Jax Tully, 61, had spent the last eight years perfecting the art of being invisible. A former middle school woodshop teacher turned small-batch organic beekeeper, he lived on two acres outside Asheville, had seven hives, an old hound dog named Clutch, and a strict policy of skipping every neighborhood event to avoid the pitying “how are you holding up” questions that followed any mention of his late wife, Karen, who’d died of ovarian cancer six months before they’d planned to retire together. His only crack in the armor was his 27-year-old daughter, Lila, who’d shown up at his door that Saturday afternoon with a case of cheap lager and a threat to move back home if he didn’t come to the summer block party.
He’d relented, showed up in a honey-stained Carhartt shirt and boots caked with clover mud, and spent the first 45 minutes hovering by the grill, nodding at acquaintances and sipping beer so cold it made his teeth ache. He was reaching for a second can off the ice chest when his elbow connected with something soft, and he jumped back so fast he knocked a bag of potato chips off the folding table next to him.
It was the new neighbor two doors down. He’d seen her hauling potting soil and vintage garden planters into the old Henderson place for the last three weeks, but he’d never gotten close enough to talk to her. She wore a sun-faded sage linen sundress, had a smudge of dark soil on the curve of her left wrist, and silver streaks running through her wavy auburn hair that caught the golden hour sun like thin strands of tinsel. She laughed, not the polite awkward laugh he was used to, the loud, throaty kind that made his ears warm. “Easy there, beekeeper. I’m not a hive you don’t want to rile up.”
He stammered an apology, brushed the chip crumbs off her dress hem, his fingers brushing the soft skin of her calf for half a second. He’d forgotten what it felt like to touch a woman who wasn’t his daughter or a nurse at the doctor’s office. She told him her name was Mara, 58, widowed three years prior, ran a small herbal tea business out of her sunroom. She’d seen his hives lining the edge of her property line, she said, had been meaning to knock and ask if he sold raw honey to blend into her chamomile and lavender batches.
They ended up leaning against the split-rail fence bordering the street, watching a group of kids scream as they ran through a sprinkler shooting arcs of cold water over the front lawn. Her knee brushed his every time she shifted her weight, and he could smell lavender and tomato vine on her skin, sharp and sweet, not the cloying perfume Karen used to wear, but something new, something that made his chest feel tight in a way that wasn’t grief. He told her about the woodshop, the beehives, the way Karen used to joke that he’d rather talk to his bees than people. He didn’t even realize he’d mentioned Karen until he stopped talking, tensed up, waiting for the pitying look. It never came. Mara just nodded, said her late husband had been a rock climber, used to disappear for three days at a time into the Pisgah National Forest, and she still left a glass of iced tea on the porch for him every time it stormed.
The conflict sat heavy in his chest for the next 20 minutes: half of him screaming that this was a betrayal, that he should go home, lock the door, go back to his hives and his dog and the quiet life he’d built, the other half leaning in closer every time she talked, noticing the way she bit her lower lip when she laughed at his dumb joke about how bees were better behaved than the 7th graders he used to teach, the way her calloused gardener’s hand rested on the fence an inch away from his.
When the first fireflies started blinking on at the edge of the treeline, Mara pushed off the fence, turned to him, and asked if he wanted to walk back to her place to see the raised vegetable beds she’d just finished building. She reached out, brushed her thumb over the small scab on his wrist from a bee sting he’d gotten that morning, and said she had arnica salve that would take the itch right out. Her touch was warm, firm, no hesitation, and the jolt that ran up his arm was enough to drown out the guilt screaming in the back of his head. He said yes.
They walked down the street slow, the noise of the block party fading behind them, crickets chirping loud in the grass on the side of the road. When they got to her front porch, strung with warm yellow fairy lights, she pushed the screen door open, then turned to him, her face soft in the half-light. She told him she’d been working up the nerve to knock on his door for two weeks, but all the neighbors had told her he kept to himself, she didn’t want to bother him. He told her he’d been avoiding knocking on hers for the same reason.
She leaned in, kissed him slow, and he kissed her back, his hand resting light on her waist, the honey stickiness still on his fingers catching on the linen of her dress. She tasted like peach iced tea and mint, and for the first time in eight years, he didn’t feel guilty for feeling good.
He followed her inside, the screen door slamming shut behind them, and the last firefly of the dusk blinked past the porch rail, headed for the clover fields surrounding his hives half a mile down the road.
