She turned her face to the sun, which was surprisingly warm for April. Her dad needed more help, but he wouldn’t accept it. Especially as an edict from her. She wasn’t sure why it had always been so difficult between them. From the time she was small, she’d chafed at his decrees, even when it would have been easier to go along. Even when she secretly thought he was right. He’d urged her to consider Columbia, but she refused. Heinsisted she see the campus anyway, pulling alumni connections to get her an interview. “You love New York,” he said, “and you have the grades. It’s the perfect place for you.” She was taken with the campus and its heady urban feel but stubbornly wouldn’t say so. It was too close to home and an even bigger strike—her father’s alma mater. Her mother, fumbling in her own mist of confusion, couldn’t see Cassie was wavering. She might have accepted Columbia with a little nudge, but her father was a bulldozer, and she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. She went to Boston University instead. A reputable school, but not Columbia.
Her father drove her up to Boston on move-in day, but she was spoiling for a fight and took offense at what he didn’t say. Her mom, riding along with them, cried and clung when it was time to say goodbye, like Cassie was the parent and her mother the child.
Her mom had been gone more than twenty-five years, but Cassie missed her every day.
She was about to get up and see what her dad was doing when a postal truck turned up the driveway, spitting stones as it came.
The driver retrieved a white wooden box from the back and set it gingerly on the ground. “I need someone to sign for this,” he said.
“What is it?” The box was about two feet wide and a foot high with screened holes on either side. A suspicious buzzing came from inside.
“Bees. Can you sign?”
“Bees! He ordered more bees?”
The driver consulted his manifest. “Linden, right?”
“Yes, that’s us. But I don’t think he meant—”
“Ma’am?” The driver handed her a pen. “If you could please just sign.”
She sighed. “Yes, of course.” She signed then left the box and went to find her dad.
“My bees!” he said, hurrying out after her. “I forgot they were coming. I meant to order another hive. Now I have nowhere to put them.” He squatted next to the box, peering through one of the small, screened openings.
Cassie squatted next to him, even though the buzzing made her skin prickle. “Can’t you just put them in with the other bees?”
“No.” Her father looked horrified. “There’s a queen. They need their own hive.” He sounded definite about this part. Cassie supposed it was like asking a mother and her kids to move into some other woman’s house. No way was that going to work out.
“Can’t they stay in here for a while?” They were just bees in a box. It looked pretty much like a hive, just a little smaller. She couldn’t imagine why he needed another hive.
“No, they can’t stay in here. They’ll die. They need to be in a hive.”
“Well, what are you going to do with them?” She knew she sounded cross but couldn’t help it. He’d ordered bees he didn’t remember and now had nowhere to put them.
He lowered himself to the front step. “Give me a minute. I need to think. I don’t need you nattering at me.”
The defeat in his voice stopped her. Her mother had begun with incidents like this. Not bees, of course, but the inability to follow through. She would find a recipe then couldn’t make sense of it. Or start telling a story then lose track in the middle. Who knew if her father had Alzheimer’s or run-of-the-mill dementia. It didn’t matter. What mattered was he was losing the ability to think sequentially. He’d seemed almost his old self when he bustled out of the house, excited about the bees. But now he was sitting here dejected, unsure what to do next.
The hives would have to go, that was obvious. He couldn’t take care of bees anymore. But she would need to talk him into it. The bees meant the world to him, a fraying but unshakeable link to her mother.
She touched his arm. “We’ll figure it out.” She’d been planning to look at flights to New Orleans even though Andrew had told her not to come. He needed her, but at the moment her father needed her more. And maybe she should give Andrew a chance to handle this.
Right now, she had to find a hive, or somewhere to put these bees. But even if she managed to get a hive delivered before the bees died, would her father know what to do? She wasn’t going to be much help.
She pulled out her phone and typed inbees. No. That wasn’t it. She needed someone in a white suit who knew what the hell he was doing. Someone who could transfer the bees or whatever needed to be done. Who could give her father a hand until she could convince him to get rid of them.
A beekeeper. That’s what she needed.
Chapter Three
Glenn was elbow deep in a customer’s hive when the woman called. He didn’t usually answer his phone when he was working bees, but he’d told Lilah to let him know when she got home. Made her promise. He liked to be around for her on the weekends, but it had been one crisis after another. A customer in Ridgefield whose colony had swarmed, and now Mr. Conte, new to beekeeping, who’d opened up his hive for the first time this spring and found very few bees left. People didn’t realize they had to leave their bees honey over the winter. You couldn’t harvest every drop in the fall and expect them to survive. Conte had called in a panic, and Glenn couldn’t say no.
He set the frame down gently so he didn’t crush any of the bees crawling on top. Mr. Conte hovered like an expectant father. “So what do I do now?” he said.
“First of all, we’ll take a look and see if your queen survived.” The guy should have had enough sense to keep his bees alive, but all kinds of people got into beekeeping. Most just liked the idea of honey and had no clue what was involved. Glenn lifted out another frame from the middle of the box, a likely place for the queen. “Strong hive can re-queen itself, but a weak hive like this, you’ll probably have to order one. Frames and worker bees too.” He didn’t see a queen, or any brood for that matter, which didn’t bode well.
When his phone buzzed a second time, he lowered the frame back into the box. “Excuse me a minute,” he said. He instructedConte to pull out a couple more frames and keep looking for the queen. “You’ll see her if you look carefully. She’s bigger than the workers.” He walked off a couple of yards. When you weren’t working bees it was better to give them some room. They didn’t like people hanging around the hive. Couldn’t blame them. He wouldn’t want some stranger loitering around his house either.
