Honey Bus
Next Day—1975
Granny was waiting for us at the Monterey Peninsula Airport, standing with arms crossed in a wool dress and a crisp, high-collared blouse with puffy sleeves. Her tawny bouffant was salon-sculpted into frozen waves, and protected by a clear plastic headscarf tied under her chin to shield her hairdo from the elements. She was an exclamation point of perfect posture, jutting above the glut of less-mannered travelers flagrantly kissing their relatives in public. She scrutinized our approach through cat-eye glasses, lips pursed in a thin line. When Mom saw her, she let out a wounded cry, and reached for a hug just as Granny pulled out a wadded hanky from her sleeve cuff and held it out to Mom to avoid an embarrassing scene. Mom took it and just stood there, unsure of what to do. Granny observed manners, and one did not blubber in public.
“Let’s have a seat,” Granny whispered, grabbing Mom’s elbow and guiding her to the row of hard plastic chairs. Mom blew her nose and gulped back sobs as Granny made soft clucking noises and rubbed her back. I stood there awkwardly, looking while at the same time trying not to look. Granny handed Matthew and me two quarters from her coin purse and pointed to a row of chairs with small black-and-white televisions mounted on the armrests. Delighted, we ran to the chairs to watch a TV show while Mom and Granny had a Very Important Conversation. Matthew and I squeezed together in one of the chairs, dropped the quarter in and spun the dial until we landed on a cartoon.
When Granny and Mom finally stood up to go, we were the last people left in the boarding area. Granny came over, and I instinctively stopped slouching. “Your mother is just tired,” she said, leaning down to kiss my cheek. She smelled like lavender soap.
Matthew and I rode in the wayback of Granny’s mustard-yellow station wagon, far enough from Granny and Mom so we couldn’t hear what they were saying. I looked out the back window to inspect California sliding past. It was February, but oddly there wasn’t any snow. We drove over rolling brown hills with horse ranches and up a steep grade with hairpin turns, pushing the car higher and higher. The car groaned with effort, and my stomach dropped when I realized that we were on top of a ring of mountains, like we were driving on the edge of a gargantuan bowl. Beneath us, the earth fell away in deep folds and grooves all the way to the valley below, and an idea came to me that we must be driving over the dinosaurs, whose bodies had turned into mountains after they’d died.
I also noticed that the trees in California were different—solitary, massive oaks with outstretched octopus arms twisting just a few feet above the ground, nothing at all like the fiery maples or crowded forests of skinny birch trees back home. When we finally started to descend, I could see all of Carmel Valley below us, a vast green basin with a silver river snaking along one side of it. My ears popped on the way down until we reached the bottom of the bowl, the mountains now a towering fortress around us. Carmel Valley felt like a secret garden in one of my fairy tales, sealed off from the rest of the universe. It was warmer here, and the sun seemed to slow everything down: the ambling pickup trucks, the sleepy crows, the unhurried river.
We drove by a community park and public swimming pool, then made a right turn onto Via Contenta and passed an elementary school with tennis courts. The rest of the residential street was lined with one-story ranch homes separated by juniper hedges and oak trees for privacy. Granny slowed in front of a volunteer fire station where some men were washing red engines out front, passed a small cul-de-sac with a handful of identical wood-shingled bungalows, and then reached her destination—a small red home perched in the middle of an acre of land, bordered on four sides by overgrown trees.
Granny skipped her front gravel driveway and instead took the back way to the house, turning onto a short dirt lane that ran along her fence and was canopied by a row of mammoth walnut trees with branches reaching all the way to the ground, engulfing us in a tunnel of green leaves. Walnut shells popped under our tires as we followed the curving drive to the backyard. She parked next to a clothesline, where her square-dancing petticoats were flapping in the breeze.
