Chapter 2 #2
"She's going to say no."
"Probably. First few times, definitely."
"And you're going to keep offering."
"Every week. Cheerfully. Until she runs out of reasons to say no or gets tired of coming up with new ones, whichever happens first."
Diesel shook his head, but he was grinning, the particular grin of a man who's watched this exact strategy work on somebody before, because it had — on him, a little, in the early days of this club learning to trust each other, and later on half the couples in it, one stubborn act of showing-up at a time.
"You know," he said, "for a guy who spends most of his time cracking jokes, you're the most relentless person in this entire club when you actually want something."
"That's the secret nobody clocks," I said.
"Being soft on purpose doesn't mean being easy to get rid of.
It just means the fight looks different.
I'm not gonna wear her down by being hard.
I'm gonna wear her down by being here. Every week.
Same as I did with Rosco. Same as this whole club did with every single one of us who showed up here broken and figured we'd stay that way. "
"She threw a jar at Hawk."
"I know," I said, grinning again, helpless about it. "Incredible aim."
Saturday came. I showed up at her stall with an offer to help with deliveries, and Hazel Dunmore looked at me like I'd suggested something deeply, personally offensive, which — I would learn over the following weeks — was just Tuesday for her, an entirely standard reaction to basic human kindness, and which did not, in the slightest, make me reconsider a single part of the plan.
"I don't need help," she said.
"I didn't say you needed it. I said I'd like to help."
"Those are the same thing."
"They're really not. Needing help means you can't do it alone. Wanting help means you'd rather not, even though you obviously can, because you've been doing it alone since before you had a driver's license, probably, and nobody's ever once made the offer easy to accept."
She went very still at that, honey jar halfway wrapped in tissue paper, and for a second I thought I'd overstepped — I do that sometimes, say the true thing before I've earned the right to say it — but then she finished wrapping the jar, set it down with more care than the transaction required, and said, flat, "The diner order goes out Tuesdays. Six a.m. I'm not slowing down for you."
Which was not a yes. Which was also, unmistakably, a yes, delivered in the only dialect Hazel Dunmore appeared to speak fluently: reluctant, hedged, wrapped in enough qualifiers to deny it later if anyone asked.
I showed up Tuesday at five forty-five, because showing up exactly on time felt like it might read as compliance, and showing up early read as commitment, and I have never once been subtle about which one I was going for.
She was already loading the truck. Didn't say good morning. Handed me a crate the second I got within reach, like I'd been drafted rather than volunteered, and said, "Careful, that one's heavy on the left side, jars aren't packed even."
"Got it."
"If you drop it, you're buying every jar in it."
"Deal."
I didn't drop it. I want that on the record, mostly because Diesel bet against me — put down actual money, twenty bucks, on the theory that I'd end up owing Hazel Dunmore an entire crate of honey inside of two weeks, a bet I intend to collect on someday out of pure principle.
The delivery route took us to the diner first, then Harper's bakery, then the mill restaurant, three stops in the gray early light with the town still mostly asleep around us, and I learned more about Hazel in that one silent, efficient hour than I had in a month of Saturday mornings.
I learned she does the diner's order first because Mabel opens earliest and hates waiting on anybody.
I learned she has a specific way of stacking crates in the truck bed so nothing shifts on the turn by the old mill, a turn tight enough to spill a badly loaded truck.
I learned she doesn't make small talk while driving, but she'll answer a direct question if you ask it plainly and don't dress it up.
"Your grandmother started this," I said, somewhere between the bakery and the restaurant, not really a question.
"Great-grandmother, technically. Grandmother expanded it. Mother let it go to seed for a while. I picked it back up."
"Let it go to seed how?"
She was quiet long enough that I thought she wasn't going to answer, hands steady on the wheel, eyes on the road.
"She wasn't well," Hazel said finally. "Not sick, exactly. Just — gone, some other way, even when she was standing right there. I learned to run the hives myself because somebody had to and there wasn't anybody else lined up for the job."
"How old were you?"
"Twelve."
I didn't say anything to that right away, because there wasn't a right thing to say, and I've learned over the years that the wrong thing — pity, or worse, some clumsy attempt to make it sound less hard than it was — does more damage than silence.
So I just sat with it a second, let it be as heavy as it actually was, and then said the only true thing I had.
"That's a lot to carry at twelve."
"I managed."
"I didn't say you didn't manage. I said it was a lot."