Page 3 of Dark Honey Mountain Man

Heath

I'm still setting up when she arrives.

Two crates of wildflower honey on the table, goldenrod in the middle, the dark at the back where I keep it so people have to ask. The canvas is wet from overnight. I'm shaking it out and I see her coming up the row past the empty stalls with two coffees, and I know before she reaches me that I've been half-listening for boots since I got here.

That's a new thing. I don't like it much. It doesn't stop.

Anaya is gorgeous in a way that few women are. Understated, not much makeup, hair in a braid. Her light brown skin is warm against her autumn-colored outfit. Her smile is bright, and her eyes lock onto mine as she approaches.

"I don't know how you take it," she says, and holds one out. "So it's black, and there's two creamers and two sugars in my pocket, and no judgment either way."

"Black's right."

"Good. I'd have thought less of you."

I take the cup. Her hands are cold — the paper's warmer where her fingers were. She's wearing a wool hat the colour of rust and her hair's coming out from under it in a way that says she got dressed in a rush.

She looks around the stall. At the crates, at the smoker sitting on the tailgate of the truck, at the hand-painted sign.

"Can I see the hives today?"

"No."

Same word. Same flat delivery. I want to see what she does with it.

What most people do with it is push. They laugh and say come on, or they explain that they're not like other people, or they offer money, or they get quiet and offended and leave. Woman from a magazine two years back offered me four hundred dollars for an afternoon and a photographer. I told her the same word and she looked at me like I'd broken a contract she'd signed on my behalf.

Anaya sets her coffee on the corner of my table.

Then she reaches into her tote and pulls out a container. Glass, with a snap lid, wrapped in a dish towel like it's been keeping warm since a kitchen it shouldn't have been cooked in.

"Okay," she says. "Different thing, then."

She peels the lid, and when she does the steam comes off it into the cold.

The smell hits me before I've got a name for any of it. Something burnt at the edges — sugar burnt, on purpose. Something sour and dark. Curry leaves in hot fat, which I know from a woman who used to sell samosas at the far end of this market when I first started coming, and mustard seed, which I know because it pops, and I can see them, black beads scattered over the top.

Underneath it all, unmistakable, the resin note. My honey.

"Charred cabbage," she says. "Motel hot plate and a frying pan I bought at the hardware store, so don't hold the technique against me. That's a glaze — tamarind, black pepper, the honeydew, a little fish sauce. The yogurt's underneath to cool it. Curry leaves and mustard seed in ghee over the top." She holds out a fork. "I need to know if it's right."

"Right by who?"

"By the honey. By the bees." She laughs, but she’s serious.

I come around the end of the table.

I don't decide to. I'm on her side of it before I've thought about it, close enough that she has to tip her chin to keep looking at me, and I take the fork out of her hand and my fingers go over hers doing it. Cold fingers. She doesn't let go right away.

Neither do I.

Then she steps back half a step, and folds her arms, and something's gone through her face that she hasn't got under control yet.

I should say something first. I don't have anything.

I eat it standing at my own stall with the canvas still dripping and a woman I met yesterday watching my face.

It's hot and sour, and there's a heat in it that arrives late, at the back, and the cabbage is black in places and sweet in others. And the honey isn't the sugar in it. That's the thing. She hasn't used it as sugar. She's used it the way you'd use stock, or the burnt onion at the bottom of a pot — the dark under everything, holding it down.