Granny took great pride in living on one of the largest lots on her street, and she was quick to remind anyone who forgot that she was among the first residents of Carmel Valley Village, arriving in 1931 from Pennsylvania with her mother when she was eight. They’d driven across the country in a convertible Nash Coupe after Granny’s father had unexpectedly died of a heart attack, because her mother wanted to escape the tragedy in a warmer place with good swimming. This history, Granny believed, conferred on her a pedigree that allowed her to complain about the influx of newcomers over the next forty years. However, she was comforted that the oak, walnut and eucalyptus trees demarcating her property had grown to screen the neighbors from view. And the neighbors in turn were spared the sight of Grandpa’s accumulating junk heaps that now pervaded the king-size lot.
I stepped out of the car and saw several haystack-size piles of tree trimmings, at least three toolsheds, mounds of gravel and bricks, two rusting military jeeps, a flatbed trailer, a backhoe and two beaten-down pickups. A trellis of grapevines led in a sloping line from the laundry to the back fence, where there was a small city of stacking beehives resting on cinder blocks, each one four and five wooden boxes high. From this far away, it looked like a mini-metropolis of white filing cabinets.
Something caught my eye through the billowing laundry. I walked through the rainbow of swirling skirts to get closer, and found myself standing before a faded green military bus. Rain had chewed away a ring of rust holes around the roof, leaving brown streaks trailing down its sides. Weeds choked the tires, its wraparound front windshield was cracked and cloudy, and a massive rhubarb bush sprouted from under the front bumper. It seemed to have driven right out of World War II and wheezed to a stop right by Grandpa’s vegetable garden, from an era when vehicles were all fat curves instead of sleek edges, making the bus look more animal than machine. The rounded hood was sculpted like the snout of a lion, with vent holes for nostrils and globe headlight eyes that stared back at me. Below its nose was a row of grinning grille teeth, and under that, a dented metal bumper that looked an awful lot like a lower lip. In peeling white paint above the windshield, it read U.S. ARMY 20930527. Captivated by the incongruity of it, I felt compelled to investigate.
Kicking a path through waist-high weeds, I tried to see inside but the windows were too high. I circled to the back of the bus, and near the tailpipe I found a crooked stack of wooden pallets that improvised as stairs leading to a narrow door. I scrambled up, the makeshift staircase wobbling beneath me, and pressed my nose to the filmy glass.
Inside, all the seats were gone, and in their place was some sort of factory of whirligigs, crankshaft gears and pipes. A metal basin about the size of a hot tub rested on the floor, and contained a hefty flywheel powered by pulleys as large as manhole covers. Behind the driver’s seat were two massive steel barrels with cheesecloth stretched across their open tops. An overhead network of galvanized steel pipes was suspended from the ceiling with fishing lines.
The equipment ran the length of one wall, and on the other side Grandpa had stacked a bunch of wooden boxes, each about six inches tall and two feet wide, and painted white. Each rectangular box, taken straight from his hives, was open on the top and bottom and contained ten removable wood-framed sheets of wax honeycomb. The frames hung in neat rows, supported by notches inside the box. I would later learn from Grandpa that these were the “honey supers,” the removable top-tier boxes of a modular beehive where the bees stored nectar in the wax honeycomb and thickened it into honey by fanning their wings. The supers rested atop the larger brood boxes at the base of the hive where the queen lays her eggs.
There must have been three dozen boxes of honeycomb inside the bus. Glistening honey trickled down the stacks, collecting in shiny pools on the black rubber floor.
I could see glass jars on the dashboard that had turned purple in the sun, and sunflower-yellow bricks of beeswax that Grandpa had made by melting wax honeycomb and straining it through pantyhose into bread pans to harden. Electrical cords snaked everywhere, and construction lights dangled from the ceiling handrails. I cupped my hands over my eyes to shield the glare, and from out of the shadows someone inside pressed their nose to mine. I startled and nearly fell backward, just as Grandpa popped out the back door.
“Boo!” he said.
