Cassie looked at Shelly, who shrugged.
“Nothing’s left in the house, Daddy,” Cassie said. “The movers took it all. I have your smoker and all that at my place.”
“But I’m going to need it.”
“Glenn has a smoker.” She didn’t say they wouldn’t need to smoke the bees, that they weren’t going to open the hives. Even though she’d explained they were moving the bees tonight, her dad was confused or had forgotten. Or maybe he just wanted to believe nothing had changed. That the house remained the same, waiting for him to walk in the door and resume his old life.
“Let’s see how things go,” she said gently.
Once they’d assembled at the hives, Andrew helped Glenn unload the ramp so they could muscle the boxes into the truck. It was almost full dark now, bats flitting from the woods, swooping erratically in and out of the trees. Terrifying if you didn’t know the good they did in the world. Cassie aimed a flashlight so Glenn could staple the hive entrances closed for the short ride to his house.
“Why are you closing them up?” her father said. “They won’t be able to get out.”
“We’ll open them in the morning,” Glenn assured him. “It’s just so nobody gets lost on the way.”
“On the way to where?”
Glenn stopped what he was doing. “I know a place where they won’t be disturbed. Where it’s quiet and there’s fresh water andthey can get healthy again. What do you think, should we take them there?”
Cassie waited, her heart suspended. Her father needed to come to this on his own. A decision he could still make. They could have moved the bees without him; it would have been simpler. But he needed to be here. Just as she’d needed to walk through the house one last time.
Her dad considered. The wheels turned more slowly now. Sometimes they got stuck, especially when he was tired. Mornings were better for him, but the bees had to be moved at night.
“I’ve never been to this place,” he said finally.
“I’m going to take you there now,” Glenn said, “so you can see.”
Her dad rode in the truck with Glenn and the rest of them followed, a small procession winding along the back roads of Laurelton with a slim moon keeping pace. They were only going a few miles, but picking up and moving thousands of bees had to be done with care. Glenn drove slowly, avoiding the bumps, easing to a stop when the lights turned red. Cassie imagined the bees tucked up inside the warm belly of their hives, drowsy in the darkness. No idea that they would wake up somewhere new. But bees were resilient, and she wanted to believe they would thrive.
At Glenn’s house, Cassie and Shelly held their father’s hands so he wouldn’t trip in the dark as Andrew and Glenn rolled the hives across the yard.
An outside light switched on, and Lilah came down the stairs from the deck. “This is Lilah.” Cassie introduced the girl. She was lankier than the last time Cassie had seen her. She’d shot up over the summer, on the cusp of becoming a teenager. About to transform as all kids did to the adult they would become.
“Do you want to wait on the deck, Mr. Linden?” Lilah said. “The grass is sort of lumpy.”
“Do you, Dad?” Cassie asked. “We’ll sit with you.”
She should have known he wouldn’t hear of it. He planted himself next to Andrew and Glenn, watching intently as they wrestled the hives off the dolly. “How will the bees know where they are?” he said.
Glenn settled the first hive at the end of a long row. “As long as it’s more than two or three miles they reorient pretty easily. Might put some branches in front for few days so they notice something’s different.”
The new hives looked like all the others, a neighborhood of neat white and pastel boxes, front doors facing east where the sun would find them in the morning.
“I’ll bring you over whenever you like,” Cassie said. “You can check on how they’re doing.”
Her father’s brow furrowed. “There’s too many of them. I won’t be able to tell which ones are mine.”
“I know which are yours,” Glenn said gently. “Don’t worry.”
“But how willIknow?” her father said.
Cassie sent Glenn a worried glance. Here, at the end, a wrinkle. The boxes blending in for her father, who still knew enough to know he wouldn’t recall. Anguished to lose this last link to himself and her mother in a confusing complex of indistinguishable beehives.
“I have an idea,” Lilah said and dashed back to the house, pale hair flying. She was back a minute later with a black marker. “We can write your name on your hives. That way you’ll know which ones are yours.”
Cassie held her breath. Would this fix be enough, or would her dad leave unhappy and distressed, forgetting in the morning that the hives had been moved, remembering only that something important was gone.
They were all silent, holding their collective breath. Then her dad’s face eased.
