The Honey Bus Read online

  “Want to see the rest of the house?” he said.

  He took us on a loop of the top floor, showing us the kitchen and the bedrooms with screens that slid into different wall positions. There was a small library with swords mounted on the walls, and then we descended to the bottom to the big open room with the Christmas tree. Downstairs was an office, several more rooms with sliding walls, and a piano. New Grandpa turned his attention to me, asking me whether I liked elementary school. I told him it was fine. Then he asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Nobody had ever asked me that.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, it will be a doctor or lawyer, one or the other, right?” he said, pinching my cheek. It hurt, and I took a step back, rubbing my face. Mom’s face was starting to flush in anger.

  “She’s going to be whatever she wants to be, Dad,” she said firmly.

  Again, there was nothing more to say. Mom looked out toward some storm clouds gathering over the canyon and frowned. Her father led us toward the Christmas tree, which was encircled by a throng of presents. He reached for one and handed it to Mom. She opened a furry V-neck sweater from Neiman-Marcus in a shade somewhere between green and brown, like pond water. Mom did not wear sweaters. She said it was lovely and put the box on the floor.

  “For the young man,” he said, handing Matthew a gift. When my brother unwrapped a Tonka dump truck, he immediately tore open the packaging and started pushing the truck around on the floor while Mom’s father kept a watchful eye on his vases.

  My gift was a ceramic speckled goose egg to hold jewelry. I didn’t have anything to put inside it, but I thought it was beautiful and delicate, something a nice lady would have in her house. It made me feel grown-up to be entrusted with a breakable. My mood shifted slightly.

  We stayed for a few more cookies, and then Mom stood up and said it was time to go. Our host didn’t try to argue. He thanked us for coming and walked us back toward the big red door. He didn’t hug anybody goodbye; he just stood with one hand on the door and waved with the other.

  Mom speed-walked to the car. She slammed the door, jammed the key into the ignition and screeched out of the parking space in reverse. She was so mad, she forgot to make us remove our shoes. She jerked the steering wheel to negotiate the curvy Carmel roads, and Matthew leaned toward me and whispered, “Jell-O.” I nodded, and we let our bodies go slack in the back seat, swaying together as Mom swung the car side to side. Mom was muttering under her breath, and hitting her thigh with her fist. Then she started talking to no one in particular.

  “Did you get a load of that house? I could use a little help, too, you know. But nooooooooooooooo!”

  She was shaking, and she might have been crying, but I wasn’t sure. Matthew and I flopped to the left, then the right, then back again, absorbed in the task of turning our bodies to gelatin.

  “I don’t know why I try. Stupid, stupid, STUPID! I shouldn’t even give him the time of day. He never gave a shit about me, that’s for damn sure!”

  Matthew was about to practice the S-word again, and I quickly put my hand over his mouth. Mom kept on talking to her cigarette. She banged on the steering wheel between sentences.

  “After everything he did to me!”

  Bang!

  “People never change.”

  Bang!

  “Same old bastard!”

  Bang!

  Matthew and I kept our bodies pressed close even after the road evened out. We braced ourselves against the torrent of angry words coming our way, keeping each other comforted as much as anyone can when trapped inside a closet with a person using a megaphone. Mom was hollering now, her words ricocheting inside the car and bouncing off the walls, colliding and smashing to bits over our heads. All the things she wished she’d said to her father came pouring out in our rolling confessional. She didn’t need him. He meant nothing to her. She wished him dead. She would never waste her breath on him ever again.

  I wanted to comfort her, but Mom seemed unreachable to me, lost in her own memories that were too awful to share. Whatever had happened to her was too big for me to fix with words.

  I wanted to hurry home so she could get back in bed where it was safe. Just catching this glimpse into her past, I became more sympathetic, and promised myself not to get so angry with her for staying in bed. The world was hard for her, and I needed to be patient because there were deep reasons from her past that made her give up on the present.

  As she turned under the canopy of walnut trees leading into our backyard, she shook her index finger and proclaimed, “I tell you what... That is the last time he will ever see me, or you two kids again!”

  The knot in my stomach released. The double grandfather problem vanished, nothing but a magician’s trick gone up in smoke. When I woke up on this oddest of days, I had one grandpa. By midday I had two. Now I had one again. I guess it would have been baffling for most kids to gain and lose a grandfather in the space of twelve hours, but to me it was just another example of how relationships in my family shifted with the sudden winds. One day a person was in, the next day they were forgotten history. I was starting to get used to the impermanence of people, of places, of promises. Everything changed with Mom’s fluctuating moods, so it was better to let her words slide on by without assigning them too much meaning. It didn’t matter anymore because that impostor grandfather had become an unmentionable. He was never real to me, anyway. But I was still keeping the pretty ceramic egg.

  Mom continued cursing under her breath as she entered through the front door. Granny was stretched out on the rug with her daily libation, and when Mom passed by without so much as a hello, Granny looked up with a bemused smile, and swirled the ice cubes in her plastic cup.

  “So, how is good-ole-what’s-his-face-my-first-husband?” Granny called after her.

