“You did.” As she’d suspected Elena did not have a sister, at least not one who was coming to clean. “Someone who can do a little cooking too, the way Elena did.” Cassie’s secret plan, cooked up with Shelly, was to find someone who could transition into a caregiver as their father began to need daily help. Do the shopping and drive him around. Who was she kidding, he was almost at that point now.
“Doing fine,” he said. That seemed to be his mantra. “I don’t need any help.”
“Not help in a big way. Just someone to keep the place tidy.” She shouldn’t have used the wordhelp. Help with the house, help with the bees. She couldn’t blame him for being resistant. He undoubtedly felt he was losing control of everything. “We cantalk more about it later.” Best to retreat for now. “The beekeeper is going to be here soon with that hive.”
“The beekeeper?” He switched off the TV. “I’d better get ready.”
...
The beekeeper’s white truck bumped up the driveway, pulling over where it widened into a cut out, the gravel thinning to dirt. He had the hive bungeed into the truck bed so it wouldn’t bang around.
Cassie went down to meet him, and Marsden killed the engine and got out. “How’s your dad today?” he said by way of greeting.
“He remembered you were coming, at least.”
He smiled. He did, in fact, have a nice smile. “That’s encouraging.” He glanced at the sky. “It’s chillier than I’d hoped. We lost the sun. The bees don’t like it much when it’s cool like this; they tend to hunker down.”
She looked worriedly at the empty hive. “Will we be able to get them in there?” Her dad was still adamant about managing the bees himself. She’d broached the subject again last night, hoping he’d softened, but he was still dug in. “Piece of cake,” he’d said about transferring the new bees. Somehow, she doubted that. Nothing with bees was a piece of cake.
“Should be okay,” Marsden said. “Might just take some doing, is all. I’m happy to help if your dad wants me to.”
“We’ll see,” she said dubiously. Her father was waiting on the porch with the box of bees, already dressed in his bee suit and veil. Cassie hopped into the truck so they could collect him.
“Did he feed them again yesterday?” Marsden said.
“Oh yeah, he’s been busy with the sugar water.” She glanced at him, curious. “So how do you happen to have an extra hive?” He’d mentioned bottling honey, but she had no idea what he did besides making house calls. How many bees did a beekeeper keep?
“I always have a few extra hives lying around.”
“Do you have a lot of bees?”
“About three hundred fifty hives, not that many.”
She turned to see if he was kidding, but he was serious. “Three hundred and fifty! That sounds like a lot to me. How do you have time to deal with your own bees when you’re taking care of other people’s?”
He slid her a look, not impatient exactly, more like he wanted to be sure she wasn’t trifling with him. “They’re pollinators. I rent them out to farmers during the growing season. Apples and peaches. Pears. Some apricots.”
“You can’t possibly truck all those hives around in this.”
He looked amused. “Not hardly. If I have to haul a lot of hives I rent a flatbed.”
“Do they mind being transported?”
He actually laughed at this, which softened his face in an appealing way and made her smile too. It was nice to hear a man laugh, even if she’d said something ridiculous.
“They don’t have much choice. And no, they don’t mind. It’s fine, it doesn’t hurt them and the forage is good. I only deal with organic farms.”
“How far do you take them?” She couldn’t remember seeing any farms in this part of Fairfield County, but she’d never paid much attention. She was always in a rush to get back to the city. Here was a life she knew nothing about.
“Up to Easton and Glastonbury. Southington. It’s a bit of a trip but not as far as some guys who truck their bees all the wayout to California for the almond farms every year. I won’t do that.”
“Oh, that’s much too far.”
“Even if I lived out there I wouldn’t do it. Those big operations are factories. It’s all monoculture—just almonds. And the bees get stressed with the pesticides. I know several beekeepers whose colonies have collapsed.”
She’d heard more about bees in the last three days than she’d ever hoped to, but his enthusiasm was refreshing. As much as Cassie liked her job, it wasn’t a calling like bees apparently were for him.
She snuck another look at him. She’d expected someone more along the lines of a plumber, a handyman type who happened to be good with insects, who did his job, went home and had a beer. But Marsden seemed more complicated than that, concerned about pesticides and the environment. Even though she tried to eat organic, she’d never given much thought to how bees were connected to the food supply.
