There were forty pale rectangles in the grass where our hives had been, and I counted every one of them.
I don’t know why. I could see from the lane that the row was gone. But I walked it anyway, east to west along the shelterbelt, the way Roy and I had walked it a few thousand times, and I counted forty hive stands with nothing on them. Cinder blocks and treated four-by-fours. The grass under each one was the color of a thing that hasn’t seen the sun in years.
A few hundred bees were still there. Foragers who had stayed out late on the goldenrod and come home to find home gone. They flew tight, confused circles over the empty stands, and some had quit and clumped together on a cinder block, a knot of them about the size of my fist.
That was the part that got me. Not the forty stands. The fistful of bees with no place to go.
“Marlene.”
Wade had pulled in behind my car without my hearing him. He stood at the mowed edge, a good sixty feet back, which is where he always stood. In thirty years my husband’s brother never came any closer to those hives than that. One sting on the hand and his arm swells to the elbow.
“I didn’t want you coming home to it with nobody here,” he said.
“Where are they, Wade?”
“Sold.” He said it to the cedar trees. “Young fella from up by Marquette came with a flatbed trailer last night. Him and a buddy. Took them two trips.”
Last night. So whoever he was, he at least knew you move bees after dark, when they’re all indoors.
“All forty,” I said.
“All forty. I got you eight hundred dollars.” He took a bank envelope out of his shirt pocket and held it out across all that grass. “Cash.”
I have kept the books on a honey farm for thirty years. It didn’t take me long. Twenty dollars a hive. The empty boxes are worth more than that without one bee in them.
“Roy has been in the ground five days,” I said.
“I know how long it’s been. He was my brother.”
He did look bad, I’ll give him that. Wade is fifty-nine, three years younger than Roy, and that week he looked older than Roy ever got to be.
“It’s the end of September, Marlene. Somebody had to do something with them before winter, and it sure isn’t going to be me, and it can’t be you. Bees are no work for a widow. Those boxes weigh what, sixty, seventy pounds? You’re fifty-eight years old.”
“I’ve been lifting those boxes since I was twenty-eight.”
“With Roy on the other end.”
I didn’t have an answer for that one. It was true, and it was Sunday, and I had spent the night before on my sister’s couch in Hastings because Jean wouldn’t hear of me sleeping in that house alone one more night. I had let her talk me into it. One night away.
“There’s the note,” Wade said.
So there it was.
Seven years back Roy borrowed eleven thousand dollars from the bank in Aurora for a twenty-frame extractor, an uncapping tank and a stainless bottling tank, all of it used, out of a honey house that was closing down near Kearney. The bank wanted a second name. Wade gave his. One payment a year, the first of December, out of the honey check. Sixteen hundred and twenty dollars. There were two payments left.
Laura Bennett writes about complicated family dynamics, difficult conversations, and the quiet moments that change everything. Her stories focus on real-life tensions — inheritance disputes, strained marriages, loyalty tests — and the strength people find when they finally speak up. She believes the smallest decisions often carry the biggest consequences.