  The bedroom door slammed in response.

  “Told you so,” she said, shrugging her shoulders at Matthew and me. My brother placed his new toy before her.

  “Lookit my truck.”

  She picked it up and inspected it from all angles.

  “That is a very fine dump truck. Why don’t you go outside and fill it with dirt?”

  Matthew didn’t need to be told twice. He clutched his prize and whizzed outside to the sandbox, and I followed, seeing as I didn’t have anything better to do. While Matthew pushed the truck and made engine noises, I picked the fallen toyon berries out of the sand and lined them up to make a roadway for him. Our sandbox was a simple square made from four redwood boards and just big enough to fit both of us, filled with sand Grandpa had liberated from Carmel Beach. The sand was so white and clean that it squeaked when we squeezed it. Matthew was packing and dumping truckloads of sand to make buildings when we heard the rattle of Grandpa’s truck and the pop of walnuts crushing beneath his tires.

  “Grandpa’s home!” Matthew chimed.

  Grandpa parked under the carport, set his lunch box and keys on the hood, and Rita ran toward us and hopped into the sandbox to dig. Grandpa plucked a yellow bloom off a mustard plant and chewed it as he walked toward us.

  “Whatcha got there?” he said, reaching for the truck.

  He gave it a few test pushes in the sand. “It’s good,” he said. “Strong engine. Where’d you get it?”

  I told Grandpa we went to Carmel to meet Mom’s dad. Grandpa nodded silently and sat down on the edge of the sandbox, waiting for me to continue.

  “Mom said you’re not our real grandpa.”

  Grandpa was quiet for a moment, thinking. Then he lifted me up and sat me on one knee. He reached for Matthew and put him on the opposite knee.

  “Now you two listen, and you listen good,” he said. “Pinch my arm.”

  We checked his face to see if he was serious.

  “I mean it. Hard as you can.”

  I squeezed and dug half-moons into his forearm
with my fingernails.

  “Do you feel skin?”

  We nodded.

  “Then I’m real. I’m your grandpa.”

  Satisfied, Matthew hopped off Grandpa’s knee and ambled back into the house. I felt better, but something was still gnawing at me.

  “What’s step mean?” I asked.

  “Step just means you’re lucky because you get to have more than one grandpa.”

  “But Mom said...”

  Grandpa leaned in until our noses were almost touching and locked eyes with me. “Sometimes she gets confused,” he whispered softly, so only I could hear.

  He was telling me that it was okay to make up my own mind about whom I wanted for a grandpa. And it was an easy choice because Grandpa’s life had room for us, and wasn’t complicated by tangled family history. He was the adult who looked forward to seeing us, enjoyed teaching us new things and truly cared about our opinions. He loved us the way a parent should.

  A shadow crossed over the sandbox and Grandpa looked up at the purple clouds threatening rain. “I need to check a hive real quick. Wanna put on your veil?”

  I followed him to the back fence and stood a few feet away as Grandpa disassembled the hive. First, he set the lid upside down on the ground, then he wedged his hive tool underneath the top box and cracked the sticky seal the bees had made. He twisted the box loose, and, cheeks puffing out with effort, set it on the upturned hive cover so the bees on the bottom wouldn’t get smashed. The uppermost boxes on the hive were where the bees stored their honey, and they weighed up to fifty pounds when full. This hive had two supers, and Grandpa took them both off without examining them. He could tell by the weight that they weren’t yet full.

  Also, this time of year he wasn’t interested in taking honey from the bees. They’d need it over winter for their own food. He removed honey during the nectar flow in spring and summer, and took only the surplus so they’d have enough to eat. Today Grandpa’s aim was to get down into the bigger brood boxes at the base of the hive, into the nursery where the queen lays her eggs in the sheets of waxen honeycomb.

  This particular hive had been giving him trouble all year. In spring, half the colony had swarmed with the queen, and the workers that remained behind produced a second queen. Soon after, that one absconded as well. While it’s natural for a hive to propagate this way, each exodus was a setback for the colony, forcing them to expend energy and time rearing a new queen and waiting for her to get mated and start laying eggs again.

  Today Grandpa was hoping to find eggs in the nursery, the telltale sign that the queen was healthy and the colony had righted itself once more.

  The guard bees were fussy and encircled his head as he worked, every once in a while one would break patrol and head-butt him to alert him to the colony’s diminishing patience. They weren’t ready to sting just yet, but they would if this inspection took too long. It was the afternoon, and the bees were returning from their foraging trips to tuck in for the night, having enjoyed the best hours of the day with full sun. They didn’t appreciate the cool afternoon air and sunlight invading their home at the precise moment they were winding down for the day, huddling together inside for warmth.

  Once Grandpa had exposed the box containing the nursery, he lifted the outermost wooden honeycomb frame from the row of ten inside, examined both sides of the honeycomb and quickly determined it was filled with honey. He set it down and propped it against the fence. The next frame he pulled out was similarly filled with honey. The third frame had empty comb in the center, with a smattering of stored pollen and a little honey stored near the top. When he reached the frames in the middle of the box, he removed one and found it covered with nurse bees scurrying over the honeycomb, darting their heads into the hexagons. He brushed a few aside with his finger, and tilted the frame back and forth in the dying light so he could see if the bees were feeding the larvae inside the cells.

