Elias Voss is 62, a retired high school woodshop teacher who’s spent the last eight years sticking to a rigid, uncomplicated routine: wake at 6 a.m., sand whatever custom cutting board order he’s got on the workbench, sell his surplus stock at the small town summer street fair every Saturday, and be home by 7 p.m. to eat a frozen dinner and watch old westerns. His biggest flaw, if you asked his younger sister who lives in Portland, is that he’s convinced any small joy that doesn’t tie back to his late wife Lynn is a betrayal of the 34 years they spent together. He hasn’t flirted with anyone since 2015, hasn’t even let a woman hold his hand longer than it takes to pass him a grocery receipt.
The July air is thick enough to chew the day Marisol sets up her wild honey stand two feet to the left of his booth. He’s wiping sawdust off a curly maple charcuterie board when he glances up, catches her tucking a streak of silver-streaked dark hair behind her ear as she laughs at a toddler who’d just stuck a grubby finger into an open sample jar of clover honey. Her forearms are dusted with faint bee sting scars, her nails caked with a little bit of dirt at the cuticles, and she smells like clover blooms and lemon lip balm from ten feet away. He looks away fast, cheeks hot, like he’s been caught snooping through Lynn’s old jewelry box.
A gust of wind hits an hour later, hard enough to knock over his stack of smaller walnut snack boards, sending half of them sliding under her table. He kneels to grab them at the same time she does, their hands brushing when they both close around the same grained board. The calluses on her palm are rougher than his, worn from lifting 40-pound hive boxes, and the contact zips up his arm so fast he almost drops the board. They fumble through picking up the rest, making small talk: she moved to town three months prior from western Pennsylvania, her two kids are in college out east, she sells honey to fund the local feral cat TNR program she runs out of her garage. He finds himself telling her about Lynn, how she’d put blackberry honey on everything from toast to vanilla ice cream, how he hasn’t bought a jar since she died. She doesn’t pity him, doesn’t give him that soft sad smile strangers do when he mentions Lynn. She just nods, says she gets it, that she still can’t listen to old Johnny Cash records after her ex-husband left her for a woman half his age 12 years prior.
The sky turns dark gray fast at 3 p.m., thunder rumbling so loud the jars on her shelf rattle. The first raindrops hit hard, cold and sharp, and everyone at the fair scrambles to pack up their stock before it gets soaked. He grabs the edge of her flimsy plastic table cover before it can blow away, helps her haul her coolers full of honey jars under the awning of the hardware store two doors down. They’re both soaked through by the time they get the last cooler under cover, his gray work shirt clinging to his shoulders, her linen blouse translucent enough he can make out the sunflower tattoo on her left bicep, faded from 20 years of working outside in the summer heat.
She leans in then, slow enough he could pull away if he wanted, and brushes a fleck of wet sawdust off his cheek. Her thumb lingers on his jawline for a beat, warm even through the cold rain on his skin, and he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t step back. He admits he’d been avoiding talking to her all morning, scared that wanting to know her meant he was forgetting Lynn. She snorts, soft, says grief doesn’t work like that, that Lynn would probably yell at him for wasting so many Saturdays sitting alone in his booth staring at his scuffed work boots.
The rain lets up ten minutes later, a faint rainbow arching over the water tower at the edge of town. He asks her if she wants to get a cheeseburger and a draft beer at the dive bar down the street once they finish packing up their booths. She grins, the corners of her eyes crinkling, says only if he lets her give him a free jar of blackberry honey, no strings attached. He laughs, loud and unforced, the first laugh that hasn’t felt like it’s been stuck behind a wall of grief in years, and nods. He reaches for the heavy stack of quart jars she’s trying to lift onto her hand truck, his hand covering hers for a beat longer than necessary, and they carry the load back to her pickup truck together.
