Silas Marlow, 53, makes his living restoring reclaimed barn wood into custom tables, cutting boards, and fireplace mantels out of a converted dairy barn 12 miles outside Asheville, North Carolina. He’s lived alone since his wife left him for a traveling craft beer rep 8 years prior, and his biggest flaw is that he’s convinced any deviation from his rigid daily routine—wake at 6 a.m., black coffee, 2 hours of planing, lunch of bologna and white bread, 3 more hours of sanding, beer on the porch at dusk—will send his whole life off the rails. His sister has been nagging him to go to a senior singles mixer for 3 years running, and he’s blocked her number twice over it.
The October county craft fair is the only social obligation he tolerates, mostly because he sells three months worth of cutting boards in 8 hours and the fairgrounds sells spiced apple cider that tastes exactly like the one his mom used to make. He shows up 45 minutes early to set up his booth, hauling crates of finished wood pieces out of his beat-up 2007 Ford F-150, and doesn’t notice the woman setting up next to him until she drops a full case of glass honey jars right next to his work boot.
Her hand brushes the frayed cuff of his Carhartt pants when she leans down to grab the crate, and he flinches like he’s been burned. “Sorry about that,” she says, and her voice is low, smoky, like she’s spent half her life laughing in dive bars. He mumbles something about it being fine, doesn’t make eye contact, goes back to stacking cutting boards. He peeks at her twice over the next 10 minutes: her hair is streaked with silver at the temples, pulled back in a braid, she’s wearing a faded flannel shirt and work boots caked in mud, and there’s a tiny, pale scar slashing across her left cheekbone.
The fair picks up by 10 a.m. Kids scream chasing each other past the booths, the smell of fried oreos and smoked turkey legs drifts over the crowd, and Silas falls into his usual rhythm: answering questions about wood grain, taking custom order requests, taking cash and Venmo from tourists. Every time he has a lull, he glances over at her booth, where she’s passing out samples of hot honey on saltine crackers, laughing with every customer who stops by. A gust of cold wind blows her knit scarf right into his face halfway through the afternoon, and he catches a whiff of jasmine and cinnamon before she yanks it back, apologizing again. “Don’t worry about it,” he says, and this time he looks her right in the eye, and she grins, the scar on her cheek crinkling.
The rain hits at 3 p.m., fast and sharp, the kind of fall shower that comes out of nowhere. Her pop-up canopy collapses under the first gust of wind, and she grabs her crate of honey jars and huddles under the edge of Silas’s, pressing right up against his side to stay out of the rain. Their shoulders are flush, and he can feel the heat of her body through his flannel, can hear her breath catching when a raindrop splatters on her wrist. He doesn’t move away, even though there’s another two feet of space under the canopy to his left. He’s half disgusted with himself, half giddy, the same feeling he got when he snuck out to drink beer in the woods in high school, like he’s doing something he’s not supposed to, like any second someone’s going to catch him.
“Raising bees is a pain in the ass when the weather’s like this,” she says, after a minute of quiet, watching the rain pour down on the fairgrounds. “Lost three hives to a storm back in April. Felt like I lost pets.” He nods, tells her about the time a tornado ripped through his property two years prior, took out three old oak trees he’d been planning to mill into dining tables for six months. They talk for 20 minutes while the rain slows, their shoulders still pressed together, and he finds himself telling her about his wife leaving, about how he stopped going out, about how he only talks to his hound dog most days. He doesn’t know why he’s telling her all that, he never tells anyone that stuff.
When the rain stops, she grabs a saltine cracker, dips it in a jar of her hottest honey, and holds it out to him. Their fingers brush when he takes it, and this time neither of them flinches. The honey burns going down, sweet and sharp, lingering on his tongue, and he makes a face, and she laughs so hard she snorts. “I make it with habaneros I grow in my garden,” she says. “Tastes better on smoked ribs, trust me.”
He surprises himself when he asks her if she wants to get a beer at the dive bar down the street after the fair wraps up. He’s fully expecting her to say no, but she nods immediately, says she’s been craving a cold IPA all day.
They close up their booths at 6 p.m., load their vehicles, and walk to the bar together, the air crisp and cool, the sky pink and orange over the mountains. He pulls out a bar stool for her, buys her first beer, and they sit across from each other, talking about wood and bees and bad 90s country music, and every couple minutes she kicks his boot under the table playfully, and he laughs so hard his sides hurt, the kind of laugh he hasn’t had in years.
When she leaves an hour later, she pulls a jar of her habanero honey out of her bag and slides it across the table to him. “For when you make those ribs,” she says, and she scribbles her phone number on the lid with a permanent marker. He picks up the jar, his thumb brushing the back of her hand where it rests on the table, slow and intentional, no accident this time.
