The Honey Bus. Meredith May

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      “It’s tedious being smart,” she’d sigh, swirling the ice in her drink. “Waiting for everyone else to catch up to you. One day you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

      Granny was now reading about the gasoline shortage and flipping the pages with more force. I went to the kitchen and helped myself to one of her cocktail cherries, and then slipped away to Mom’s bedroom. The door, as usual, was shut, and there was no sound from inside. Mom had been in bed so long that she was becoming shimmery around the edges like a memory. I felt my mother more than I saw her, when she curled her body around me at night.

      “Mom?”

      I tapped lightly on the bedroom door. Nothing. I knocked a little harder. Her voice sounded like it came from under the covers, thick and muffled.

      “Go away.”

      Her words pinched, and I winced reflexively. Mom still liked me; I knew that. I reminded myself that she just wasn’t herself right now. Granny rounded the corner and spotted me lingering where I wasn’t supposed to be. “Come with me,” she said, placing a hand in the small of my back and guiding me to the kitchen. She lifted a wicker basket of wet clothes off the counter, and I followed her outdoors to hang the laundry. She dropped the basket on the ground with a thump under the wire clothesline that Grandpa had strung up between two T’s made out of plumbing pipes.

      “Hand me the clothes,” she ordered. “I can’t bend down on account of my bad back.”

      I passed her one of Grandpa’s white cotton undershirts, encrusted with drips of plumber’s putty and worn so thin I could see through the fabric. She snapped it into the wind once, then pinned it with clothespins. Then she reached toward me for the next item. I pulled out her floor-length quilted nightgown, the one covered in pink roses.

      She cleared her throat.

      “You know your mother is going to need everybody’s help to get better,” she said, contemplating the clothing in her hands. I knew what was coming. I was in trouble for knocking on the bedroom door again.

      “I just needed Morris.”

      Granny paused and faced me.

      “Aren’t you getting a little old for a teddy bear?”

      Her words were so horrible that I momentarily forgot what I was doing and dropped my favorite green-checkered dress on the ground. I couldn’t sleep without Morris tucked in my arms. He was my only possession, the only thing left from Before.

      “Dad gave him to me!”

      Granny bent down to pick up my dress, and she grunted like it really hurt. It looked like she was stuck, but she put her hand to her back and rose slowly, puffing out her cheeks with the effort. She shook the dirt off my dress and continued pinning.

      “That’s another thing,” she said. “I don’t want you and Matthew mentioning your father around her. It only upsets her.”

      Dad was the only thing I wanted to talk about, but his name had not come up once since we landed in California. Everyone acted as if Dad didn’t exist, and I was beginning to wonder if Matthew even remembered him. He had even started to refer to Grandpa as Daddy. Each time, Grandpa gently reminded him that he was a grandpa, not a daddy. It was like our life in Rhode Island was a movie, and the movie had ended, and that was that. Over and forgotten. If everyone pretends your dad doesn’t exist, does he?

      Granny was staring at me, waiting for me to agree to never say Dad’s name. It was pointless to argue, because I would be taking Dad’s side against hers and that would have repercussions I could only shudder to imagine. It’s true I wanted Mom to get better. I didn’t want to keep thinking of her as a sick person, someone with a weak heart and faraway eyes. I wanted her to braid my hair again, read Winnie-the-Pooh to me, take me with her to the grocery store. If that meant having silent conversations about Dad in my head, then that’s what I would do. But before I submitted to Granny’s ultimatum, I had to ask a question.

      “When’s he coming?”

      Granny reached into her shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She shook one out, lit it and relaxed her shoulders with the first exhale. She stared at the honey bus as if searching it for my answer.

      “Your father is not a very good man,” she said, keeping the back of her head to me. Then she indicated to me to hand her the next thing in the basket. Conversation over.

      I put my tongue between my teeth to keep from calling Granny a liar. How dare she pick sides, as if she could just snip Dad out of my life with a swipe of her scissors? I had bat-ears; I knew that she talked about Dad with Mom sometimes, when their whispers floated out the gap at the bottom of the closed bedroom door. It wasn’t right that they could talk about him but I couldn’t—he was my father after all. I wasn’t dumb; I’d figured out that Mom and Dad were having a fight and this wasn’t a “visit” to California, but that didn’t make my dad bad and my mom good. He was my dad, and he was coming back. Granny had everything all wrong.

      The sun was low in the sky, and the honey bus looked stage-lit with orange and yellow bulbs. Through the windows I could make out the shapes of three men crowded inside with Grandpa, passing honeycomb frames between them and shouting over the rat-a-tat of the machines inside.

      I crept forward to get a closer look. The men had taken off their shirts in the heat and tied them to the overhead handrail. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but could tell they were swapping jokes, slapping one another on the back and doubling over with laughter. The men had an action-figure quality to them, their barrel chests rippling and shining with sweat as they hefted hive boxes and stacked jars of honey into towering pyramids. I studied their every move, even how their Adam’s apples bobbed with each swig of beer, and I silently willed them to wave me inside with a swing of their Popeye arms. These were the Big Sur friends Grandpa grew up with, the ones who had taught him to rope cattle and dive with a snorkel for the iridescent abalone shells that I had found in the backyard. These were big men with big hands who showed Grandpa how to build log cabins from redwood trees, how to hunt wild boar, or clear landslides off the coast highway with heavy equipment. They were living Paul Bunyans, the Big Sur mountain men who fended for themselves in the wild.

      I patted down the tall weeds and made a little burrow for myself where I could sit and watch them work. They used thick, heavy knives blackened with burnt sugars to gently slice open wax-sealed honeycomb, exposing the orange honey underneath. They lowered honeycomb frames into the massive spinner, and cranked a handle protruding above it from left to right, using two hands and all their body weight to shift its position. I saw one of the men yank on a pull-cord several times and heard the lawn-mower motor sputter to life. The flywheel started to rotate and whine, and as it picked up speed, the bus began to rock slightly from side to side. The pump kicked in and forced the honey from the bottom of the extractor, up through the overhead pipes, and directed it to cascade in two streams into the holding tanks. It was nothing short of miraculous; like striking gold.

      I stayed in my spot until the sun slipped behind the ridgeline and the crickets came out to sing. The men flicked on the construction lights in the bus and hung them from the handrails so they could keep working into the night.

      I was drawn to the bus like a moth to flame, by an irrepressible longing that I felt as a physical ache, a gnawing in my belly to disappear into the secluded protection of an enclosed space like a submarine, or a bus. The honey bus looked like it was warm inside, and safe. I wanted the men to invite me to join their secret club, and to teach me how СКАЧАТЬ