The Honey Farm They Signed Away

The Keys She Gave Away

The morning after the phone call I drove out to the farm.

It is a two-lane blacktop the whole way, and I could have driven it with my eyes closed. I had the original key in my pocket, the one Grandpa gave me when I was sixteen, on a braided leather fob he had made himself out of a piece of an old harness. I had carried that key on my ring for almost thirty years.

When I came over the rise and saw the house I had to slow down, because there were two vehicles in the yard that did not belong there. My mother’s tan Buick was parked by the pole barn. And beside it, right on the grass Grandpa mowed in careful stripes every Saturday of his life, sat a little bright-red convertible with the top down, the kind of car nobody within forty miles of Callaway actually owns.

Kayla was on the porch.

She had a phone propped up on a little tripod against the railing, and she was standing with one hand on her hip in brand-new boots and a flannel shirt with the creases still in it, talking to the camera. There were two white plastic planters by the front door, the fake kind, full of fake sunflowers, and they had been set down right on top of the bed of real coneflowers and bee balm my grandfather had babied along that south wall for twenty years, for the bees, crushing them flat.

“Oh, hey, Ruthie,” she said, glancing over without stopping her video. “Mom said you were being weird about the farm.”

I walked past her and put my key in the front door lock.

It did not turn.

Kayla smiled at me over the top of her phone.

“Mom had the locks done,” she said. “For, like, security.”

For a second the whole place went quiet in that way it does out there. The wind sock on the pole barn stopped. A meadowlark that had been going quit going. I stood on the porch boards my grandfather nailed down and I looked at the crushed flowers and the fake sunflowers and my sister’s rented-looking face, and I heard my own blood in my ears.

“It’s just a farm, Ruthie,” Kayla said, softer now, the way you talk to somebody you have decided is unstable. “It’s a bunch of old bee boxes and a house with a bad roof. I don’t know why you’re making it a whole thing.”

Just a farm.

The place where he taught me the stars. The place where I cried after my father left. The place where the two of us bottled forty-one jars of honey and pretended, both of us, that there would be another August.

I took my phone out of my pocket and I started recording.

I recorded the changed lock. I recorded the fake planters crushing the flowers. I recorded the little convertible on the grass and my mother’s Buick by the barn. I walked around the side and I recorded the south fence, where I could already see that three of the hives had been knocked off their stands and were lying tipped over in the clover, silent, the bees inside them dead or gone.

“What are you even doing?” Kayla said, following me, her voice climbing. “Are you filming me? That’s, like, illegal.”

“I’m keeping the record,” I said.

She laughed. “This isn’t a courtroom, Ruth Ann.”

I looked at her, and I remember my voice came out very level, which surprised me.

“It will be,” I said.