Chapter Two #2
She swallowed, but that’s what she was here for, to help.
Her mother would have adored all this. She’d loved the idea of bees.
The seed had taken root on her parents’ honeymoon in Greece where, to hear them tell it, they’d tramped through dusty olive groves and tasted honey straight from the comb.
They’d come home enchanted with the idea of one day planting a few olive trees and raising bees on their acreage in Connecticut.
The climate was wrong for olives, but they reminisced about Greece and those sunny hives.
But her mom had run out of time. So her father picked up the torch and carried it, faithfully tending the hives his Maggie had dreamed about but never got to see. His passion for the bees wrapped up in his love for her, until finally, there was no difference between them.
With a grunt, he lowered himself to one knee and began stuffing leaves and bits of sticks into a small can that gave off a faint aroma of wood smoke. “Having trouble getting this thing lit,” he grumbled. He struck a match, but the flame faltered in the breeze.
“Shouldn’t you be wearing your veil?” Cassie said.
He wasn’t wearing any protective gear, not even a baseball cap, and bees had started drifting around. “If I could get this damn smoker started, they’d calm down. They don’t like it when you open the hive.”
She flinched as a bee careened past her nose. “Then why did you?”
Her dad looked up. “Why did I what?”
“Open it.”
“Here.” He handed her the box of kitchen matches.
“See if you can get this going.” The smoker reminded Cassie of the oil can from The Wizard of Oz with a tiny bellows in back.
She didn’t particularly like the idea of hanging around open bee hives, but she squatted next to him and struck a match, shielding the flame from the breeze.
This time it caught, and the tinder sparked, sending up a satisfying flame.
She smiled up at him, pleased she could help. “Now what?”
“Close it,” he instructed.
She quickly closed the top and pumped the bellows until white smoke issued forth like a signal to surrender. Her dad took the bellows and lumbered to his feet, puffing smoke in the general direction of the hive. Bees were everywhere, crawling all over the open box, with more flying around.
“So what are you doing?” she asked, stepping back to avoid getting a lungful of smoke.
Her dad pumped vigorously. “Need to see what’s going on in there.”
“Don’t they just do their thing?”
“I always open them up this time of year. Need to see how they came through the winter. It’s April, right?”
“Yes, it’s April,” she said, her heart catching that he didn’t know.
“Give me a little more smoke,” he said. He was attempting to lift one of the frames from the open box, which agitated the bees even more. Dozens of them boiled around his head.
She puffed the smoker, which cleared some of them, but her father was still having trouble freeing the frame. “I need that tool.”
“Which tool?” Cassie scanned the ground to see if he might have dropped it on the grass.
“That flat thing, you know…” He waved her off impatiently then gave the frame a yank and managed to pull it free. But he lost his grip, and the whole thing, black with bees, dropped into the box with a sickening thud.
“Look out. They’re all over you!” Cassie steered him to a safer distance, her heart clamoring as she puffed smoke at a posse of pursuing bees.
Her dad seemed shaken too. He looked old, without the vigor she remembered. His hair thinner, the skin on his face and neck gone slack. Miraculously, neither of them had been stung.
“Maybe I’ll leave it for tomorrow,” he said. “They’re too riled up now.”
She heaved a sigh of relief. “That’s a good idea.”
. . .
She regrouped on the porch steps after her father went inside to rest. The house was a classic white colonial.
Black shutters. Red door. Back in the day, painting the front door red had been a stroke of daring.
Her mother, of course, was the instigator.
She loved color, wrapped herself in flamboyant shades of orange and electric blue, blazing through their staid Connecticut town like a meteorite.
Always nudging her buttoned up husband to step out.
He’d repainted the door over the years, but like the hives, it was now a washed-out version of itself.
The whole house needed a good going over.
Bits of paint were flaking off, and moss crept along the siding, giving the wood a greenish cast.
She turned her face to the sun, which was surprisingly warm for April.
Her dad needed more help, but he wouldn’t accept it.
