Chapter 4
Chapter Four
BEAU
Charm is a job. People think it is a gift, a thing you are born holding like a good singing voice, but I have been doing it professionally since I was about six years old and I can tell you it is a job, with hours, and the cruelest thing about the job is that there is no calling in sick.
You show up. You are on. The kitchen needs somebody to make it sound like a kitchen and the funeral needs somebody to carry the casseroles and tell the one story about Della and the dog that lets everybody laugh instead of the other thing, and that somebody is me.
It is always going to be me. I am the man who makes sure everybody else in the room gets the thing they came for, which is a fine thing to be, and which I have never once, in thirty-four years, turned around and done for myself.
So when I drive into town on a cold Saturday in November to scout the farmers market and figure out how a man sells forty hives’ worth of honey in a place that does not appear to want any, I am, naturally, on.
I have my good jacket. I have a smile loaded and ready.
I have a clipboard, which is a prop, a clipboard is the single greatest prop ever invented, a man with a clipboard can stand anywhere on God’s earth and look like he belongs there.
The Hollow Square on a market morning is a genuinely beautiful thing, I will give the place that.
Brick and live oak and Spanish moss and stalls all the way around, a flower shop on the corner with gold letters in the window, a café, a bookshop, a fountain some Confederate somebody is no doubt scowling from the middle of, and in the center of it all the market, loud and good-smelling and full of people who all appear to know each other, which is the part that worries me, because a town where everybody knows everybody is a town with no room at the inn for four strange men and their dead grandmother’s bees.
I find the honey situation immediately, because the honey situation finds me.
There is exactly one honey stall, and it is run by a man who has clearly been running it since honey was invented.
Hand-lettered sign. Forty kinds. A handwritten testimonial taped to the table that I lean in to read and discover is from 1991.
And the man himself, small and round and fierce, in a cardigan, with reading glasses pushed up into white hair and the eyes of a raptor, and the second, the absolute instant, my clipboard and I drift into his airspace, those eyes lock onto me and narrow, and he says, before I have produced a single word of charm, “You’re one of the bee people. ”
“I’m sorry?”
“Out past the county line. The grandmother’s place.” He says grandmother’s place the way you would say nuclear test site. “Forty hives. You’re fixing to sell.”
I have, in my life, talked my way out of a speeding ticket in two states, a bar tab in three, and one genuinely alarming misunderstanding involving a wedding I was not technically invited to. I open my mouth to deploy all of it on this furious little man.
“Earl Tubb,” says a voice behind me, warm as a porch in July, “you put those talons away this instant, he has not even bought a jar.”
And there she is.
Miss Tate. The teacher. Willa. She comes up out of the market crowd in a red coat with her arms already full of somebody else’s grocery problem, a paper sack and a casserole dish she is plainly returning to a third party, and she plants herself between me and Earl Tubb like it is nothing, like running interference between strangers and raptors is a thing she does on her way to other errands, which, I am beginning to understand, it is.
“Willa,” Earl Tubb says, aggrieved, like she has betrayed the cause.
“Earl. This is Beau Mercer. Beau, Earl Tubb, who taught my Sunday school and makes the finest sourwood honey in four counties and is about to be downright gracious to a grieving family that just moved to town, aren’t you, Earl.
” She does not phrase it as a question. She lays grieving family down on the table between us as gently and deliberately as Jonah lays down her, and I watch it do its work, I watch the old man’s talons retract one knuckle at a time, because you cannot stay a raptor at a grieving family, not in this part of the world, it is against the bylaws.
“Sourwood,” Earl Tubb says, finally, gruffly, to me. “What’ve you got.”
“Wildflower, mostly,” I say. “Some clover. My grandmother kept a sourwood line but I’d be a liar if I said I knew yet whether I can keep it alive.”
And that does it, the I’d be a liar if I said I knew, because it is true, and Earl Tubb respects a man who will admit he might kill a bee, and we are off, all at once, into the weeds of overwintering and mite counts and whether the old woman used a top entrance, and I am charming him, I am, but I am also, underneath the charm, actually talking about bees with somebody who knows them, and there is a strange unfamiliar thing happening in my chest that takes me a second to identify and that turns out to be relief.
The whole time, Willa stands there holding a stranger’s casserole, watching me, and not the way people watch me.
Here is the thing about being good at the job.
You can always tell who is buying. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred buy, that is the whole point, that is the design, the smile lands and the eyes go soft and they decide you are exactly the delightful uncomplicated fellow you are working so hard to be.
And one person in a hundred does not buy.
One in a hundred watches the smile arrive a half second early and stay a half second late and clocks the machinery, and you can see them clock it, and it is the loneliest thing in the world, getting clocked, except that it is also, it turns out, the only thing that has ever once made me want to put the clipboard down.
