Jax Trujillo is 61, a wild honey harvester based out of a 40-acre plot outside Grand Junction, and he’s spent the last eight years acting like any flicker of interest in anyone who isn’t his late wife or his adult grandson is a personal failure. He’s stubborn to a fault, has turned down every blind date his sister has tried to set up, has walked out of two separate neighborhood potlucks when a pair of widowed neighbors tried to corner him to swap recipes and phone numbers. He’s convinced desire for anyone else is a betrayal, that at his age, that kind of giddy, jittery feeling is for kids, not a man who still has a photo of his wife taped to the dashboard of his beat-up Ford F-150.
He stops at The Spur, the only dive bar within 15 miles, after selling out of every jar of his fall sage and pine honey at the county harvest fair. The place is half-empty, most of the family crowds having bailed hours earlier to get their kids home before bedtime, and he slides into a cracked vinyl booth in the back, orders a bourbon neat, shrugs off his Carhartt jacket to reveal a faded Willie Nelson tee under the flannel. His hands are calloused, crisscrossed with tiny bee stinger scars, and he still smells like smoke from the controlled burn he ran on a section of his property three days prior, mixed with the faint, sweet stickiness of honey.
She slides into the booth across from him without asking, and his first instinct is to tell her to beat it. She’s 58, he later learns, moved to town six months prior to open a native plant nursery after her husband died of a sudden heart attack, has sun-streaked gray hair pulled back in a messy braid, dirt under her fingernails from transplanting aspen saplings earlier that day, a flannel tied around her waist over well-worn jeans. She holds up the half-empty jar of his honey she’d bought that afternoon, says she forgot to ask if he had bulk stock for her pollinator garden, and her voice is rough, like she smokes the occasional menthol on her porch after dark.
He’s short with her at first, gives her a generic answer about dropping some off next week, leans back against the booth like he’s trying to put as much space between them as possible. Then their knees brush under the table when she shifts to grab a napkin, and he flinches like he’s been burned, and she laughs, low and warm, says she doesn’t bite, unless he asks nicely. He blushes, actually blushes, something he hasn’t done since he was 16 and asked his wife to prom, and he leans forward a little, stops crossing his arms over his chest.
She leans in too when she talks, elbows on the table, holds eye contact for two, three seconds longer than polite, no darting away, no awkward fidgeting. When she reaches across the table to grab a handful of salted peanuts from his bowl, her fingers brush his, and he feels a static jolt run up his arm, sharp and warm and unfamiliar. He feels guilty immediately, that old familiar disgust curling in his gut, like he’s doing something wrong, like his wife is watching from somewhere, judging him. But then she talks about how she spent six months after her husband died thinking she’d never feel excited about anything again, how she moved here because she couldn’t stand walking past the coffee shop they went to every Sunday, and he realizes he’s not the only one carrying that weight.
The bartender yells last call as they finish their drinks, and she asks if he wants to walk her to her truck, parked down by the creek that cuts through the fairgrounds. He agrees before he can talk himself out of it. The air is crisp, sharp with the scent of fallen maple leaves and wood smoke from the fair’s bonfire, crickets chirping in the grass off the side of the dirt path, their boots crunching over dead leaves. They stop next to her beat-up Toyota Tacoma, and she leans against the driver’s side door, looks up at him, says she can tell he’s been holding back, that he doesn’t have to, not with her.
He admits he hasn’t so much as hugged a woman who wasn’t family in eight years, that he thought wanting anything like this made him a bad husband, made him weak. She reaches up, brushes a stray piece of pine needle out of his hair, her palm warm and calloused against his cheek, and says being alive doesn’t mean you stop loving the people you lost. He kisses her then, slow, no rushing, tastes like bourbon and the peppermint candy he’d popped in his mouth after his last fair customer left, she tastes like hard cider and sage. It’s not messy, not dramatic, just right.
He follows her back to her small farm 10 minutes outside town, stops at his truck on the way to grab a case of bulk honey jars he’d stashed in the bed for wholesale clients. He leaves one jar on her kitchen counter the next morning before he heads out to check his hives, tucks a handwritten note with his cell phone number under the lid, and pauses for half a second to kiss her forehead where she’s still asleep, curled up under a quilt stitched with sunflowers.
