Elias Voss, 59, third-generation beekeeper outside Asheville, dragged himself to the VFW fish fry last Friday only because his part-time teen employee nagged him into it, said he hadn’t spoken to anyone who wasn’t covered in bee stingers in three straight weeks. He’s got a thin white scar slicing across his left knuckle from a run-in with a raccoon that broke into a hive last winter, wears a faded gray flannel even when the air hits 72 degrees, and keeps his late wife Clara’s wedding ring on a chain around his neck, hasn’t taken it off since she passed eight years prior. He’s spent the last decade avoiding Clara’s side of the family entirely, ever since her cousin tried to steal his custom sourwood honey label design to sell to a corporate grocery chain, hasn’t RSVP’d to a single cookout or birthday, blocked all their numbers, figured the feeling was mutual.
He’s halfway through his second catfish filet, picking crumbs of hushpuppy off his grease-stained paper plate, when a shadow falls over his booth. He looks up, and it’s Mara Hale, Clara’s half-sister, the one he last saw at Clara’s funeral, red-eyed, 19, drowning in an oversized black hoodie, didn’t say two words to him the entire day. Now she’s 38, lean, sun freckles dusting her nose, work boots caked in red clay, holding a plastic basket of catfish and a can of black cherry hard seltzer. She asks if the seat across from him is taken, and he just nods, too surprised to form a snarky excuse to turn her away. She slides into the vinyl booth, her denim-clad knee brushing his under the Formica table, and he catches a whiff of jasmine hand lotion and clover, the same smell that clings to his hives in mid-June.
They fumble through awkward small talk first, she mentions she’s the new apiarist for the county extension office, the one who sent him that minor citation last month for unmarked hives bordering the state park trail. He’d been furious when he got the notice, fired off a three-paragraph rant email to the office, never connected the name Mara Hale to Clara’s quiet kid sister. She laughs, a rough, smoky sound, and pulls up his email on her phone, says she thought it was hilarious, most folks just send a one-line apology, not a 500-word essay on the history of small-scale beekeeping in Buncombe County. She leans in when she talks, elbows propped on the table, brown eyes locked on his, no awkward fidgeting, no forced politeness, and he can feel heat creeping up his neck, a flutter he hasn’t felt since he was 16 and asked Clara to prom.
The weight of what’s happening hits him hard halfway through her story about chasing a swarm of feral bees through a residential backyard last week. He knows this is wrong. She’s Clara’s sister, 21 years younger than him, he spent 10 years actively cutting her entire family out of his life, told himself he’d never let anyone from that circle get close again, not after the label fiasco, not after he lost Clara. But every time she laughs, every time her hand brushes his when she passes him the bottle of Texas Pete hot sauce, every time she mentions she remembers him bringing Clara jars of honey laced with lemon when she was in the hospital, that he was the only person who didn’t treat her like a burden when she was a teen skipping school to hike the park trails, he feels that old, hard resistance melting. He tries to pull back, shifts his knee away from hers, takes a long, slow sip of his Pabst, but she just tilts her head, like she can see the war waging behind his eyes, and doesn’t push.
The hall clears out as the sky darkens, most folks heading home before the predicted thunderstorm hits, the only sounds left the bartender wiping down glasses and a low rumble of thunder off in the mountains. She admits she drove out to his apiary three times in the last month, just sat in her beat-up Subaru at the end of his gravel driveway, too nervous to knock, left that jar of wild blackberry jam on his porch two weeks prior, the one he’d assumed was from the elderly widow down the road. She says she’s had a crush on him since she was 17, when he taught her how to smoke a hive so she could earn a 4-H badge, that she never thought she’d have the nerve to say anything, but when she saw him sitting alone at the fish fry, she knew she couldn’t walk away. He sits quiet for a minute, twisting Clara’s ring on its chain between his fingers, then tells her he’s thought about that 4-H day too, off and on for years, wondered what happened to the loud, messy kid who didn’t even flinch when a bee stung her on the wrist.
He reaches across the table, brushes a strand of chestnut hair that fell in her face, his calloused, honey-stained finger grazing her cheek, and she doesn’t flinch. They decide to drive out to his apiary after they finish their food, so he can show her the new queen hives he’s been raising through the spring, she says she’s got a blackberry pie she baked that morning sitting in a cooler in her car. The bartender rings up their tab, winks at Elias when he passes over his credit card, and Elias doesn’t even care that the old guy’s gonna gossip about this to the whole county by Monday morning. He stands up, holds out his hand to help her out of the booth, and she laces her fingers through his, her palm warm and rough from handling hive tools, no hesitation at all.