Willa Tate is the one in a hundred. She is watching me run Earl Tubb and she is not buying a word of the performance, not because she thinks I am lying, but because she can see, plain as the fountain, that it is a performance, and the corner of her mouth is doing something that is not a smirk, that has no meanness in it at all, that is, if I had to name it, recognition.
Like she is watching somebody do a magic trick she also knows, from the inside, having sawed a great many women in half herself.
And I think, with the small cold clarity that arrives about twice a year and that I generally drink until it goes away: she runs the same con.
The sunshine. She runs the exact same con I run, doors-open and everybody-welcome and leave-it-to-me, and I would bet this whole farm there is a dam behind hers the same as there is behind mine.
The difference, and I clock it in the same breath, is that hers is mostly real.
That is the part that knocks the wind out of me a little, standing there in the cold with a clipboard.
She means it. The casserole and the interference and the Earl Tubb, she actually means all of it, the sunshine is load-bearing but it is not fake, and I have spent eleven years convinced that everybody charming is secretly hollow like me, and here is a woman proving me wrong while returning a dish.
“You’re doing great, by the way,” she says to me, low, while Earl Tubb is distracted lecturing a passerby. “Long sleeves and all. He’s going to give you the corner spot by spring, watch.”
“You sound awful confident for a woman holding a casserole.”
“I am always confident, and the casserole is Dottie Pruett’s, and I am running it back to her because she ran my granny’s pie plate back to me eleven years ago and I have only now squared the debt, that is how this town works, Mr. Mercer, it is a closed loop of dishes and favors and everybody owing everybody and nobody ever quite even, and the trick,” and here she shifts the casserole to her hip and looks at me, direct, no charm on it at all, the realest face I have been shown in months, “the trick is you let yourself owe. People think the strong move is to never need the pie plate back. But the people who never owe anybody anything end up the loneliest people in the loop. You want to be in the loop, Beau. Owe somebody a dish. Trust me.”
And I have absolutely no idea what to do with that, so I do what I do, I grin and I say, “Are you flirting with me about casseroles, Miss Tate,” and she laughs, easy, and does not answer, because we both know that was not flirting, that was her handing me something true and watching to see if I would catch it or bat it away, and I batted it away, on schedule, like a professional.
A huge, beaming man in a smokejumper’s pullover appears out of nowhere and throws an arm around Willa like a golden retriever discovering its favorite person at the door.
“WILLA,” he booms. “I texted you a meme about a goat at six this morning, did you get the goat meme, it made me think of you because of, you know, the thing with the new bee family and the,” and then he spots me, “OH. Are you the bee family. Are you a goat man. Do you have the goat.” This is, Willa explains, laughing, peeling him off her, Deacon, who reads fire safety to her second-graders and is bonded to the woman who owns the flower shop on the corner, and Deacon shakes my hand with both of his and tells me within ninety seconds that his pack came to this town temporary and stayed permanent and that it was the best thing that ever happened to any of them and that I look like a man who could use a coffee, come on, and I am, against every instinct I have, charmed, by someone for once instead of the other way around.
Over his shoulder, in the doorway of the flower shop, a dark-haired woman with her arms crossed is watching the whole thing.
The flower shop owner. Willa’s person, you can tell, the way you can always tell, by the specific quality of attention.
She is not smiling. She is looking at me the way you look at a weather front coming in over your roof, and then she looks at Willa, and then back at me, and I understand that I have been entered into some private ledger I will not get to read, and that the dark-haired woman has done math about me that I have not done about myself.
I do not stay for the coffee. I tell Deacon next time, and I mean it, I find that I mean it, and I gather up my clipboard and my honey intelligence and I drive back out to the farm where Sam is on the porch pretending he is not waiting to ask how it went and Cooper is feeding that goat and Asa is somewhere out in the cold with his hands in a hive he should not be opening in November, and I report that Earl Tubb is handled and the market is doable by spring and that the reading teacher squared it for us, and Sam goes soft and grateful at the mention of her and Asa says nothing at the mention of her, which from Asa is its own kind of comment.
And here is what I do not report, because I do not have the words for it and would not say them if I did.
That standing on the Square in the cold I caught something off her, some warm bright thing under the wool of that red coat, something like cut grass and the first good day of summer, and that for one second the whole gray flat months-long nothing the world has tasted like since June cracked open and I got a lungful of color, and then it was gone, and I told myself it was nothing, I told myself the senses go strange when you are tired and sad, I told myself it was gratitude, a man is grateful to the woman who saves him from the honey raptor, that is all it was.
I am very good at telling myself things. It is, you could say, the job.
I do not tell anybody about the cut grass.
I go inside, and I make the kitchen sound like a kitchen, and that night when Cooper laughs at my goat impression until he chokes, I bank it, the laugh, the way you bank a fire, because it is the closest thing to warm this house has got, and somebody has to keep it lit.
I am good at keeping a fire lit. It has never once occurred to me to stand close enough to get warm at it myself.