Bees buzzed around his head, and he slammed the door quickly to keep them from getting inside the bus. He was wearing threadbare Levi’s a couple inches too short and no shirt. He had Einstein hair sticking out every which way, as if electricity had just zapped through it, and a round face tanned to a chestnut color that settled into an expression of bemusement with life, as if he was forever chuckling at a private joke. In one hand he held a can with smoke pouring out of a spout on top. He yanked a tuft of green grass out of the ground, jammed it into the spout to stifle the flame and set his bee smoker on a pile of bricks. Then he dropped down on one knee and opened his arms wide, signaling me to fall into them.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said, squeezing me tight.
I peeled my arms from Grandpa’s neck and pointed at the bus.
“Can I go in?”
His workshop held a Willy Wonka–like spell over me. He’d built it himself, out of hand-me-down beekeeping equipment and spare plumbing parts, and powered it with a gas-powered motor taken from a lawn mower. When he bottled honey inside during the hottest days of summer, the whole bus rumbled as if it were about to drive off, and the indoor temperature shot above one hundred. Nothing in his secret workshop was official, or safety-checked, and the sweltering, sticky danger of it all made entry that much more irresistible. It seemed like magic to me that Grandpa brought honey supers inside, and emerged hours later with jars of golden honey that tasted like sunlight. Grandpa had the power to harness nature, like Zeus, and I wanted him to teach me how.
Grandpa stood up and blew his nose into a grease-stained rag, then shoved it in his back pocket.
“My honey bus? It’s not a place for little kids,” he said. “Maybe when you’re fifty, like me.” The bus was too hot and dangerous inside, he said. I could lose a finger.
Grandpa reached his long arm to the roof of the bus, where he’d stashed a piece of rebar that was bent at a right angle. He inserted one end of the rod into a hole where the back door handle used to be, and twisted to lock the bus. Then he put the homemade key back on top of the bus, out of my reach.
“Franklin, would you come get the suitcase!” Granny called out, in a way that sounded more like an order than a question. Granny had honed her leadership skills with decades of practice keeping elementary schoolchildren in line. I was a little afraid of her, and always tried to be on good behavior because her presence inherently demanded it. Not only of me, but of everyone in her orbit. Grandpa’s ears perked at the sound of her voice.
I followed Grandpa to the station wagon. He fetched our one shared suitcase from the back and we walked to the front door, trailed by a handful of bees attracted to the honey stuck to Grandpa’s boots.
My grandparents lived in a tiny red house with a flat, white gravel roof that looked like year-round snow. Grandpa said it turned away the sun and was cheaper than air-conditioning. The house had two bedrooms, and a kitchen wrapped by an L-shaped room with redwood paneling that served as both the living and dining room. A large brick fireplace that took up half of one wall was the main source of heat. Next to it was a windup grandfather clock, and on the opposite side of the house, floor-to-ceiling windows facing the Santa Lucia Mountains, which formed a natural barrier between our house and Big Sur on the other side. The kitchen was painted baby blue and was home to Grandpa’s black dachshund, Rita, who slept under the stool next to the washing machine. There was one bathroom, decorated with brown-and-silver-striped wallpaper, and a low-flow showerhead that misted weakly.
Granny led us to the spare bedroom that used to be Mom’s when she was a girl. It had since been painted a cantaloupe color. I stepped inside and immediately saw my world shrink: Matthew would sleep in a cot in the corner, and I would share the double bed with Mom. We would put our clothes into a Victorian marble-topped vanity with two lavender-scented drawers. My room in Rhode Island suddenly seemed like a castle in comparison to this small box, so crowded by beds there was no space to play.
Mom immediately closed the curtains to the sun, sending a shadow over the walls. Granny steered Matthew and me back into the hallway.
“Your mother needs some peace and quiet,” she whispered. “Go on and play outside.”
Granny had a voice that never suggested, but always instructed. We immediately understood the first unspoken rule of our new home—Granny was in charge. She would be the one to set our daily routine, plan the meals and make decisions for Mom, Grandpa, us.
Mom didn’t join us for dinner that night, so Granny put a bowl of tomato soup and toast on a tray for her instead. She set a crystal vase with a rose next to the bowl, like hotel service.
“Someone get the door,” Granny said, standing before Mom’s bedroom.
