Rafe Colton, 61, retired county road crew foreman and part-time honey producer, slumps on the splintered pine picnic table and stares at the crimped edge of his wild blackberry honey pie, already regretting letting his sister bully him into entering the northern Michigan county fair’s amateur baking contest. He’s got a smudge of beeswax caked on the left side of his jaw he couldn’t scrub off in the port-a-potty sink, his work boots are caked in hay dust, and every other person at the table is wearing a frilly apron or a “World’s Best Grandma” baseball cap. The air reeks of fried dough, diesel fumes from the Tilt-A-Whirl, and warm cinnamon, so thick he can almost taste it on his tongue.
The seat next to him scrapes against the dirt, and a hip bumps his hard enough to make him jostle his paper plate of saltine crackers. He turns to snap, and the words die in his throat. Lorna Hale, 58, owner of the county’s only feral cat rescue, is sliding into the seat, her faded “Adopt a Mouser” t-shirt pulled tight across her shoulders, a peach crumble in a chipped ceramic dish balanced in her lap. Rafe’s ex-wife Karen had called her a troublemaker for 17 straight years of their marriage, ever since Lorna had shown up to their 2010 holiday party in a leather jacket and told Karen her tuna casserole tasted like canned cat food. Rafe had always thought she was funny, even when he’d pretended not to to keep the peace.
She nods at his pie, grinning, and the corner of her eyes crinkle. “Honey base? Figured you’d bring something bee-adjacent. I brought peach crumble. Grew the peaches myself out back by the cat shelter.” Her forearm rests an inch from his on the table, sun-warmed, dotted with faint scars from cat scratches and nail gun accidents from building feral cat winter shelters. Their hands brush when they both reach for the same plastic pitcher of lemonade at the same time, and Rafe yanks his back like he’s touched a hot stove. She snorts, pours him a cup anyway, slides it across the table, her fingers lingering on the edge of the cup for half a second longer than necessary. He catches a glimpse of a tiny faded bee tattoo on the inside of her wrist, and he raises an eyebrow. “Got it in 2012,” she says, twisting her wrist to show him, like she’s been waiting years for him to notice. “After you told me honey bees only sting when they’re defending something worth keeping. Never got the chance to tell you that back then.”
He tries to keep his answers short, his brain screaming that Karen would throw a fit if she saw them talking, that crossing this old line is wrong, that he’s not the kind of guy who chases women his ex explicitly forbade him from interacting with. But Lorna doesn’t let him hide. She asks about his hives, listens for 10 minutes straight while he rants about the varroa mites that wiped out 40% of his colonies last spring, no interruptions, no jokes about how he spends too much time with bugs. No one’s asked him about the hives in years, not even his sister. When he pauses to take a sip of lemonade, she leans in, her thumb brushing his jaw before he can flinch, wiping the beeswax smudge off with a quick, firm stroke. Her thumb is calloused, rough, and the touch sends a jolt up his spine that he hasn’t felt since he was 20 years old. “You had a little something there,” she says, holding up her thumb to show him the waxy fleck, her eyes glinting like she knows exactly what she just did to him.
The judges announce the winners 20 minutes later, over the blare of the fair announcer’s crackling speaker. Rafe’s pie takes first place, Lorna’s crumble takes second. She cheers so loud the people at the next table turn to look, throws her arms around him before he can react, her chest pressed tight to his, her hair smelling like lavender and pine cleaner from mopping the cat shelter floors. When she pulls back, her hands are still on his shoulders, her face inches from his, and she says, quiet enough only he can hear, “I’ve wanted to do that since 2011, when you helped me pull a litter of feral kittens out of your hay bale and Karen yelled at you for getting cat hair on your work shirt.”
Rafe feels the last of his stupid, stubborn loyalty to a marriage that ended 12 years ago crumble to dust. He doesn’t owe Karen anything. She left him for an RV salesman who wore white leather loafers, for Christ’s sake.
They leave the contest table together, their shoulders brushing every other step as they walk past the Ferris wheel, the creak of its metal supports loud over the sound of kids screaming on the roller coaster. He buys her a cone of pink cotton candy, she buys him a bag of deep-fried Oreos, their fingers brushing every time they pass the snacks back and forth. He asks her if she wants to come out to his property the next morning, see the hives, try fresh honey straight from the comb, and she says yes, no hesitation, grinning so wide her cheeks dimple. She leans in before she climbs into her beat-up pickup truck, presses a soft, quick kiss to his cheek, the faint taste of cherry lip balm sticking to his skin long after she drives away. He stands there in the fair dust, holding his blue first-place ribbon in one hand and half a bag of fried Oreos in the other, and laughs so hard his sides hurt.
