Rudy Galvan is 62, retired high school woodshop teacher, the kind of guy who still leaves extra zucchini on his elderly neighbors’ porches and apologizes to inanimate objects when he bumps into them. His biggest flaw, the one his late wife teased him about for 32 years, is that he’d rather chew through a two-by-four than rock the boat in their tiny Willamette Valley town. He’s spent the eight years since she passed splitting his time between building custom birdhouses for the weekly farmers market and avoiding any social situation that might lead to someone asking him when he’s “going to get back out there.”
It’s 92 degrees on this late August Saturday, sweat sticking the collar of his faded Carhartt shirt to his neck, when he spots Marnie Hale walking toward his stall. She’s 58, the new county bee inspector, and also his ex-wife’s cousin’s ex-wife, a technicality that’s had him tucking his chin and looking the other way every time they cross paths for the last four years. The town just voted last month to ban non-native honeybee hives to protect local pollinators, so she’s been making the rounds of every vendor selling garden supplies all morning, a half-empty jar of wild clover honey tucked in the pocket of her canvas work vest.
She stops right in front of his display of mason-bee friendly birdhouses, her work boots scuffing the edge of the tarp under his stall, and leans in so close their shoulders brush. He can smell coconut sunscreen and cut grass on her, and his throat goes dry before he can even say hello. She smirks, like she knows exactly how flustered he is, and taps the edge of a cedar birdhouse with a calloused finger. “I saw these on the community Facebook page. You build the nesting tunnels the right width, huh? Most guys just drill random holes and call it a bee hotel.”
Rudy laughs, more nervous than he means to, and wipes his palm on the thigh of his jeans. He tries to step back a little, to create the kind of polite distance he keeps with everyone he’s not supposed to be attracted to, and knocks over a half-full jar of walnut stain he’d left sitting on the edge of the table. It clatters to the ground, lid popping off, a dark splotch spreading across the asphalt. He swears under his breath and bends to grab it at the same time she does, their hands brushing hard when they both wrap around the jar. Her skin is warm, a little rough from handling hive frames all week, and he freezes for half a second before yanking his hand back like he touched a hot nail.
The psychological whiplash hits him fast, the familiar burn of guilt warring with the stupid, giddy flutter in his chest he hasn’t felt since he was 17 and asked his wife to prom. He shouldn’t be thinking about how pretty her eyes are when she crinkles them laughing at him for panicking over a stain. He shouldn’t be noticing the faint smudge of bee wax on her left cheek. People would talk if they saw him lingering too long, would say he’s moving on too fast, that he’s disrespecting his wife’s memory by messing around with someone from her side of the family.
She doesn’t push him, just wipes the stain off her palm with a wet wipe from her pocket and nods at the dive bar two blocks down, the one with the neon Pabst sign that’s been half-broken since 2017. “You got another hour on your stall, right? I’ll swing back when you close up. I’ll buy you a beer. We can talk about the native hive boxes you said you were building on that post last week. If you want.”
Rudy hesitates, his eyes flicking to the group of retired teachers he plays poker with every Friday, who are sitting at the produce stall across the way, definitely watching them. For half a second he almost makes up an excuse, says he has to get home to fix his fence, that he’s busy. Then he looks back at Marnie, and she’s not pushing, not teasing, just waiting, and he nods.
She’s leaning against the hood of her beat-up Ford Ranger when he locks up his stall an hour later, sipping a cherry hard seltzer, and she tosses him a cold one from the cooler in her bed before they even walk to the bar. They sit in the back booth, the jukebox playing old Johnny Cash so loud the table vibrates a little, and their knees brush under the table every time one of them shifts. She calls him out on his people-pleasing habit first, says she’s watched him say yes to building custom bookcases for people who don’t even pay him half what he’s worth for years, and he doesn’t even get defensive, because it’s true. He tells her he’s scared to stop being the grieving widower everyone feels bad for, scared if he moves on, people will forget how much he loved his wife. She reaches across the table, brushes the bee wax off his cheek this time, on purpose, and says “She’d yell at you for moping this long. I knew her, remember? She’d tell you to stop wasting time being what everyone else wants you to be.”
They leave the bar as the sun is painting the sky pink and orange over the vineyards on the edge of town, and he doesn’t even look around to see if anyone’s watching when she leans up and kisses him slow, the taste of cherry seltzer and mint on her lips. He asks her if she wants to come back to his workshop to see the hive boxes he’s been building, the ones he was too nervous to bring to the market, and she laces her fingers through his and nods. He unlocks the shop door, the smell of cedar and linseed oil wrapping around them as she pulls him over the threshold.
