Rafe Mendez, 53, has made his living keeping 42 hives of honeybees on 18 acres of wooded mountain land outside Asheville for 11 years, ever since he quit his soul-sucking office job selling health insurance and his wife left him for a luxury realtor in Charlotte the same week. His biggest flaw, as his older sister likes to remind him every Thanksgiving, is that he assumes every kind word from a stranger comes with a hidden request: free honey, access to his property to hike, or a casual fling that’ll fizzle out as soon as they realize he spends more time talking to his queen bees than he does other people.
The August county fair swelters, thick with the smell of fried Oreos, cut timothy grass, and the faint chemical tang of portable toilet sanitizer. Rafe has his table lined with quart jars of wildflower, sourwood, and clover honey, a stack of handwritten labels, and his dented metal bee smoker propped against the table leg to ward off the random wasp that drifts over from the cotton candy stand. He’s wiping sweat off his forehead with the back of his frayed work shirt when he feels a sharp elbow dig into his forearm, and turns to see a woman with silver streaks in her dark curly hair fumbling to catch a half-crate of jam jars that’s tipping off a wobbly hand truck.
He catches the crate before it hits the dirt, sets it upright on the pavement next to her booth, and grunts before turning to walk back to his own spot. She calls out a warm thank you, and he waves over his shoulder, already mentally dismissing the interaction as another person who’ll be by in an hour asking for a free jar to sweeten her preserves. He’s surprised when she shows up 20 minutes later with a paper plate holding two slices of fried green tomato, still crispy, slathered in homemade pimento cheese.
Her name is Clara, she says, she runs the jams and jellies booth, and she’s been buying his honey from the general store in town for six months to mix into her small-batch peach butter. She leans against the edge of his table as she talks, close enough that he can smell the vanilla perfume she’s wearing mixed with the faint stickiness of cooked stone fruit on her hands, and her knee brushes his when she shifts her weight to avoid a kid running past with a dripping blue raspberry snow cone. He doesn’t step back.
For the next three hours, between waves of fairgoers buying honey or jam, they lean against the shared wooden rail between their booths and swap stories. She tells him about her husband, who died three years prior from a sudden heart attack while they were hiking the trail that cuts across the back of Rafe’s property, and he tells her about the time a black bear broke into three of his hives last fall and ate 40 pounds of honey before he scared it off with the bee smoker. She laughs so hard at the story she snorts, and he feels something soft unclench in his chest he’d thought was permanently frozen shut.
He fights the feeling for an hour, alternating between wanting to lean in closer, to brush the curl that’s fallen over her eye back behind her ear, and being disgusted with himself for even thinking about it. The town gossips have already been yapping for weeks about his ex-wife getting remarried, he knows they’d eat it up if they saw him flirting with the jam lady before the divorce papers were even six months cold. He almost makes up an excuse to leave early, packs up half his unsold jars, before he sees her struggling to lift a 50-pound crate of blackberry jam onto the back of her beat-up pickup truck.
He helps her heft it up, and when he sets it down she reaches out and brushes a smudge of honey off his jaw—he’d gotten it earlier when he opened a sample jar for a toddler with a sticky face—with her thumb. Her hand lingers for half a second, warm against his stubbled skin, and she doesn’t look away when their eyes meet. The fairgrounds are almost empty now, the neon ride lights turned off, the only sound the distant chatter of the carnies packing up the tilt-a-whirl and the chirp of crickets in the grass at the edge of the parking lot.
She asks him if he wants to come over to her house the next afternoon, says she’s testing a new honey-cinnamon jam recipe and wants his input on what honey to pair with it, adds that she’s got a cooler of cold Pabst in her fridge and a porch with a view of the same mountain range his hives sit on. He doesn’t make an excuse, doesn’t tell her he’s busy, doesn’t say he doesn’t mix work with personal stuff. He just nods, takes the napkin she hands him, and scrawls his cell number on the back of one of his wildflower honey jar labels.
He drives home an hour later, the windows rolled all the way down, the cool mountain air whipping through his graying hair. The jar of peach butter she gave him sits on the passenger seat next to his leftover fried green tomatoes, and he reaches over when he stops at a red light, twists the lid off, and dips his finger in. It tastes like ripe summer peaches, cane sugar, and the faint, floral tang of the clover honey he harvested back in June. He smiles, slow and unforced, and doesn’t even notice the car behind him honking when the light turns green.
