Elias Voss is 64, runs a one-man vintage typewriter restoration shop out of the converted garage of his Asheville, North Carolina home, and hasn’t set foot in the downtown farmers market in eight years. The last time he went, his wife Clara was by his side, haggling over peaches and sneaking samples of goat cheese while he laughed at her terrible poker face when the vendor called her bluff. She died three months later from a sudden aortic dissection, and Elias had written the market off as another one of those small, sharp joys he couldn’t stand to touch without her. His biggest flaw? He’d spent those eight years walling off every casual advance, every well-meaning set-up from neighbors, convinced any new connection would be a betrayal of the 34 years he’d had with Clara.
He only shows up on this sweltering mid-July Tuesday because his next-door neighbor broke her ankle tripping over her golden retriever, begged him to drop off a cooler of her dill pickles at her regular vendor stall before 10 a.m. The air smells like grilled sweet corn, cut watermelon, and citronella candles warding off mosquitoes, a bluegrass trio picking a fast, twangy version of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” from a folding stage at the end of the row. Elias is wearing the faded gray flannel he keeps on even in 85-degree heat, a habit from his shop where he cranks the AC to keep typewriter metal from warping, and he’s already sweating through the collar by the time he drops off the pickles.
He’s turning to leave when a kid darting past with a blue raspberry snow cone slams into his side, and Elias stumbles backward, knocking into a table lined with glass honey jars. The whole table rattles, one jar of raw wildflower honey tipping over the edge, and he grabs it mid-fall, his hand slamming against the hand of the woman leaning over to catch it too. Her fingers are calloused, crisscrossed with tiny, faded scabs from bee stings, and there’s a smudge of pale yellow beeswax on her left cheek, a tiny brass bee earring glinting in the sun when she looks up at him.
“Elias Voss?” she says, and her voice is rough, warm, like she smokes one cigarette a day after checking her hives, and he recognizes her immediately. Lena Hale. They graduated high school together in 1977, he’d had a crush on her so bad his hands used to shake when she asked to borrow his lab notebook in chemistry class, before she moved to Oregon a month after graduation and he met Clara two years later. He’d not thought about her in decades, not really, but the way she’s grinning at him, one eyebrow tilted the exact same way it used to when she was teasing him for getting a B on a lab report, makes his chest feel tight.
She’s 61, divorced two years, moved back to western North Carolina six months prior to run a small beekeeping operation, she tells him, leaning across the table so close he can smell clover and cedar on her shirt, the heat off her arm brushing his through his flannel. He tells her about the typewriter shop, makes a dumb joke about how most of his clients are 20-year-old influencers who think typewriters are “aesthetic”, and she laughs so hard she snorts, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. She holds eye contact with him for three full beats after she stops laughing, no polite look away, no awkward shift, and he feels his face heat up, the way it used to when he was 17 and too shy to ask her to prom.
When she asks him if he wants to come out to her farm at the edge of the county next Saturday to see the hives, he almost says no. Almost tells her he has a stack of 1950s Underwoods to rebuild, that he doesn’t do weekend plans, that he’s not good company. But then she tucks a strand of blonde hair streaked with gray behind her ear, and he remembers how she used to do that right before she asked him for a pencil in homeroom, and he says yes before he can think better of it.
He spends the rest of the week kicking himself. Guilt curls tight in his gut every time he thinks about her laugh, the feel of her hand against his when they caught the honey jar, like he’s cheating on Clara, like he’s throwing away 34 years of marriage for a silly high school crush he never even acted on. He almost drives back to the market to cancel three times, grabs his truck keys each time before remembering he’d have to make small talk with half the town to find her stall, and he’s too proud for that.
He shows up Saturday at 2 p.m., like he said he would, with a 1953 Royal Quiet De Luxe he’d restored three months prior, stashed in the back of his pickup. He’d found it in an attic cleanout, the keys stuck with old ink, and he’d spent 12 hours fixing it up, polishing the case until it glowed, and when she’d mentioned she used to write poetry back in high school, he’d known he was going to bring it to her.
She meets him at the door of her small, blue clapboard farmhouse, wearing faded denim overalls, no shoes, a single bumblebee sitting calm on her wrist, not stinging her, not moving. She doesn’t even brush it off when she walks over to him, just grins and nods at the typewriter box in his hands. They walk out to the hives at the edge of her property, the grass wet under his work boots, clover sticking to the laces, and she hands him a beekeeper’s veil, their fingers brushing again when he takes it.
Halfway through her explanation of how the queen bee runs the hive, he stops her, tells her he’s been feeling like an ass all week, that he hasn’t wanted to spend time with anyone that wasn’t Clara in eight years, that he feels like he’s doing something wrong by being there. She nods, like she gets it, steps closer so their shoulders are touching, and wipes a smudge of pine sap off his cheek with her thumb, the callus on her thumb catching on his stubble. “Guilt’s just your brain trying to keep you safe from being hurt again,” she says, quiet, like she’s talking from experience, and he doesn’t pull away when her thumb lingers on his jawline.
They spend the rest of the afternoon sitting on her back porch, drinking sweet iced tea spiked with a splash of peach bourbon, while she types silly, terrible poems about bees and typewriters on the Royal, reading them out loud to him between laughs. The sun dips low over the Blue Ridge Mountains, painting the sky pink and orange, a few lazy bees buzzing around the potted lavender on her porch rail. He hasn’t laughed so hard he snorts since he was 19, when Clara tripped over a curb on their first date and tried to play it off like she’d done it on purpose.
He reaches over, wraps his hand around hers where it’s resting on the porch rail, the calluses on her bee-stung fingers fitting perfectly against the calluses on his, worn into his skin from 30 years of prying stuck typewriter keys free. The bumblebee that was on her wrist earlier lands on the back of their clasped hands, sits there for three slow seconds, then flies off toward the hives.
