Manny Rios, 59, has kept bees on 12 acres outside Asheville for 22 years, and he hasn’t set foot at the county fire department’s summer cookout in the 8 years since his wife, Lila, passed. He only showed up this year because his 22-year-old niece, a rookie volunteer firefighter, threatened to stop bringing him her famous peach pie every Sunday if he bailed. He’d parked his beat-up Ford F-150 at the edge of the field, leaned against a pine far from the crowd, and nursed the same cup of sweet tea for 45 minutes, turning down three separate offers of pulled pork sliders to avoid making small talk. Everyone here still treats him like a broken thing, like he might shatter if someone so much as mentions Lila’s name, and he hates it. He’s not broken. He’s just fine being alone, or so he tells himself.
The first time he notices Elara Voss, she’s tripping over an exposed oak root 10 feet away, a paper plate piled high with pickled okra tipping in one hand. He moves without thinking, catches her elbow with his free hand, steadying her before she faceplants into the patch of clover at his feet. She laughs, a low, throaty sound that doesn’t have the tight, polite edge most people’s laughs do around him, and brushes a strand of auburn hair streaked with silver off her forehead. She’s 54, he remembers, moved to the valley three months prior to run the small downtown library, and half the county has been gossiping about her nonstop since she showed up: left a husband of 26 years back in Charlotte, sold the house, quit a high-paying corporate job, moved here alone with nothing but three cats and 12 boxes of books. The women at the grocery store call her reckless, the men call her trouble, and Manny had made a point to avoid running into her until now.
Her lemon verbena perfume curls into his nose, sharp and sweet, and he realizes he’s still holding her elbow. He lets go fast, like he’s been burned, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She holds out the plate of okra to him, and when he takes one, their fingers brush: calloused from his beekeeping gloves, hers soft but crinkled at the tips from turning pages all day. She leans against the pine next to him, close enough that her shoulder brushes his bicep when she shifts her weight, and asks him about the faded “Save the Bees” sticker on the back of his truck. He’s surprised to find he doesn’t mind talking to her. She doesn’t ask about Lila. She doesn’t look at him like he’s one missed meal away from falling apart. She just laughs when he tells her about the black bear that broke into three of his hives in April, drank half a frame of honey, and passed out in the grass next to the apiary, snoring so loud Manny thought a chainsaw was running down the road.
The sun dips lower, painting the sky pink and orange, and the crowd starts hooting as the fire chief announces the annual raffle prizes. Manny had stuffed his ticket in his pocket when his niece pressed it on him, hadn’t even looked at the numbers, but when the chief calls his number, he blinks, shocked. The prize is a free two-night stay at the log cabin halfway up Black Mountain, the one with a wall of built-in bookshelves the previous owner left behind, fully stocked with hundreds of first editions. Elara makes a soft, excited sound next to him, says she’s been trying to get access to that cabin for months to catalog the books for the library’s local history collection. She turns to him, and her brown eyes hold his, steady, no looking away, no awkward fidgeting, and he feels something unclench in his chest that he didn’t even know was tight.
They slip away from the crowd a few minutes later, walking down the rutted dirt path to the creek that cuts through the edge of the field, to get away from the noise. She pulls off her scuffed work boots (she’s wearing thick wool socks under her floral sundress, of course she is) and dips her feet in the cold water, sitting next to him on a flat, sun-warmed granite rock. Her knee presses against his, warm through the thin fabric of his work pants, and she says she knows everyone in town talks about her, knows they say she’s crazy for leaving her old life behind, knows they say he’s a hermit who hates everyone. “They’re wrong about both of us,” she says, quiet, like she’s sharing a secret only the crickets can hear.
Manny sits there for a second, listening to the creek gurgle, to the faint sound of country music drifting up from the cookout, to the steady beat of his own heart, which is racing faster than it has in years. He’d spent 8 years convinced he didn’t want anyone else in his space, convinced he was better off alone with his hives and his quiet, but right now, with her knee pressed to his, the smell of her perfume mixing with the pine and the clover, he knows he was wrong. He tells her he has a batch of sourwood honey that just finished curing that morning, the best he’s made in 10 years, sitting in glass jars on his kitchen counter. He asks her if she wants to come over and try it, maybe stay for dinner, if she’s not busy.
She smiles, the kind of smile that crinkles the corners of her eyes, and stands up, wiping grass off the back of her dress. She holds out her hand to him, palm up, calloused page-turning fingers spread, and he slips his calloused beekeeper’s hand into hers, letting her pull him to his feet.
