Manny Rocha, 53, has spent the last eight years living and working alone on 20 acres of forested land outside Eugene, Oregon, where he keeps 47 beehives and bottles small-batch honey under the label Sticky Fingers Apiary. His only consistent human contact is the weekly Saturday farmers market in downtown Eugene, and even then he limits conversation to quick check-ins with regulars and price checks for curious passersby. His wife left him for a winery owner who’d bought the property three miles down his road back in 2015, and he’s since convinced himself anyone who shows him more than passing kindness is either after free honey or access to his quiet, unzoned land for parties or camping. It’s a flaw he’s long since stopped apologizing for, even if his older sister calls him every other week to nag him about “wasting his best years hiding from the world.”
The August heat sits thick on his neck at the market that day, his gray undershirt stuck to his ribs under a faded Carhartt work shirt dotted with wax stains and a faint smear of honey on the left cuff. He’s just handed a jar of wild blackberry honey to a retired teacher who’s been buying from him for six years when he notices her leaning against the adjacent peach stall, twisting a jar of his own wildflower honey between her fingers, staring right at him. She’s wearing cutoff denim shorts scuffed at the hem, a loose white linen button down unbuttoned two buttons at the collar, scuffed white sneakers caked in garden mud, and a smudge of peach fuzz stuck to the line of her jaw. He’s never seen her before, rare for the small market circuit.
She pushes off the peach stall and walks over before he can look away, stopping so close the toe of her sneaker is half an inch from his scuffed work boot. She introduces herself as Lena, the new county library outreach coordinator, says she’s been hearing about his honey from half the senior patrons who come in for the weekly book club. She asks if he’d do a 20-minute talk at the main branch next month for their summer nature series, focused on native pollinators. Manny’s first instinct is to say no, tell her he doesn’t do crowds, doesn’t do public anything, that he’d rather be elbow deep in a hive box than standing in front of a room full of strangers. He opens his mouth to say exactly that when she leans in past him to point at a jar of tupelo honey on the top shelf behind him, her bare shoulder brushing the exposed skin of his bicep. He smells lavender shampoo and ripe peach on her, and his throat goes dry.
She pulls back and holds eye contact for three beats longer than casual, the corner of her mouth tugging up in a smirk when she notices him staring at the freckle just below her left eye. “You gonna answer me, or you just gonna stare all afternoon?” she says, tapping the counter lightly with her fingernail. He fumbles for a sample stick, dips it into the open tupelo jar behind the counter, and holds it out to her. Their fingers brush when she takes it, a sharp little jolt like the static he gets when he pries open a wooden hive box on dry days, and he flinches almost unnoticeably. She laughs, warm and not unkind, and licks the honey off the stick, her tongue darting out quick to catch a drop that drips down her thumb. “Good,” she says, nodding. “Worth the drive out here just for that.”
He tells her he’ll do the talk, but only if she buys him a beer at the dive bar off Main Street after the market closes, as a non-refundable deposit for his time. She agrees without hesitation, says she’ll meet him there at 5, once she’s done hauling boxes of library flyers back to her car. He spends the rest of the market half distracted, messing up three orders and forgetting to charge a college kid for a jar of clover honey, too busy replaying the way her shoulder felt against his arm.
The bar is cool and dim when he walks in, smelling like fried peanuts and stale beer and lemon Pledge, and she’s already in a booth in the back, a pint of pale ale waiting for him across the table. He slides into the booth, his knee brushing hers under the Formica top, and she doesn’t shift away. They talk for two hours, first about the library series, then about the kid who came in last week asking for every beekeeping book the branch had because he found a swarm in his grandma’s backyard, then about the time Manny had a swarm take up residence in the cab of his old pickup and had to drive 20 miles to rehome them with 10,000 bees buzzing around his head. She laughs so hard she snorts, covering her mouth with her palm, and Manny realizes he hasn’t talked this much to another person since his wife left. When he pauses to take a sip of his second beer, she reaches across the table and brushes a fleck of peanut shell off his lower lip, her thumb lingering for half a second on the chapped skin before she pulls back.
They leave when the sun’s dipping below the roofline of the buildings across the street, painting the sky streaky pink and tangerine. She asks if she can come out to his property sometime to see the hives, and he tells her yeah, tomorrow, if she brings a peach pie from the stall they were next to at the market. She leans in and kisses him on the cheek, her lips soft, the faint taste of honey and beer on her breath when she pulls back, and says she’ll be there at 10 sharp. He watches her climb into her beat up Subaru and pull out of the parking lot, then gets into his own truck, turns the key, and Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” cuts on the old radio. He rests his forearm on the open window, the warm evening air hitting his face, and smiles so wide his cheeks ache before he even notices he’s doing it.