Especially as an edict from her. She wasn’t sure why it had always been so difficult between them.
From the time she was small, she’d chafed at his decrees, even when it would have been easier to go along.
Even when she secretly thought he was right.
He’d urged her to consider Columbia, but she refused.
He insisted she see the campus anyway, pulling alumni connections to get her an interview.
“You love New York,” he said, “and you have the grades. It’s the perfect place for you.
” She was taken with the campus and its heady urban feel but stubbornly wouldn’t say so.
It was too close to home and an even bigger strike—her father’s alma mater.
Her mother, fumbling in her own mist of confusion, couldn’t see Cassie was wavering.
She might have accepted Columbia with a little nudge, but her father was a bulldozer, and she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
She went to Boston University instead. A reputable school, but not Columbia.
Her father drove her up to Boston on move-in day, but she was spoiling for a fight and took offense at what he didn’t say. Her mom, riding along with them, cried and clung when it was time to say goodbye, like Cassie was the parent and her mother the child.
Her mom had been gone more than twenty-five years, but Cassie missed her every day.
She was about to get up and see what her dad was doing when a postal truck turned up the driveway, spitting stones as it came.
The driver retrieved a white wooden box from the back and set it gingerly on the ground. “I need someone to sign for this,” he said.
“What is it?” The box was about two feet wide and a foot high with screened holes on either side. A suspicious buzzing came from inside.
“Bees. Can you sign?”
“Bees! He ordered more bees?”
The driver consulted his manifest. “Linden, right?”
“Yes, that’s us. But I don’t think he meant—”
“Ma’am?” The driver handed her a pen. “If you could please just sign.”
She sighed. “Yes, of course.” She signed then left the box and went to find her dad.
“My bees!” he said, hurrying out after her. “I forgot they were coming. I meant to order another hive. Now I have nowhere to put them.” He squatted next to the box, peering through one of the small, screened openings.
Cassie squatted next to him, even though the buzzing made her skin prickle. “Can’t you just put them in with the other bees?”
“No.” Her father looked horrified. “There’s a queen. They need their own hive.” He sounded definite about this part. Cassie supposed it was like asking a mother and her kids to move into some other woman’s house. No way was that going to work out.
“Can’t they stay in here for a while?” They were just bees in a box. It looked pretty much like a hive, just a little smaller. She couldn’t imagine why he needed another hive.
“No, they can’t stay in here. They’ll die. They need to be in a hive.”
“Well, what are you going to do with them?” She knew she sounded cross but couldn’t help it. He’d ordered bees he didn’t remember and now had nowhere to put them.
He lowered himself to the front step. “Give me a minute. I need to think. I don’t need you nattering at me.”
The defeat in his voice stopped her. Her mother had begun with incidents like this.
Not bees, of course, but the inability to follow through.
She would find a recipe then couldn’t make sense of it.
Or start telling a story then lose track in the middle.
Who knew if her father had Alzheimer’s or run-of-the-mill dementia.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was he was losing the ability to think sequentially.
He’d seemed almost his old self when he bustled out of the house, excited about the bees.
But now he was sitting here dejected, unsure what to do next.
The hives would have to go, that was obvious. He couldn’t take care of bees anymore. But she would need to talk him into it. The bees meant the world to him, a fraying but unshakeable link to her mother.
She touched his arm. “We’ll figure it out.” She’d been planning to look at flights to New Orleans even though Andrew had told her not to come. He needed her, but at the moment her father needed her more. And maybe she should give Andrew a chance to handle this.
Right now, she had to find a hive, or somewhere to put these bees. But even if she managed to get a hive delivered before the bees died, would her father know what to do? She wasn’t going to be much help.
She pulled out her phone and typed in bees. No. That wasn’t it. She needed someone in a white suit who knew what the hell he was doing. Someone who could transfer the bees or whatever needed to be done. Who could give her father a hand until she could convince him to get rid of them.
A beekeeper. That’s what she needed.