The Boy and the Glass Hive

Harvey looked at the jar. He picked it up.

“Son,” he said, “you’re going to run this town someday.”

“No sir,” Dustin said. “I’m going to run bees.”

That got the first laugh of the night, and it broke the room open. People stood up. Arlo was wiping his face with his cap. Doris squeezed my arm so hard it left marks.

Trudy Bell found me by the coffee urn.

“I took the corner because she asked me,” she said. “I didn’t know what she’d said to those people. I swear it. I’d never have taken it if I had.” She was crying a little. “I’ve asked Harvey to put me in the back. By the dumpster.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I do,” she said. “I’m going to take the dumpster.”

The next Saturday was the twelfth of September, a clear blue morning with dew heavy on the grass at six. We got to the square at 6:30.

The corner by the bank was empty, with the white lines freshly painted. A new table stood in the spot where the old one had been, a heavy oak thing with four straight legs, and a card taped to it in Harvey Tolan’s blocky handwriting. Reserved. C. Bowman.

Dustin stood for a moment looking at the table.

“It doesn’t wobble,” he said.

“No.”

“Mom, I think I might cry.”

“You can if you want to.”

“I don’t want to.” He wiped his sleeve across his eyes anyway. “I just wish Grandpa could see it.”

I put my arm around his shoulders, and he let me.

“He can,” I said. I did not know if it was true. It was what I said.

By 8:20 there was a line.

The woman in the blue cardigan was fourth in it. She did not say anything about her husband. She bought six jars and took them to her car in a paper sack, holding the sack with both arms the way you carry something sleeping.

Dustin bought the truck on the last Saturday in October. The man in Orrville had held it for him. Rob drove him over in the pickup with the cash in a bank envelope, twenty-eight hundred dollars in tens and twenties.

He was not old enough to drive it home, so Rob drove the Ranger down Township Road 14 at twenty-five miles an hour, and Dustin rode in the passenger seat of his own truck with the window rolled down. It still has the rust spot on the left rocker. He says he is keeping it.

I do not know where Gwen is now. She has not been to the market since. I hear she has taken a job at the county office in Wooster, doing something with schedules.

I do not hate her. I think about her father’s hands, and the way she put one of them on my son’s shoulder in a kitchen four winters ago, and I think she is a person who forgot she was kind. I hope she remembers.

What I do instead, on Saturday mornings, is stand at the corner by the bank with a paper cup of coffee, and watch my son lean down to a child at the glass. He points at the queen with the blue dot. He tells them how she lays a thousand eggs a day.

He says, “Look. They’re working.”

And they are.