Rafe Mendoza is 53, runs a 12-acre apiary outside Boone, North Carolina, and has avoided the annual Watauga Harvest Festival for seven straight years, ever since his ex-wife moved to Asheville with the realtor she’d been seeing behind his back. He only showed up this year because his distributor insisted he set up a booth to move the last of his summer wildflower honey, and by 8 p.m. he’s sick of smiling, sick of strangers asking if he’s “finally seeing anyone,” sick of the neighbor two plots over cornering him to pitch her 48-year-old sister who “loves bees and hates cooking, perfect match for you.”
He ducks into the makeshift beer tent tucked between the kettle corn stand and the bluegrass stage, shoulders hunched, and slams into someone’s elbow hard enough that their half-full cider sloshes over the rim. He’s already apologizing before he looks up, and freezes when he recognizes Lila Hale, the 32-year-old county park ranger who’s denied his permit expansion three times in the last six months, who once chewed him out for 20 minutes because a handful of his hives were 12 feet over the public land boundary.
She doesn’t snap like he expects. She just dabs the cider off her plaid flannel sleeve with a crumpled napkin, smirks, and nods at the empty stool next to her. The tent is packed, the stools crammed so close together their knees brush the second he sits down. He catches a whiff of pine soap and wild blackberry off her, not the heavy DEET bug spray she wears when she’s tramping through the woods to inspect his property. Her left sleeve is rolled up to the elbow, and he spots a tiny, lopsided bee tattoo peeking out above her wrist bone, something he never noticed when she was waving regulatory paperwork at him.
They make awkward small talk at first, about the unseasonable rain that delayed the apple harvest, about the bluegrass band that’s been cycling through the same three Johnny Cash covers all night. She teases him about the angry, all-caps email he sent the park service last month, when they turned down his request to place hives near the old abandoned apple orchard on public land, and he feels his neck heat up, a flutter in his chest he hasn’t felt since he was 17 and sneaking into drive-ins with his high school girlfriend. She leans in when she tells him about the wild honey hive she found tucked in an oak crevice three miles up the Blue Ridge Parkway earlier that week, her shoulder pressing firm against his, the roar of the crowd fading to a low hum when she meets his eyes, holds the contact for three beats too long.
Rafe’s brain is screaming at him to leave. Everyone in this town knows everyone’s business, they’d whisper for months if they saw him sitting this close to a woman 21 years his junior, a woman who works for the department that’s one bad report away from shutting down half his hives. He knows it’s stupid, knows the gossip would make his weekly farmers market runs unbearable, but when she tugs the collar of her flannel down a half inch to show him the bright red bee sting on her collarbone, says she tried to move the hive alone and got stung twice before she bailed, he can’t look away. He almost reaches out to brush his thumb over the raised, tender mark before he catches himself, pulls his hand back to wrap around his beer mug so tight his knuckles go white.
He tells her he’ll meet her at the trailhead at 7 a.m. tomorrow, no charge, will help her relocate the hive to his property where it won’t be at risk when the park service does their controlled burn next month. Her face lights up, and she scribbles her personal cell number on a scrap of napkin, presses it into his palm so her fingertips brush the calluses on his knuckles, the ones he’s got from prying open wooden hive boxes every day for 18 years.
They talk for another 45 minutes, until the bartender announces last call, and Rafe walks her to her beat-up 2012 Subaru parked at the edge of the festival grounds. He doesn’t kiss her, doesn’t make an awkward pass, just says he’ll see her tomorrow, and she grins, says she’ll bring coffee, black, like she remembered from the time he was drinking it on his porch when she showed up for a surprise permit inspection two months prior.
He walks back to his own beat-up Ford pickup 10 minutes later, the napkin crumpled in the front pocket of his stained work jeans, the faint smell of pine and blackberry still lingering on the sleeve of his flannel. A group of his beekeeper friends holler at him from across the parking lot, wave him over to join them for a nightcap, and for the first time in seven years, he doesn’t flinch at the thought of them asking questions, doesn’t care if they see the napkin peeking out of his pocket. He unlocks his truck, climbs in, smooths the crumpled napkin out on the passenger seat where he can’t miss it, and turns the key in the ignition.