  “We’re in business!” he exclaimed. He held out the frame so I could see little white larvae curled into C’s in the bottom of the cavities. Those small worms were four days old. He pointed at another area of the honeycomb, and I saw vertical white pins, the fresh eggs. The nurse bees were so intent on feeding that they stayed on the frame, paying no attention to us as we turned the frame side to side to examine it.

  “Is the queen here?” I asked.

  “Not on this one,” he said. “Need to keep looking.”

  Just then I felt a raindrop on my arm.

  The rain picked up quickly, drops pattering on the frame in Grandpa’s hands. Now the nurse bees were lifting their heads and taking in their surroundings, running to one another and tapping antennae in a mad frenzy. They were clearly perturbed by the strange sight of water in their nursery.

  “Better close up,” Grandpa said. He took a few steps toward the hive, then stopped in his tracks and stared at the frame in his hands. “Well, I’ll be darned!”

  He wheeled around and held the frame aloft. Where just seconds before the nurse bees were stumbling in all directions and knocking into one another, agitated by the sudden rain, now several hundred were lined up in perfect rows like corn on the cob. They were organized as precisely as a battalion, all facing the same direction with their heads north and their wings interlocked, forming a tarp over their precious eggs. They stood together motionless, their posture rigid, their wings tight together like Spanish roof tiles, protecting the next generation from the rain.

  Grandpa had successfully convinced me that bees were smart. But I didn’t know bees were capable of love. I marveled at their sacrifice as they took the brunt of the raindrops on their backs and diverted the water away from the young into little rivulets formed by their overlapping wings. How long would they stay like that if we didn’t put the frame back into the hive? They looked so determined that I imagined the bees would stand guard until the rain passed, or until they got so waterlogged or cold that their hearts stopped beating.

  It defied logic that nurse bees would know how to do this. Nurse bees remained indoors—either in man-made hives or in hollowed-out trees or inside the walls of houses, wherever colonies set up a dry home. They were “house bees” that didn’t venture outside to forage, not until they had learned to fly long distances and had matured into field bees. So they weren’t familiar with rain. How could they suddenly know how to align themselves into a makeshift umbrella? And how did they send out the signal so quickly, so that they simultaneously snapped into formation?

  I stood there, gawping.

  “Isn’t that something,” Grandpa said. “A friend of mine said he saw this once, but I didn’t believe him.”

  “How’d they do that?”

  “You’ll have to ask Mother Nature,” he said.

  Grandpa slid the frame back into the safety of the nursery, restacked the hive boxes and placed the cover on top, securing it with a brick. The nurse bees would soon dry out in the warmth of the hive.

  As we walked back to the house for dinner, I thought about what I had just witnessed. I had seen insects displaying unconditional love. The nurse bees huddling against the rain were not the parents of the babies they were protecting. The queen was. But they put themselves in harm’s way because nurse bees were hardwired to raise the queen’s offspring. They were surrogate parents, just like Grandpa was for my brother and me.

  It took thousands of nurse bees to care for so many eggs, so a bee colony divided up the responsibility. It didn’t matter that the nurses were unable to give birth; they still knew what to do. Each bee had equal love, and there was no distinction inside a beehive between “step” and “real.”

  The bees had just confirmed who my real grandpa was.

  8

  First Harvest

  1976—Summer

  Most months of the year, the honey bus remained dormant. But after the spring nectar flow, toward the start of summer, Grandpa began keeping an e
ye on the thermometer nailed to the garden fence. When the red line rose above ninety, the conditions were ideal for extracting honey. Heat made the honey runny, so it could pump faster through the pipes inside the bus. If there had been exceptional spring rains to produce abundant flowers, he could increase his output and bottle nearly one thousand gallons of honey.

  I had been asking Grandpa all spring if I could help him with the harvest. He didn’t let me into the honey bus last year because he said I needed to be bigger. Now that I was six, and I had gone up two shoe sizes, I was campaigning hard for admission. Each morning I checked the weather to let him know I was monitoring the situation and ready to report to duty, in case an ideal harvest day arose.

  And finally it happened. One July morning I awoke to the chorus of the cicadas, shrieking in the heat. I got out of bed and pulled back the curtain and saw Rita curled in the shade of the apricot tree, panting. This hot this early could mean only one thing—the high holy days of harvest were upon us. I hustled outside in my pajamas and checked the thermometer. Almost ninety already. I found Grandpa bent over a tall stack of pancakes at the dining room table, and gave him the good news.

  “It’s honey weather,” he pronounced.

  Grandpa slowly chewed a mouthful like he was considering a complex algebra equation, and then took a long slurp of his coffee in that unhurried way that old people have about everything. He folded his paper napkin in half, then in fourths, then daintily dabbed the corners of his mustache before he cleared his throat. I held my breath, waiting for his verdict.