Wade said he wouldn’t know.
“I’d have thought you would,” Don said. “I heard you sold forty.”
Curtis happened to be standing right there buying fence staples. Shirley says he went red to the ears, but he spoke up, and he didn’t dress it either way.
“A good double-deep hive going into winter with a laying queen is two hundred dollars,” he said. “Forty of them is eight thousand. I paid eight hundred. I didn’t know that till Mrs. Olson drove out and told me herself, after I already owned them. She brought Roy’s records. She showed me which six were going to die, and then she came out two mornings a week for seven weeks and kept them alive for me. She never asked me for one hive back.”
Shirley said you could have heard the coffee drip.
Wade set his hose on the counter. He said, “I’ll come back for that,” and he walked out.
I thought I would enjoy hearing it more than I did. I scraped my half of the potato pan and found I mostly felt tired, and a little sorry, and that I missed Roy, who would have known what to say to his brother.
The winter was a hard one. Twice in January I drove up after a snow, and Curtis and I walked the row and cleared the entrances with a bent wire, and knocked.
That’s all you can do with bees in January. You put your ear flat to the cold side of the box and rap it with your knuckle. If they’re alive, they answer. A rising hum, like somebody deep in the house saying, yes, yes, we heard you, go away.
Fourteen answered. Twenty-two answered and sounded annoyed about it. Twenty-three answered, faint.
Nineteen didn’t.
Curtis rapped it three times. Then he straightened up and looked at me with his eyes wet from the wind, or not from the wind.
“You told me,” he said.
“I told you it might. You did everything there was to do. Write it down.”
He got the journal out of the truck and wrote it down.
We opened them on the first sixty-degree day in March. Thirty-one of Roy’s thirty-six had come through. Five gone, nineteen among them. Twenty-three was small but she was laying. Around here plenty of people lose a third or better, and some years half.
Curtis counted twice. Then he set down his smoker and said he had been thinking all winter, and would I hear him out again.
“Jenna’s expecting in July,” he said. “I’ve got these and my own, and nights at the plant. They did better with you in seven weeks than they’d do with me in seven years. I want to bring them home. Your yard, your honey house, your work. They stay my bees. We split the crop down the middle. And any splits you make off them this spring are yours, free and clear.”
“That’s too generous by a good deal, Curtis.”
“No, ma’am.” He was a different young man than the one with the cap in his hands. “Roy gave me an hour and a half once and wouldn’t take a dime. And I paid twenty dollars a hive. I’ve known what that was since the tailgate.”
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.