Roy Pacheco, 53, has kept bees on 12 acres of north Georgia pine and tupelo for 17 years, ever since he quit his corporate logistics job to stop having panic attacks in airport parking garages. His biggest flaw, the one his late sister used to nag him about nonstop, is that he’d rather burn a whole hive of infected bees than ask for help, even when it’s offered for free. He hasn’t so much as bought a woman a cup of coffee since his wife left him for a traveling gospel singer eight years prior, and he’s told himself a hundred times he’s fine with that, that his hives, his old hound dog, and his weekly bourbon and poker night with the guys from the feed store are more than enough.
The August county fair air sticks to his skin when he hefts three jars of his prize tupelo honey toward the agricultural exhibit tent, the brim of his faded John Deere hat pulled low against the sun. He can smell fried Oreos, pine straw, and the distant tang of diesel from the tractor pull going on at the other end of the fairgrounds, and his boots kick up dust as he rounds the corner of the tent, slamming straight into someone carrying a stack of vegetable entry forms.
The jars slip in his grip, and a calloused, dirt-streaked hand shoots out to catch the middle one before it hits the ground. He looks up, and it’s Mara Hale, the new county extension agent he’s been dodging for three months, the one he’d assumed would be a stuffy, pencil-pushing bureaucrat here to nitpick his hive spacing and fine him for some obscure regulation he’d never heard of. She’s standing so close he can smell coconut sunscreen and the faint, sharp scent of tomato plant on her flannel shirt, and she holds eye contact for a full two seconds longer than polite, one corner of her mouth tilting up in a smirk that makes the back of his neck feel hot.
“Been trying to track you down for weeks, Pacheco,” she says, passing the jar back to him, her fingertips brushing his for just a beat longer than necessary. “Everyone in the county says you’re the hardest man to get ahold of this side of the Appalachian Trail.”
He grunts, shifting the jars in his arms, already gearing up to tell her he doesn’t want any government grants, any inspections, any of the nonsense he’s sure she’s there to peddle. But then she nods at the honey in his hands, says her 82-year-old grandma only uses his honey for her peach cobbler, has driven 45 minutes to his farm stand twice this summer just to stock up. He blinks, the sharp edge of his defensiveness softening a little, and when she asks if he’s got 10 minutes to grab a sweet tea at the food stand down the way, he finds himself saying yes before he can think better of it.
They sit across from each other at a splintered pine picnic table, the sweet tea so cold it makes condensation drip down the sides of the plastic cups onto his jeans. She doesn’t lead with the grant talk first, asks him about the mite infestation he’d dealt with this spring, listens when he rants about the commercial beekeepers that truck hives through the area every summer bringing disease with them, doesn’t interrupt or talk down to him like every other extension agent he’s ever met. When a group of kids runs past the table, one of them slams into the leg of the bench, and her knee bumps his under the table, warm and solid through the denim of her work pants, and he doesn’t move his leg away.
By the time she brings up the pollinator grant, the one that will cover 80% of the cost for 50 new hive boxes and a year of free mite treatments, no strings attached, just a single 15 minute check-in next spring, he’s already halfway to forgetting why he ever avoided her in the first place. When she invites him to sit with her for the demolition derby later that night, says she’s got an extra cooler of cold IPA in her truck, he hesitates for all of three seconds before he says yes, ignoring the little voice in his head that says he’s too old for this, that he’s just setting himself up to get burned again.
They climb the bleachers an hour later, the roar of the modified car engines getting louder as they get closer to the track. She sits down right next to him, their shoulders pressing together when she settles, and passes him a cold beer, their fingers brushing intentionally this time, no pretense of a dropped jar or a fumbled form. The first two cars slam into each other in a shower of sparks, the crowd around them roaring, and she laughs loud enough that he can hear her over the noise, leaning into him a little when a particularly hard crash sends a piece of bumper flying across the track. He takes a sip of the beer, cold and bitter on his tongue, and lets his arm rest on the bleacher behind her, no hurry to move it anywhere else.
