Chapter 24
Taz
The bee suit is approximately eight thousand degrees inside, and I've never been happier in my entire life.
"You look ridiculous," says Marco, sunburned and grinning, from the edge of the flatbed he lent me (he grows almonds two booths down and apparently can't say no to a desperate man), handing up another hay bale. "Like, genuinely insane."
"That's the point." I adjust the headpiece, which keeps sliding to the left because apparently my skull is shaped wrong for borrowed bee costumes. The antennae flop pathetically. "Hand me the sign."
He passes up the hand-lettered poster board I spent an hour making in the motel room last night while Molly slept.
MY WIFE MAKES THE BEST HONEY IN CALIFORNIA.
The letters are uneven, the E's are all different sizes, and I'm pretty sure I spelled California wrong the first three times.
But it's done, and it's true, and I'm going to hold it over my head while wearing a padded stinger down Main Street.
"The baby costume though," Marco says, shaking his head. "That's what's going to break the internet."
I look down at Clem, who's currently being held by Molly near the registration booth.
She's wearing the tiny matching bee suit we found at the festival vendor tent: yellow and black stripes, little wings that stick out from her back, and a hood with antennae that's way too big for her head.
She looks like a confused bumblebee who got lost on her way to a flower. She looks perfect.
"Mol!" I call out across the staging area. "We're almost ready!"
She walks over, Clem tucked against her chest, and the smile on her face is worth every drop of sweat currently pooling in places I don't want to think about. "Taz, I have a serious question."
"Anything," I tell her.
"Did you sleep at all last night," she asks, "or did you just lie there planning how to humiliate yourself in front of an entire town?"
"Little of both." I reach down from the flatbed to adjust Clem's antenna hood, which has slipped over her eyes. "Mostly planning. The humiliation requires logistics."
"The parade coordinator came by twice looking for you," she says. "She kept saying the word permits."
"Handled it," I say.
She narrows her eyes. "How did you handle it?"
"I may have made a generous donation to the Paso Robles Youth Soccer League." I shrug, which makes the padded thorax of my costume squeak. "Their kids needed new uniforms. I needed a flatbed in the parade lineup. Everybody wins."
Molly laughs. "Somewhere there's a soccer coach explaining that the uniforms were funded by a man who needed permission to wear a stinger in public."
"I hope they put it in the newsletter," I tell her.
Her eyes are dancing. "You'll regret that when somebody asks you to present the trophies dressed like this."
"I'll insist on a cooler month," I say. "My commitment to youth athletics has ventilation requirements."
She shakes her head, but she's still smiling, and that smile is the whole reason I'm doing this.
I'm not trying to win her back like it's a transaction, or prove a point, or check a box on some imaginary list of husband redemption tasks.
Just to see her laugh. To remember how much I love making her laugh, and how I forgot that somewhere along the way while I was building empires and neglecting the only person who matters.
"Okay," she says. "Walk me through the safety plan again."
"Again?" I ask.
"Taz," she says, in the voice that means business.
"Fine." I count off on my fuzzy yellow gloved fingers.
"Route is twelve minutes total, we're in the third section so we won't be in full sun.
It's eighty-one degrees right now, the coolest it's been all week, and it won't peak until long after we finish.
She's in breathable cotton under the costume, and I've got a battery fan clipped to the hay bale next to where I'll be sitting.
Water bottles for me, her pacifier and your pumped milk if she gets hungry.
The float has a full stop before the performance stage at the end; we're not moving during any of the loud parts. "
"And if she gets fussy?" Molly asks.
"I hand her down to you immediately," I tell her. "You'll be walking alongside with Marco."
Molly studies my face. I can't read her expression, which drives me crazy because I used to be able to read everything she was thinking just by the way her eyebrows moved.
But two months of separation and all the damage before it, and I've lost that fluency.
I'm relearning her like a language I used to speak in my dreams.
"Okay," she finally says. "Let me help you get her settled."
She climbs up the makeshift steps we've rigged to the flatbed, and I take Clem while she arranges the hay bales into a padded nest. The festival provided blankets, and Marco added a foam mat underneath for extra cushioning.
It's probably the most elaborate setup for a twelve-minute parade ride in the history of Central Coast celebrations.
"Here." Molly positions a shade umbrella that clips to the flatbed's railing. "Just in case."
"I love you," I say without thinking, because she's fussing over our daughter and there's hay in her hair and she's pinning the prize ribbon from yesterday to the front hay bale, where the whole parade route will see it.
She pauses. Looks at me. "I know."
It's not "I love you too," but it's not nothing either. I'll take it.
The parade route is lined three-deep on both sides, which seems excessive for a honey festival but apparently this is what Paso Robles does on summer Saturdays.
There's a brass band somewhere ahead of us, playing a march that sounds vaguely like John Philip Sousa if Sousa had been heavily medicated.
"WHAT?" I shout at the parade coordinator, who's jogging alongside our float.
"I said you're up in two minutes!" she yells back.
"GREAT!" I bellow.
"Your sign is upside down!" she shouts over her shoulder.
I flip it. MY WIFE MAKES THE BEST HONEY IN CALIFORNIA. Right-side up this time.
