Truly(54)

No one answered when he rang the bell, but he had a key to the building. He led her through the house to the fenced-in backyard, where two stacked white wooden boxes sat in a corner, buzzing.

“There they are.”

“Cool. So what are you going to do?”

“Just a general check. I’ll pull out the screen and look for mites, look to see if there’s enough honey to harvest yet. With winter coming, I want to make sure there are enough bees here to get through the cold months, and that they have enough to eat.”

“Where’s your, you know …” She waved her arm around her head. “Bee hat.”

“I don’t usually wear one. If you know what you’re doing, they’re not that dangerous.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

Ben grinned and stepped closer to the box. “You ever been in the kitchen of a busy restaurant during the service?”

“I was a waitress once.”

“Where?”

“Olive Garden.”

“Okay, well, what I’m talking about is a little different. Much smaller, for one thing, because in New York the kitchens have to be as small as possible to make room for more tables in the front. Crammed with people—executive chef, sous chef, pasta guy, grill guy, sauté guy—more than that, really, but the point is, it’s crowded, it’s small, and there’s open flame and boiling water, plus hot oil. It’s fucking dangerous.” He pointed at the innocent-looking humming box. “This is a piece of cake.”

He walked around the side of the box, and May craned to see better. “You want to come closer and look?” he asked. “I think Natalie has a suit you can wear.”

“No, it’s okay. I’ll admire you from afar.”

“All right, Guinevere.” He lifted a putty-knife-looking tool from a case he’d retrieved inside the house and slid it slowly around the edges of the lid. “The bees glue everything down. If you leave the hive long enough, they’ll seal the top on.” He pried it off and lifted it slowly, setting it next to the hive. Inside, there were dozens of bees crawling on top of what looked like a set of parallel slats. More landed and flew away as Ben retrieved another tool from the table.

“This is a frame,” he said, pointing to one of the wooden slats. “You put it in with a sheet of wax, and they make the comb and put the honey in it.” He used tongs to lift it out of the hive while a bee landed on his hand. As May watched, the bee seemed to push up in front, and its stinger end pressed against Ben’s hand.

“Did you just get stung?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Didn’t it hurt?”

“A little. I always thought picking raspberries hurt a hell of a lot worse. Can you grab this for a second?” He flicked his eyes at the tongs holding the frame.

May moved close enough to take them. The frame was heavier than she’d expected. Ben used the fingers of his free hand to do something to the bee that freed it. It flew off. “Didn’t want it to die for no reason. Here, I’ll take that.”

She gave it back. “It’s heavy.”

“Yeah, it’s full of honey. You can tell by looking at it, the bees have capped off most of the cells. They do that when the honey’s ready. It starts out as nectar, right? Which is just sugary water. And then they reduce it down to a specific moisture level, around seventeen, eighteen percent, and cap it off.”

“How do they reduce it?”

“First they use their mouths. The forager bees will pass it along to other bees, who move it around their mouth parts to expose it to air. Then later they put it in the cells, and they beat air over them with their wings.”

“I can’t decide if that’s disgusting or amazing.”

He smiled. “That’s life for you. Disgusting and amazing.”

Was that true? It certainly had the ring of truth. She thought of childbirth and sex. The taste of the ocean. The view of New York from the top of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Disgusting and amazing.

Maybe her problem was that the disgusting parts came as a shock. Her life was so sanitized, so predictable, she hadn’t learned to expect them—to accept that she couldn’t have everything clean and pretty, and that she shouldn’t even want it that way. You had to accept the highs and lows, the beautiful and the mundane all mixed together.

“Where’d you go?” he asked.

She looked at his mouth, forming one of his quizzical half-smiles.

Such a great mouth. If he’d kissed her tasting of mint toothpaste, to the strains of slow jazz, it might have been more classically romantic, but it certainly wouldn’t have been half so memorable. At least their moment had been real.