I twisted the doorknob and pushed, sending a wedge of yellow light into the darkened room, and a plume of cigarette smoke billowed out. The air was so thick I could feel it pour into my lungs as I inhaled. I took a step back and let Granny go in first. She gently approached the bed, where Mom was curled in a fetal position, crying softly. A glass ashtray the color of amber rested on the headboard, filled with a cone of ash.
“Sally?”
Mom moaned by way of answer.
“You should eat something.”
Mom uncurled herself and sat up. She winced and squeezed her temples.
“Migraine,” she whispered. Her voice was so thin, it sounded like it might tear. Granny flicked on the light, and I could see Mom’s face was flushed and her eyes were puffy.
“Tylenol?” Granny offered, fishing the plastic bottle out of her pocket and rattling it.
Mom extended her arm, and Granny dropped two pills in her palm. Granny held out a water glass and Mom gulped twice, handed it back, then flopped back down into the pillows.
“The light,” she said.
I reached up and turned it back off.
Mom seemed so weak, like she couldn’t even hold her head up. I thought of that time I found a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. It was pink, and I could see the blue of its bulging eyes that had yet to open. The poor thing’s head lolled to the side when I tried to pick it up.
“I’ll just leave this here,” Granny said, setting the tray at the foot of the bed. Mom waved it away. Granny stood over the bed for a few seconds, waiting for Mom to change her mind. She bent down and adjusted the pillows to make Mom more comfortable, then Mom closed her eyes again and turned away from us. Granny picked up the tray and we shuffled out.
That first night Matthew slept in his new cot, while I crawled into the big bed where Mom was burrowed into the middle, the sheets tightly wound around her like a burrito. I carefully tugged on the sheet, trying not to wake her. She mumbled in her sleep and half-heartedly tugged back, then scooted aside to make room for me. She sniffled and fell into a light snore.
I moved to the edge of the mattress, as far as I could possibly be from Mom without falling out of the bed. I faced the window, which ran the length of the wall, tracing the moonlight that leaked in around the perimeter of the curtains with my finger. I didn’t want our bodies to touch, as if her tears were contagious.
I felt twitchy and sleep wouldn’t come. I wondered what Dad was doing at that moment, if he was walking through the empty rooms of our house, changing his mind and deciding to come to California after all. I hoped that whatever had just happened to our family was temporary, but I didn’t understand what had broken, so I couldn’t imagine how to fix it. I had a new uneasiness in the pit of my stomach because I now knew the injustice of random bad luck, that it was possible to have a family one day and lose it the next. I wanted to know why I was being singled out for punishment, and tried to retrace my steps to pinpoint what I had done wrong to have my life upended this way. It was baffling, but I had the sense that going forward, I had to choose my words, and my steps, more carefully, so I could do my part to comfort my mother and slowly, craftily, coax her happiness back. I had to be good, and patient, and maybe my luck would turn around.
Mom’s and Matthew’s snores settled into a syncopated rhythm, and I tried to match my breathing to theirs so I could relax into sleep. I lay motionless and fell into a self-induced trance, humming “Yellow Submarine” quietly until I receded somewhere deep inside my skull and blinked out.
Over the next few weeks, Mom remained bedridden. Granny tried various strategies to cheer her up and brought her all sorts of bedside meals, trying to find something she could stomach. But Mom refused most of it, accepting only sugary coffee, canned soda and the occasional bowl of cottage cheese. Granny fetched hot pads for her back, cold compresses for her forehead and murder mysteries from the library. Still Mom’s migraines wouldn’t go away. When she complained of sore muscles, Granny dug around in the hall closet and produced a gadget that looked like a handheld electric mixer; only this thing had one stem protruding from it that ended in a flat metal disc. Granny plugged it in and the disc heated up and vibrated. She sat on the bed and moved the vibrator across Mom’s back in lazy arcs, loosening the tension while Mom sighed with relief.
