Thirty-six hives of Roy’s, then, instead of forty. Every one of them with a reason to be there.
We fed thick syrup, two parts sugar to one of water, until it got too cold for them to take it. We hefted every hive from the back and wrote down which were light. We put the mouse guards on. Curtis learned to wash a mite sample without his hands shaking, a half cup of bees in a jar, count what falls out and divide by three.
He wrote in the journal. I told him to. He was shy of it at first and started in the back, in ballpoint, in handwriting that slants like wheat in wind. By November he was writing right under Roy.
Jenna brought coffee out every single morning, and a few times she brought Katie, zipped into a snowsuit, who would point at the boxes and say “buh.” I had not expected to laugh that fall.
He paid me in cash every Friday, a hundred and twenty dollars. Seven weeks. Eight hundred and forty dollars altogether, and I wrote that in my own book at home.
Kyle came for Thanksgiving. He drove up Wednesday night, and Friday morning he rode out to Marquette with me because he wanted a look at the man. He and Curtis treated nineteen and twenty-three together and then spent two hours setting steel fence posts and stock panels with straw bales on the north side of that row, for a windbreak, and by noon they were arguing about pickups like they’d been neighbors all their lives.
On the way home Kyle said, “What about Wade?”
“What about him?”
“He hasn’t called you. He wasn’t at church. He owes you seventy-two hundred dollars, Mom, by my figuring.”
“He doesn’t have it. And I’m not going to go knock on his door and tell him what he did. He’s a grown man. He’ll come to it.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Then he doesn’t, and I’m still not the one who has to live in his skin.”
Kyle shook his head. But he let it be, and I was proud of him for that, because he is his father’s son and letting things be does not come natural.
On the first of December I went to the bank and made the payment. Sixteen hundred and twenty dollars. Eight hundred of it came out of Wade’s envelope, the same eight bills, and eight hundred and twenty came out of what I had earned on Curtis Meyer’s tailgate. That left me twenty dollars of my bee wages. I put it toward a bag of sugar for hives that belonged to somebody else.
I didn’t call Wade to tell him it was paid. I figured the bank would mail him the same slip they mailed me.
I heard about the co-op from Shirley Peters, in the church basement, over a pan of scalloped potatoes we were both trying to scrape clean.
Her husband Don has had our bees on his alfalfa for twenty years. He’s seventy-four and he doesn’t waste words. The second week of December he was at the co-op counter with five or six others, waiting on the coffee, when Wade came in for a hydraulic hose. And Don said, across the room, friendly as you please, “Wade, what do you suppose a hive of bees brings these days?”
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.