She spied his truck from the bedroom window and ran downstairs to give Andrew a last word of instruction. “Is this the beekeeper guy?” he said, glancing up from a bowl of cereal.
“Yes. His name is Glenn. You’ve met him.” This was so awkward, Glenn picking her up like they were in high school. Her nineteen-year-old son seeing her off.
“You’ll stay here with Grandpa, right?” she confirmed.
“Yup.” He tipped back his bowl to get at the milk.
“Okay. I won’t be late. Maybe try one of the new puzzles.” Andrew and her dad had finished the dinosaur puzzle, and she’d picked up a couple of new ones at Meyer’s. Although she had a feeling he could start on the dinosaurs all over again, and it would be completely fresh. “Call if you need me,” she said. “We aren’t going far.”
Glenn was waiting for her on the porch. He had on jeans and an olive green Henley and Cassie’s heart flew up at the sight of him. Charlie was standing in the passenger seat, nose wedged through a slice of open window.
“I hate to leave him if I’m going hiking,” Glenn said. “You don’t mind, do you? I can always drop him home.”
“Of course not. I’m delighted to see Charlie.” She gave the dog a rub and nudged him into the back seat as she climbed into the truck, suddenly a little nervous. The wine had loosened them up the other night, but what if they couldn’t find anything to talk about in the light of day? They were such different people, and a trek in the woods wasn’t really her thing. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been hiking. Central Park probably didn’t count.
“I made peanut butter cookies,” she said, stowing the backpack she’d borrowed from Andrew under her feet.
Glenn chuckled. “And I made peanut butter sandwiches. Guess we should have coordinated.”
“Oh well.” She smiled. “You can never have too much peanut butter.”
He started up the truck, and they fell into an easy conversation after all. Glenn was surprisingly talkative, telling her as they drove about a new client who against all advice had ordered an assertive strain of bee and now was having trouble getting into his hives.
“They’re more protective than the Italian bees,” he said. “You’ve got to smoke the heck out of them, and even then you don’t have much time.”
“Will they come after you?”
“Oh yeah, they get pretty annoyed that you’re mucking around their house. And when one stings, it releases a chemical alerting the others there’s danger. So they all pile on. It’s not just this strain, they all do that.”
“You can’t blame them for defending themselves.”
He shot her an amused look. “Says the woman who had a bee in her hair.”
She laughed. “I’m feeling more charitable after the fact.”
“You were a champ.”
“I don’t know about that. I was just this side of hysterical.”
Now that it was May the trees had exploded in a torrent of green and they took the back roads from Connecticut into New York, eventually turning onto a narrow road that wound past stately homes with long driveways and modest houses hugging the road. She didn’t see any hiking trails, but Glenn finally pulled over onto a gravel turnout next to a discreetly marked trailhead.
“It’s part of the Westchester Land Trust,” he said. “Nine thousand acres of open space.” He snapped the leash on Charlie. “The best thing is that it’s close by.”
They didn’t see any other hikers as they started down the trail, which meandered into the woods with little fanfare. “I grew up five miles from here and never even knew this existed,” Cassie confessed. But why would she have known? This wasn’t her world. Her parents had never taken them hiking. They enjoyed the idea of having woods around, but it wouldn’t have occurred to them to set off down a trail with a map. They’d been city people who found their way to Connecticut and were content to putter around their little slice of heaven.
Glenn didn’t have a map, but he didn’t need one. He looked right at home with his hiking boots and green shirt that blended with the dappled light. He nodded toward a tree marked with a yellow blaze. “We’ll go this way, it’s a nice climb.”
The trail didn’t ascend immediately. For the first few hundred yards it paced a crumbling stone wall that was going wild, consumed with vines and other growth. In some spots you couldn’t see the stones anymore, and Cassie wondered how it might look a hundred years from now. Or two hundred. Whether there would be any sign of people at all. When the wall petered out, the trail dipped into the loamy quiet of the woods, the sun filtering through the canopy, delicate blue wildflowers angling for pockets of sunlight. She couldn’t believe all this was just an hour outside Manhattan. She strained to hear the road, but the trees swallowed sound and the only noise was the muffled thud of their footsteps and Charlie’s enthusiastic snuffling.
After a few minutes, Glenn unclipped him. “They’re supposed to be on leash,” he said with a conspiratorial wink, “but if no one’s around, I usually let him off.”
“My lips are sealed.”
Charlie immediately blundered after a squirrel, which shot up a tree in front of him.
“Has he ever caught one?” Cassie asked.
“Never.”
