Ronan O’Malley, 62, spent 28 years as a forest fire smokejumper before retiring to run a tiny bait and tackle shop off the road to Lolo National Forest. He’d avoided Missoula’s annual summer street fair for eight straight years, ever since his wife Eileen died of ovarian cancer halfway through their 34th wedding anniversary. The fair had been their thing, full of inside jokes about the terrible deep-fried Oreos and the bluegrass band that played the same set every year, so he’d written it off entirely until his 17-year-old granddaughter begged him to stop by her lemonade stand Saturday afternoon.
The July heat hung thick enough to sip, heavy with the smell of cut grass and cotton candy and burnt hot dogs. He’d already stayed 20 minutes longer than he planned, downed two lukewarm root beers, and slipped his granddaughter a $50 bill for her college fund when no one was looking, when his eye caught the honey booth tucked between a face-painting stand and a guy selling hand-carved wooden cutting boards. Eileen had stirred local wildflower honey into her chamomile tea every single morning, so he drifted over before he could talk himself out of it.
The woman behind the booth leaned against a stack of wooden crates, wiping her hands on a flour-sack towel printed with tiny bumblebees. She was 58, he guessed, sun streaks in her dark brown hair, laugh lines fanning out from the corners of hazel eyes flecked with gold. She’d moved to town six months prior to take a part-time librarian job after a messy divorce from a lawyer who’d cheated on her with his paralegal, though Ronan didn’t learn that till later. First, she pushed a tiny sample spoon of clover honey across the table toward him, her arm brushing his when she leaned in to point at the jar behind her, and he caught a whiff of lavender hand lotion mixed with the sweet, sharp scent of beeswax.
He tasted the honey, slow. It was bright, a little earthy, undercut with a faint pine tang from the fir trees surrounding the hives she kept out in the Bitterroot Valley. He told her he hadn’t had honey this good since Eileen used to buy from a beekeeper out near Darby, and he tensed up immediately after, waiting for the awkward pity smile most people gave him when he mentioned his late wife. Instead, she nodded, and said her mom used to do the same, stirred honey into her oatmeal every morning till the day she died. No pity, no rushed change of subject, just a quiet, steady eye contact that made his chest feel tight in a way he hadn’t felt in years.
He stayed there for 15 minutes, leaning against the booth edge, talking. When he told her about the scar snaking up his left forearm from a 2007 fire that nearly trapped him on a ridge outside Superior, she leaned in closer, didn’t interrupt, asked follow-up questions about what it felt like to jump out of a plane into a wall of smoke. A kid ran past, slamming into the back of Ronan’s leg, and he stumbled forward, his hand brushing hers where it rested on the table. Her skin was soft, a little sticky from stray honey, and he felt a jolt shoot up his arm, hot and fast, that made him pull back like he’d touched a live wire. Part of him was disgusted, guilty, like he was cheating on Eileen even talking to this woman for longer than 30 seconds. The other part, the part he’d buried eight years prior, wanted to stay there all afternoon, listen to her laugh, watch the way she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear when she was thinking.
The sky turned dark all at once, heavy gray clouds rolling in over the mountains, and then the rain hit, hard, cold summer rain that soaked through his thin work shirt in 10 seconds flat. The booth’s canvas canopy flapped wildly, a row of small honey jars teetering on the edge of the table, and he moved without thinking, shoving the jars into crates with one hand while holding the canopy pole down with the other. They were pressed shoulder to shoulder under the tiny strip of cover, rain pouring so hard they could barely hear the bluegrass band 50 feet away, and she laughed, loud and bright, wiping a raindrop off the tip of his nose with her thumb, her skin grazing the corner of his mouth for half a second, so fast he almost thinks he imagined it. He didn’t flinch, didn’t pull away, just smiled back, and for the first time in eight years, he didn’t feel guilty for feeling happy.
The rain passed as fast as it came, the sun breaking through the clouds to paint a faint rainbow over the ridgeline west of town. He carried three heavy crates of honey jars to her beat-up forest green Subaru parked on the side street, and when he set the last one in the back, she handed him a full jar of wildflower honey, tucking a scrap of notebook paper with her cell number scrawled on it under the lid before he could protest. He didn’t say anything, just nodded, and drove back to his small cabin on the edge of the woods, the honey sitting on the passenger seat next to him.
He set the jar on his kitchen counter when he got inside, pulled the scrap of paper out from under the lid, stared at it for three full minutes, the ghost of Eileen’s voice in the back of his head telling him he deserved to be happy, the other part of him screaming that he was being stupid, that he’d only get his heart broken again. He picked up his phone, unlocked it, typed out “You got any recommendations for how to use that honey besides tea?” and hit send before he could talk himself out of it.
