How’s my grandchild? my mother texted. I’m sending you an article about folic acid. Don’t skip it. Also your father has been studying your garden photos and says the soil drainage on the south slope looks excellent and to tell Atlas he approves. He wants to know if Atlas has tested the pH below the creek bank. I told him to stop interrogating my daughter’s boyfriend through text message and he said it’s not interrogation it’s professional interest. Eddie Diaz does not have professional interest. He has opinions he won’t stop sharing. Like his daughter.
I typed back: The baby is the size of an avocado and does not have opinions about soil pH yet.
Yet, my mother replied. Give it time.
Both families were planning to visit in June. My parents were driving up from Bend. Atlas’s parents were making the trip from Billings. Everyone would meet for the first time on this mountain, and my mother had already texted me twice about what to cook for people she’d never laid eyes on.
Next, a text from Dahlia:I’m driving up in June. I need to see this mountain that stole my sister. Also Mom won’t stop talking about it and I need visual evidence that you haven’t lost your mind.
Bring layers, I typed. Eighty degrees at noon and forty by dinner. And I haven’t lost my mind. I’ve relocated it.
And Britt, in the tone of a woman who had been waiting two months to deliver this line:
Booked my flight. Landing in Missoula June 14th. I need to meet the man who seduced my best friend with trout. I have questions, Flora. Pointed, invasive, deeply personal questions. Also does Atlas have a brother? You mentioned a brother. Is he single? Is there a family resemblance? I’m bringing wine for me and judgment for you.
I laughed loud enough to startle a junco off the railing.
The loft had a window now. South-facing, wide, framing the view: wildflowers and mountains and the long sweep of the valley beyond. Atlas had cut the opening himself, fitted it, sealed it, set the glass on a Tuesday afternoon while I sat on the bedroom floor handing him tools and pretending I wasn’t crying. The room smelled like fresh pine and beeswax. The floor he’d sanded weeks before I ever found the prenatal vitamins was smooth underfoot. There was no furniture in it yet. We had time.
I heard the shed door bang shut. Boots on gravel. Then he came around the corner of the cabin carrying a frame of capped honeycomb, shirtless — because June in Montana was warm enough to justify it and Atlas would have been shirtless in a blizzard if the bees needed tending. The sun caught the honey on his hands and the hard planes of his torso. My entire body responded with the subtlety of a five-alarm fire.
Four months pregnant. Fully committed. Living with the man. And the sight of him walking across the yard hit me the same way it had the first day, when I’d been facedown in his bee yard with a bee on my nose and my dignity scattered across three counties. My pulse climbed. My skin flushed warm. I pressed my thighs together on my chair and thought, very clearly: I am building a life with this man and I still want to climb him inbroad daylight. Which was reassuring, in a way. Some things the hormones couldn’t take credit for.
He saw me. His face shifted — that subtle rearrangement around his eyes and mouth that I’d learned to read like weather. Almost a smile, but not yet — the thing that came right before it, the version he only did for me.
“First extraction’s done,” he said. “Twelve frames. Pale gold. The clover’s coming in next — should be ready in a couple weeks.”
“I want to taste it.”
“It’s not strained yet.”
“I want to taste it now.”
He climbed the steps, held the comb out, and I dragged my finger across a cap of wax and brought it to my mouth. Warm, floral, sweet in a way that tasted like the last two months of my life — layered, specific, earned. His meadow, my garden, his bees carrying pollen from the corridor I’d built. I closed my eyes and the sound I made was, again, entirely inappropriate for a porch.
When I opened them he was watching me with an intensity that had nothing to do with honey.
“We got the ultrasound results back,” I said.
He went still. The comb in his hands, wax caps gleaming in the sun. The bees working the slope behind him, sixty thousand tiny engines in their daily commute. His gaze dropped to my belly, back to my face.
“It’s a girl.”
His chest expanded. His jaw worked once. He set the comb down on the rail with a care that made my throat close, and then he was in front of me, on his knees, both hands spreading across my stomach, and his forehead pressed to the bump.
“A girl,” he said. Low. Almost to himself.
“You’re going to be outnumbered.”
“I’ve been outnumbered since you showed up.”
His chin tipped up. Brown eyes bright in the sun, so certain they made my chest ache. I put my hands over his.
He reached into his back pocket. My breath stopped.
A ring. Old, thin gold, a single small stone that caught the afternoon light. He held it between his thumb and forefinger with a steady hand. This was it — right here, with uncapped comb on the railing and his daughter under his palms.
“Atlas.”