My brother and I were not allowed in the bedroom during daytime because Mom needed to recuperate, but Granny would sit at her bedside for hours in deep conversation, and despite my eavesdropping I caught only snatches of it. Mostly I heard Granny reassuring Mom that it wasn’t her fault, that she could put this behind her, that men were worthless when you really get right down to it, and not worth this much fussing over. I’d hear Mom sniffling and asking wounded questions. Why me? What am I supposed to do now? What did I ever do to deserve this? Her questions were similar to my own, and I strained to hear an answer from Granny that would explain. One never came, and eventually I grew weary of spying and gave up.
Spring came, and the almond tree in the front yard erupted in white flowers. Mom entered her third month of bed rest, yet her despondency only grew. Mom’s bad luck invoked in Granny an inexhaustible pity. While Granny gave Mom a safe haven and unlimited time to regain her strength, she worked double-time to hold up appearances that my younger brother and I weren’t really semiorphans. She never spoke to us about what was happening to our mother, instead forging ahead as if nothing was amiss. Granny bought and washed our clothes, took us to the doctor for checkups, made us brush our teeth before bed and wrote scathing letters to our father demanding he send more money to support us. Granny adapted to her second motherhood with a sense of family duty, which gave Mom permission to carve out a new identity as a woman scorned. Granny looked after Matthew and me in an obligatory way, without the affection she reserved for her daughter. Mom was her child, and we were more like unexpected foster kids. In her most frustrated moments, she blamed Matthew and me for ruining her life plans, letting us know that if it weren’t for that no-good father of ours, she could have been enjoying her retirement.
Her suggestion to go outside and play became a refrain. Granny now had more laundry to do, more food to make, more dirt tracked in the house to clean up and she couldn’t keep up with it if we were constantly underfoot.
Outside there was plenty to mess with, and as we were loosely supervised by our grandparents, we were free to roam the yard as long as I kept an eye on my little brother. That first summer Matthew and I gorged on Grandpa’s blackberry vines until our lips and fingertips were purple. We climbed into two hollowed-out army jeeps rusting in the yard and drove them through dozens of imaginary wars. We unearthed plastic soldiers and old glass marbles that someone had buried in “olden times,” and we came upon an enormous pruning pile that Grandpa had been contributing to since before we were born—a colossal hill of fruit tree branches—and scaled it on all fours like lizards climbing a wall. We discovered that if we jumped up and down on the heap, we got excellent bounce, just like a trampoline. We fell off and bruised ourselves only a few times.
We quickly adjusted to the outdoor sounds of Carmel Valley, no longer jumping in terror when one of the peacocks on the hilltops let out a squeal like a woman being throttled, and learned to differentiate between the ambulance and fire sirens coming from the volunteer fire station down the block. We much preferred outside to inside, which felt more like a library than a home with everyone talking in hushed voices and being careful not to slam cupboards or clang dishes that might disturb Mom.
My brother and I ran loose and were becoming slightly feral, wearing the same jeans so many days in a row that the denim became more brown than blue, and bathing only when we remembered, which didn’t seem to bother anyone because it was right and good to save water in drought-prone California. Which is why Matthew and I got in supremely big trouble when we got caught hiding behind the oak trees at the top of the driveway with the garden hose going full blast, dousing unsuspecting drivers with sudden rainstorms. It was bad enough we’d pulled a dangerous prank, but it was even worse that we wasted precious water with a looming drought. Grandpa was letting his fruit trees die, and he was worried that there wouldn’t be enough flowers for his bees to make honey. Neighbors were rescuing gasping steelhead trout from what was left of the Carmel River, transferring them into water tanks in the back beds of their pickups and driving the fish to the mouth of the river, closer to the ocean, to release them.
I tried arguing that we had crimped the hose in between cars, but it didn’t win any points. Granny ordered Grandpa to spank us anyway. But he did it in a way that was more symbolic than painful, making a big showy swing with his arm and slowing to a pat by the time his hand reached our bums. But we yowled from the shame of it all.
