Epilogue
WILLA
We harvest the honey in September, a year almost to the week from the night I walked into a grieving farmhouse for a Family Night I had been dragged to, and smelled, under all that careful sorrow, the faint impossible promise of a home.
A year. It does not seem like long enough to have become a whole different woman in, and it does not seem like nearly long enough to have loved four men and a boy and a goat and a town this thoroughly, and yet here I am, in late summer light the color of the exact thing we are pulling from the hives, standing in the middle of a honey harvest that is also, if you know how to read it, a kind of resurrection.
Because there are not two hives by the porch anymore.
There are five. Mémé’s old gray survivor, the one Asa buried in his own mind and Cooper found alive and Sam nursed through the dark, the swarm it threw in the spring, and three more besides, because a family that decides to live instead of stand guard turns out to be the kind of family that ends up with more hives than it strictly planned on, the way it ends up with more chairs at the table and more boots by the door and more bees than any of us can quite account for.
The farm hums. The whole place hums, all day, a sound I did not know I had been missing my entire life until I moved into the middle of it, the sound of a great many small alive things doing the loud sweet work of being alive together.
The honey comes off the frames thick and slow and gold, a whole year of the farm’s weather rendered down into something you can put on a biscuit, spring’s clover and summer’s sourwood and the wildflower tangle of the back acres, all of it in there, the taste of a place and a season and a family’s worth of work.
Cooper holds a finger under the first ribbon of it off the extractor and tastes it and pronounces it, with the gravity of a boy who takes his duties seriously, “the best one.” Which is what he says every year, Beau tells me, because to a child the best one is always the one he is living inside of right now.
He is not wrong. It is the best one. It is the first one I have ever belonged to.
We harvest as a family, which is to say chaotically, which is to say perfectly.
Asa runs the extractor with the careful competence he runs everything, except he is rolling his sleeves up and laughing now while he does it, a thing the man at the county line three days into his own ruin would not have believed possible.
Beau holds court at the uncapping station and tells the same four jokes he has been telling all summer and we all still laugh, because the jokes are not the point, the jokes were never the point, the point is a man who used to perform so nobody would look too close getting to be funny now because he is happy, which is a different thing entirely.
Sam keeps the lists. Jonah keeps everybody fed.
And Cooper, who is nine now and a head taller and has not watched the road for anyone who is not coming back in months, runs the jars, lining them up in the sun in careful rows, and he has appointed himself the official keeper of the bees besides, which means he talks to them, which Mémé apparently used to do, telling the hives the family news, who came and who went and who got married, because she said bees like to be kept in the loop.
Cooper tells them everything. I have heard him out there at the hives in the evening, small and serious, informing the bees that Miss Tate is staying, that nobody is leaving, that the family got bigger, in case they were worried.
I stood at the kitchen window the first time I heard him do it and I had to grip the edge of the sink, because there is a particular ache in watching a child who spent a year braced for the next loss stand at a beehive in the gold of the evening and report, as settled fact, to an audience of bees, that the leaving is over.
He believes it now. That is the whole thing.
Not hopes it. Believes it, all the way to the bottom, the way he believes in honey and goats and the slanty-windowed room with his name on it.
We taught him the leaving for a while, all of us, the worst lesson a family ever taught a boy, and then we spent every single day since unteaching it, and somewhere in this long warm summer it finally took.
And in the kitchen, on the counter where it lives now, out in the open, splattered and stained and used, sits Della’s recipe box.
That is the thing that undoes me, this harvest, the thing I have to step out onto the porch about for a minute.
The box is not on the windowsill anymore, kept, untouched, a relic behind glass.
It is on the counter, lid up, cards out, in the thick of the work, because we are making the honey cake, Della’s honey cake, the one in her own handwriting, the recipe Asa could not look at for a year because her hand was in it, and now her hand is in it the way she would have wanted, which is to say up to the elbows in flour and honey in a loud kitchen full of the family she refused to let go quiet.
We honor her by using her. By getting her recipe box sticky.
By saying her name at the table easy and often, not in the hushed voice you use for the dead but in the ordinary voice you use for the beloved, Della would have loved this, Della always said, the way you talk about a person who is simply elsewhere and deeply missed and permanently, warmly here.
Jonah set the first jar of the harvest on the windowsill where the box used to sit.
Hers. The first one is always going to be hers.
And then we got back to work, because she did not want a shrine, she wanted a kitchen, and we finally, finally gave her one.
I never met Della Mercer. I have built my whole understanding of her out of a recipe box and a benediction and the shape of the hole she left and the way five grown people say her name at the supper table.
But I think I would have liked her enormously, and I think, in whatever way the dead get to know such things, she knows about me.
Knows her brother kept his promise. Knows her boys came back to life and the right one got let in.
Knows that the family she could not stay for did not freeze solid at her grave the way she lay there dying afraid it would, but got loud and got bigger and got happy, which is the only thing she ever actually asked anybody for.
I think she is satisfied. I think she can finally rest. I keep the first jar on her windowsill, and now and again I tell her so, quietly, the way Cooper tells the bees.
We’re good, Della. You can stop worrying now. We’ve got it from here.
I take my minute on the porch, and Asa comes out and finds me, because he notices now, he has learned to notice, and he stands behind me and wraps me up and we look out at the loud golden humming farm, the boy at the jars, the brothers in the barn, the five hives, the long evening coming down over all of it like more honey.
“You all right?” he says into my hair.
And here is the whole arc of me, the entire distance I have traveled, contained in how I answer that question.
Because a year ago, a lifetime ago, a coat-and-porch-light ago, I would have said I’m fine.
Automatic. Armor. The two words I used my whole life to wave people back out of the center of me.
I’m fine. Please look away. I am the one who tends the story, not the one it is about.
I do not say I’m fine.
“No,” I say, and I am smiling so wide it aches, and there are tears running down my face in the honey light, and not one of them is sad.
“No, I am not fine. I am about a thousand miles past fine. I gave up fine months ago. I am happy, Asa. All the way happy, the loud kind, the kind with no exits in it. I am exactly where I am.”
He turns me around and looks at me, the strongest match I will ever have, the last one home, the man who drove to the edge of his own life and let his whole stubborn family drag him back into the middle of it.
“Yeah,” he says. “Me too. Exactly where I am. First time in a long time.”
I spent thirty-three years being very, very good at a great many wrong things.
Being fine. Being elsewhere. Being the friend, the watcher, the supporting character, the woman at the edge of the frame with a light on for people who had already driven away.
I was a master of it. I could have taught the course.
I am not good at any of those things anymore. I have let every one of them go, the way you let a thing go when you finally have somewhere better to put your hands.
What I am good at now, the only thing, the whole entire thing, is this: being here.
All the way here, in the middle of the picture, in the center of the loudest warmest family in three counties, in a kitchen with a dead woman’s recipe getting gloriously ruined and a boy talking to the bees and four men I would not trade for the rest of the world combined and a porch light burning behind me that is finally, after a whole lifetime of pointing the wrong way, aimed exactly right.
It is on for the people who are still here.
And every single one of us is home.