The Boy and the Glass Hive

“Mom,” he said. “I’m thirty-four dollars short of the truck.”

“I know.”

“Do I look stupid? I’m happy about thirty-four dollars.”

“No,” I said. “You look like your grandfather.”

We packed up at ten-thirty, because there was nothing left to sell.

Rob folded the card table. Dustin and I carried the hive back to the truck, with the tube pulled in and the entrance closed, and I strapped it into the seat again. Arlo Voelker came over and put his big hand on the glass.

That was all Arlo said. But on the way out of the lot, three different vendors I had barely spoken to all summer stopped Dustin to shake his hand like he was a man.

Rob went to see his sister on Sunday.

He drove over alone after church. I did not go, and neither did Dustin. He came home an hour later and sat at the kitchen table and told me she had opened the door but not the screen.

“She said she had nothing to say to me,” Rob said. “I told her what I thought. I didn’t yell. She stood there with her arms crossed, looking past my shoulder.”

“Did she say anything about Dustin?”

“She said, ‘He didn’t need to do that in front of everybody.'” My husband rubbed his eyes. “That was it. That was the only thing. Like it was something the boy had done to her.”

By Tuesday, the phone calls had started.

I did not make them. Neither did Rob. They came to us. Arlo called on Monday night and said, “I’m going to say something at the board meeting, if that’s all right with you.” Doris called on Tuesday. Then a woman I had never met phoned from the egg stand, and a man who sold tomatoes, and a girl who ran the soap table. Seventeen vendors in all.

They had not been waiting for a hive. They had been waiting for a reason.

It turned out Gwen had been moving people around for three years. A young couple who sold pickles sat behind the dumpster for six weeks in July, and quit. A widow who sold crocheted dishcloths got shoved to the edge of the lot with no warning. Nobody had wanted to be the one to say so.

The board met on Thursday night at the Pike Run fire hall, in the back room under the bulletin board with the pancake supper flyers. Five chairs behind a folding table. The president was Harvey Tolan, who owns the hardware store and has a voice like a screen door. There were forty folding chairs for the public. By seven, they were full, and people were standing along the wall.

I had told Dustin he was welcome to stay home. He came anyway, in a clean white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, carrying a jar of honey. He sat in the front row.

Gwen was at the end of the board table, with her clipboard on her knee. She did not look at the room.

Harvey Tolan called the meeting to order at 7:05. He read the minutes. He took a call about the Halloween parade. Then he cleared his throat and said, “I understand there’s some feeling about last Saturday.”

Arlo Voelker stood up first.