The float lurches forward, and I brace myself against the hay bale, Clem secure in my arm. She's not crying; if anything, she looks vaguely interested in the whole situation, her eyes tracking the moving colors around us. Eight weeks old and already more chill than her father has ever been.
"You doing okay, little bee?" I murmur against her hood. "This is pretty wild, huh? Your mom won a prize yesterday. Best blend in the whole region. I know you don't know what that means yet, but it's a big deal. She worked really hard for it."
Clem makes a sound that might be acknowledgment or might be gas.
"Yeah, I thought so too," I tell her.
We round the corner onto Main Street, and the crowd noise triples.
I hoist my sign higher with my free hand, and someone in the crowd starts laughing.
Then someone else. Then the whole block is losing their minds, phones out, pointing at the grown man in the bee suit holding a baby in a matching bee suit with a homemade sign about his wife's honey.
"BEE MAN!" a kid screams from the curb.
"BEE MAN! BEE MAN!" More kids pick up the chant.
I spot Molly walking alongside the float, Marco next to her, and she's got both hands pressed to her face.
Her shoulders are shaking. Crying or laughing, I can't tell from here, and then she pulls her hands down and I can see it's both.
Tears streaming down her face, mouth open in that helpless laugh I love so much.
"How's the view from up there?" she shouts.
"GREAT!" I yell back. "I'M DYING OF HEAT STROKE BUT IT'S GREAT!"
"You look like an idiot!" she shouts, still laughing.
"I KNOW!" I shout back.
"SOMEBODY'S FILMING!" she calls.
"MAKE SURE THEY GET THE SIGN!" I holler.
She's glowing. For the first time since I walked into that hospital room with my pathetic bag of things and my desperate hope that she'd let me stay: she's glowing.
A woman on the curb catches my attention, waving frantically. "Is that baby yours?"
"Yes ma'am!" I call back.
"And the wife who makes the honey?" she shouts.
I point at Molly with my sign hand, nearly dropping the sign in the process. "That's her! She won best blend!"
The woman starts applauding, and the people around her join in, and suddenly there's this wave of clapping following us down the street. For Molly. For her honey. For the thing she built that has nothing to do with me or my money or the Williams name.
She deserves this. She deserves all of it.
We reach the end of the route and the float stops smoothly, right on schedule, about fifty feet before the performance stage where some local band is setting up. The sudden stillness makes Clem startle, her face scrunching up in the way that usually precedes crying.
"Hey, hey," I say quickly, shifting her against my chest. "You're okay. We're done. That was the whole thing. You were the best baby bee in parade history."
She's not convinced. Her lower lip trembles.
I settle onto the edge of the flatbed, legs dangling, and start humming the lullaby I've been practicing.
It's the one my mom used to sing to me, the one I found myself humming in the shower three weeks ago and realized I still remembered most of the words.
I can't carry a tune to save my life; Molly says my singing voice sounds like a wounded elk trying to communicate with its herd, but Clem doesn't seem to care.
"Sleep now, little one," I half-sing, half-whisper against her fuzzy bee hood. "The stars are waking, one by one..."
She settles against my chest, the tension going out of her tiny body. Her eyes droop.
"The moon is watching from above..." I sing, softer now.
I don't remember the next line. Never did. So I make a line up: "And you are made of so much love..."
When I look up, Molly is standing at the edge of the flatbed, watching us. Her eyes are wet again, but she's not laughing anymore. She's just looking, at me, at Clem, at whatever we've become in this ridiculous moment on a hay-covered truck bed in the middle of a honey festival.
"I ran out of lyrics," I tell Molly. "I don't think she noticed."
"She'll complain when she's old enough to look them up." Molly climbs onto the flatbed beside me. "That's your mother's song."
"I remembered most of it," I tell her. "Practiced after you went to sleep. The shower has heard some terrible versions."
"You could sing it to her tonight," she says, softer. "Without the costume."
"I was hoping this wasn't a condition of employment," I say.
She's quiet for a moment, looking out at the dispersing parade crowd. Then she reaches up and plucks the antennae headpiece off my head. My hair is plastered to my skull with sweat, flattened into a shape that will take a shower to correct, and I definitely smell like a gym locker that caught fire.
"Taz," she says.
"Yeah?" I ask.
"That date you asked me about," she says. "I want it."
My heart kicks. "You do?"
"A real one," she says. "Forget festivals and midnight baby shifts where we're both half-conscious. Dinner. Just the two of us."
"Yes," I say immediately. "Obviously yes. When, tonight or tomorrow? I can make reservations anywhere—"
"Tomorrow night," she says. "There's a winery outside Ojai that Az told me about. They have a patio with string lights."
"Done," I say.
"Your mom can watch Clem," she adds.
"I'll call her as soon as we get back," I promise.
Molly looks at our sleeping daughter, then at me in my sweat-soaked bee costume, then back at the crowd where people are still pointing and laughing at photos on their phones.
"You owe me a photograph before you take that off," she says.
"For Clem," I ask, "or evidence against me?"
"I'll decide when I see the lighting," she says.
She takes the photograph anyway, three of them, and lowers the phone. "I haven't laughed that hard in months," she says.
"Good." I shift Clem carefully, freeing one arm to wrap around Molly's shoulders. She leans into me, just slightly, and I try not to read too much into it. "That was kind of the point."