea, half on edge. He heard the new school board president was swinging by to scope vendors for the fall student field trip program, and he’s held a grudge against that board for 12 years, ever since they shot down his late wife Elara’s outdoor foraging education grant two weeks before she got her cancer diagnosis. He hasn’t spoken to a single board member since her funeral, walked out of the grocery store last year when he saw the old president in the cereal aisle.
Mara Carter, 49, walks up at 3:47, he notices the time on the beat-up Casio on his wrist. She’s wearing cut-off jean shorts, a faded 1998 John Mellencamp tour tee he recognizes because he and Elara saw that show in Cleveland, work boots caked in mud from the community garden she runs on the west side. He only ever saw her on 2020 Zoom calls, where he logged on every other week just to yell about the grant, and back then she wore a frumpy blazer and glasses sliding down her nose, looked like every other stuffy bureaucrat he’d ever argued with. In person, she’s softer, sun streaks in her dark brown hair, a smudge of potting soil on her left cheek, a thin scar snaking up her right wrist he recognizes from an old callout. She leans against the edge of his booth, her bare arm brushing his, and says she pushed through the Elara Voss Foraging Fellowship at last month’s board meeting, wanted to tell him face to face instead of sending a stupid form letter.
He freezes, the honey dipper he’s holding clatters into the open sample jar, golden honey sloshing over the edge onto the wooden table. He’d written 47 letters to the board over 12 years, got 47 generic rejection slips back, half thought he’d die before he heard someone say those words out loud. She pulls a folded copy of the program outline out of her back pocket, passes it to him, their fingers brushing when he takes it, her palm is calloused too, rough from gardening and splitting firewood, she says. She mentions she fell off a poorly maintained utility pole when she was 17, stuck in the hospital for three months, that’s why she got into local advocacy, wanted to fix the broken systems that let low-income neighborhoods get skipped for critical repairs. He nods, remembers that call, he was the lineman who carried her down the ladder, wrapped her wrist in a pressure wrap before the ambulance got there. The memory hits him like a punch to the sternum, all the anger he’s carried for a decade fizzling at the edges.
He’s torn for the next 20 minutes, part of him wants to tell her to get lost, that a named program doesn’t make up for 12 years of being ignored, the other part is watching her laugh when a bumblebee lands on the sample jar, no flinch, she says she keeps three hives in her backyard too, got into it after her divorce five years back. The sky turns dark gray by 4:30, thunder rumbles off in the direction of the lake, vendors start rushing to pack up their booths before the rain hits. She offers to help him load his crates of honey jars, he says no at first, stubborn as he’s always been, then relents when she grabs the heaviest crate before he can protest.
A gust of wind slams into his pop-up awning 10 minutes later, raindrops the size of quarters splattering onto the table. She slips on a patch of wet grass when she’s carrying the last crate to his truck, he reaches out fast, catches her around the waist, pulls her tight to his chest to keep her from cracking her head on the gravel. Their faces are three inches apart, he can smell lavender soap and peach iced tea on her breath, her hand is splayed on his flannel shirt, he can feel her heartbeat racing under his palm. He’s fought this for months, told himself every person on the school board was his enemy, but right then all that bitterness melts away, he leans in and kisses her. She kisses back immediately, her fingers tangling in the gray hair at the nape of his neck, the rain soaking through their shirts, running down the back of his neck.
They pull apart when they hear a kid yell from the parking lot, both grinning, wiping rain off their faces like idiots. He slams the tailgate of his old Ford F150 shut, she leans against the passenger door, says she’s got a dry flannel and a batch of chocolate chip cookies cooling on her kitchen counter, if he wants to follow her back to her place to go over the program details. He nods, not bothering to play hard to get, turns the key in the ignition, the radio crackling to life with that same Mellencamp track they’d both seen live 25 years prior. He pulls out of the parking lot behind her beat-up Subaru, the jar of wildflower honey she’d bought sitting on the passenger seat, sticky and warm and exactly where it’s supposed to be.
