Elmo Pritchard, 63, has kept bees in the hollows west of Asheville for 28 years, and has held a grudge against Marnie Cole for exactly 12 of them. He blames her for his wife Lila’s death—convinced she talked Lila into that solo Blue Ridge Parkway hike where she slipped on wet rock and fell 80 feet, left in the rain for 14 hours before a ranger found her. He hasn’t said more than three words to her in all that time, even when she set up her homemade jam stand two feet from his mead booth at the annual Madison County Fair three days prior. He’d nodded once when she waved, turned back to pouring sample cups of wildflower mead, and pretended she didn’t exist.
The storm hits at 7:17 PM, right as the line of fairgoers thins out to a handful of teenagers sharing a funnel cake. Wind slams into the row of vendor tents, sending paper sample cups skittering across the plywood counter of his booth, and fat, cold raindrops start pouring so hard they drown out the sound of the Ferris wheel’s creaky chain lift. Marnie yells something over the noise, and before Elmo can protest, she’s hauling three boxes of jam jars under the edge of his sturdier, canvas-covered awning, her boots squelching in the quickly forming puddle between their booths. She’s close enough that he can smell the lavender she infuses in her hand soap under the sharp tang of rain and fried Oreos wafting from the food stand three rows over.
He’s about to tell her to get her stuff off his booth when a gust of wind yanks the edge of her flimsy pop-up tent loose, sends half her unboxed jam jars crashing to the grass. Half of them shatter, sticky peach and blackberry jam spreading across the mud in dark, sweet-smelling pools. He curses under his breath, climbs over the counter of his booth, and kneels down next to her to grab the unbroken jars before the rain gets to their paper labels. Their hands brush when they both reach for the same jar of peach jam, her skin calloused from decades of chopping fruit and screwing on jar lids, warm even through the cold rain dripping off both their sleeves. He yanks his hand back like he’s been stung, which is ironic, considering he gets stung by bees at least three times a week and barely flinches.
They carry the remaining jars back under his awning, and Marnie leans against the side of the booth, wiping rain off her face with the hem of her flannel shirt, her dark hair plastered to her neck, a streak of silver at her temple that he never noticed before. He doesn’t know why he does it, but he reaches under the counter, grabs two plastic sample cups, and pours her a measure of his oak-aged sourwood mead, the good stuff he usually reserves for repeat customers who buy full gallon jugs. She takes it, her fingers brushing his again when she wraps her hand around the cup, and takes a slow sip, her eyebrows raising in surprise.
“Always thought your mead was too sweet,” she says, grinning, and the crinkles at the corners of her hazel eyes make his chest feel tight, like he’s forgotten how to breathe for a second. He’d spent 12 years picturing her as sharp, mean, the woman who sent his wife to her death, but she’s softer than he remembered, her laugh rough like she smokes a cigarette every now and then, which she does, pulling one out of her jacket pocket a minute later, lighting it with a Zippo that flicks open and shut with a familiar click. It’s the same kind of Zippo Lila carried, he realizes, and that’s what makes him say it, the question he’s been holding in for 12 years.
“Why’d you make her go alone?” he says, quiet enough that the rain almost covers it. Marnie freezes mid-sip, the cigarette hanging between her fingers, and for a second he thinks she’s going to leave. Then she sighs, takes a long drag, and tells him the story he never bothered to ask for. Lila was the one who begged her to come, she says, but Marnie’s 16-year-old son had appendicitis that morning, she’d been at the hospital for 12 hours, didn’t even know Lila had gone alone until the ranger called her to ask if she knew where Lila had planned to hike. She’d felt guilty for 12 years too, she says, wouldn’t even look at him at the grocery store or the post office because she thought he was right to hate her.
Elmo doesn’t say anything for a long minute, just stares at the rain pouring down across the fairground, the neon lights of the Tilt-A-Whirl blurring through the drops. The resentment he’s carried around like a stone in his chest for 12 years feels like it’s melting, slow, sticky, like the peach jam leaking into the mud at their feet. He pours her another cup of mead, and she pulls an unbroken jar of blackberry jam out of her box, twists the lid off, dips her thumb in, licks it off slow, like she’s savoring it. Her knee brushes his when she shifts closer to stay out of the rain dripping off the edge of the awning, and he doesn’t move away.
The rain stops 20 minutes later, the sun peeking out over the mountains, painting the sky pink and orange, and a fair worker trundles by on a golf cart, yelling that they’re going to open the fair back up in 10 minutes. Marnie tucks her jam jars back into her boxes, slings the strap of her canvas bag over her shoulder, and leans in close enough that her hair brushes his cheek when she talks. “I got a batch of spiced pear jam I canned last week sitting on my kitchen counter,” she says, her voice low, just for him. “Bring a bottle of that oak mead over after the fair closes. We can test how well they pair.”
He nods, his throat too tight to talk, and watches her carry her boxes back to her half-broken tent. He tucks the jar of peach jam they’d both reached for earlier into his cooler, already counting the minutes until the fair closed for the night.
