2. Heath
two
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.
Twenty-two years I've been keeping bees.
Fourteen of those I've been pressing honeydew out of comb by hand in a hot room in October, and I've had it on bread and in a mug when I was sick and once on venison because somebody told me to, and nobody has ever, not once, used it as the bottom of something instead of the top.
I finish it. All of it. It takes a while and neither of us talks.
The market's waking up around us. Somebody's tuning a fiddle badly. The orchard people at the end of the row are stacking apples in a pyramid that'll be knocked down by a toddler before eleven, same as every year.
I set the container down on the table and put the fork across it.
She's got her chin up and she's holding still — genuinely holding still, not performing patience — and that's the thing that does it, I think. That she can wait.
"Come Saturday," I say.
She blinks once. "Saturday."
"Fire road past the church, five kilometres, take the left fork at the culvert. Gate's not locked. Don't come in a car with low clearance."
"I have a Subaru."
"That'll do."
"What time?"
I think about it. "When it's warm. Ten. Not before. The bees are mean when it's cold, and they'll take it out on you."
"Noted." She picks up her coffee. She's trying not to smile too wide and losing. "Was it right? The dish."
I could tell her what I thought. I could tell her that I stood here and ate a stranger's cooking off a plastic fork in the cold and felt something move in my chest that I'd have to go a long way back to find a match for.
"You used it right," I say.
She takes that like it's a lot.
Which it was. I don't say that either.
She buys wildflower honey from me at full price and puts it in her bag, and then she stands off to the side out of the way of the table, and when people come she watches them.
A woman buys goldenrod and asks if it's local. A man in a good jacket asks if I ship. A kid asks if bees die when they sting you and I tell her yes, and that they know that, and that they'll still do it if you scare them badly enough, and the kid thinks about that for longer than her father does.
Around ten I sell the last of the dark. Three jars to a man from Kamloops who's been buying it off me since 2019 and who never asks me a single question about it, which I used to think was politeness.
Then two to a couple who overhear the price and buy them anyway.
Then it's gone, same as always, and the empty space at the back of the table looks the way it always looks.
"Fifty-one minutes," Anaya says.
"What?"
"From when the market opened. Fifty-one minutes and the dark honey is gone." She's got her phone in her hand, and then, like she's caught herself at something, she puts it back in her pocket. City girl, even still.
She holds my eyes when she says it. Doesn't get defensive. Doesn't explain more than that.
I load the crates in the truck at noon, and I drive the fire road home with the windows cracked because the cab holds smoker smoke all season, and the whole way up I don't think about the yard or the wintering or the four hives on the north bench I'm not happy with.
Moss, my dog, meets me at the gate the way he does, slower every year, tail going. I let him ride the last hundred metres on the bench seat with his head on my leg.
"Somebody's coming Saturday," I tell him.
He doesn't have much to say about it.
I stand on the porch after I've unloaded and I look at the yard — the hives in their rows down the slope, boxes going grey, the light coming low through the spruce the way it does after the equinox, gold on everything, everything backlit.
I built all of this on purpose.
I've never once asked anybody to come see it.