The real lesson we learned from the spanking was that our grandparents were exact opposites. She was the disciplinarian, and he was the softie. When they shared the newspaper in the morning, she fretted over the political news and he laughed at the comics. She worried about reputation and appearances; he wore tattered undershirts dribbled with coffee stains and never bothered to clean the black grime from under his fingernails. She was tidy; he never threw anything away, collecting his possessions into indoor and outdoor piles that grew taller and thicker by the year, which in a certain light matched the professional definition of hoarding. She detested the outdoors; he had to be coaxed inside.
When Granny met Grandpa during a square dance at the elementary school in Carmel Valley, she was a forty-year-old single mother living in the little red house with Mom, who was then nineteen. Barely a few months divorced, Granny was trying to socialize again, and Grandpa, three years younger, was perfectly satisfied being single. When Grandpa twirled Granny around, she noticed the strength in his upper body, the care he took to get the steps correct. It didn’t hurt that she’d read about him already in Big Sur’s monthly newsletter, The Roundup, which dubbed him Big Sur’s Handsome Bachelor.
Grandpa wasn’t looking for a mate; he was just fine with his bees, and he earned a steady income as a plumber, learning from friends how to make water flow to remote cabins where there was no centralized water system; digging wells and climbing the steep Santa Lucia Mountains to divert natural springs and creeks to homes below.
Ruth and Franklin were an odd couple but a good dancing pair, and began attending square dances together, even traveling to the faraway ones in Salinas and Sacramento. On their third date, at a square dance in South Lake Tahoe, Granny asked him what his intentions were, and when he tried to dodge her question, she literally told him to “fish or cut bait.” No one had ever confronted him so directly, and he was impressed. He agreed to marry her, and she convinced him right then and there to drive across the border into Nevada so they could tie the knot immediately, giving him no time to change his mind. They drove until they located a Carson City courthouse that offered around-the-clock weddings, summoned a janitor to serve as witness, and at nine that night became husband and wife. Mom was a little surprised and somewhat dubious of her sudden stepfather, but she didn’t have time to get to know Grandpa. Four months after he moved in, she transferred from Monterey Peninsula College to study sociology at California State University, Fresno.
My grandparents knew scant little about one another when they married, but over time they learned to love their differences. He liked a cold beer; she preferred Manhattans. He spoke only when he had something to say; she spoke in monologues. But they fit, mainly because she liked to lead and he, averse to confrontation, willingly followed. He had no interest in power, prestige or money, and handed his income to Granny so she could figure out the bills and the taxes. They parted every morning for their separate worlds—hers in the classroom, his in the Big Sur wilderness—and then came together every night at the dinner table where he ate in silence as she lectured on a never-ending list of topics. Grandpa admired her mind, although he also had an Olympian appetite and could fill his plate four times in one sitting. This made him an excellent listener.
It didn’t take long for Matthew and me to adjust to the rhythms of our grandparents’ schedules. Granny preferred her afternoon cocktail lying down. After a full day of teaching grammar and arithmetic to a roomful of trying fifth-graders, her first order of business was to mix a Manhattan and recline on the orange shag rug in the living room, her head propped on a pillow and a newspaper spread before her. By now she had taught me how to make her drink, and I liked the daily ritual of it almost as much as she did. I poured brown bourbon into a tall blue plastic tumbler until it was two fingers high, splashed in some sweet vermouth from the green glass bottle and added two ice cubes and a neon red maraschino cherry. I swirled it around with a dinner spoon and brought it to her.
“Grazie,” she said, reaching up from the floor.
With a loud licking of her fingers, she flipped the pages of the free Carmel Pinecone that she’d picked up at Jim’s Market and told anyone within earshot what she thought about local politics.
“Goddammit all to hell, I can’t believe they want to put streetlights in the village! Excuse my French.”
Her outbursts were not invitations to respond. She kept her head down and continued her conversation of one.
“What do we need lights for? We don’t even have any sidewalks. Damn Monterey County supervisors!” she said, taking another gulp from her tumbler. Outsider politicians were always trying to modernize unincorporated Carmel Valley Village and ruin the reason people moved out to the country in the first place, she said.
I kept listening as I climbed into Grandpa’s recliner and wiggled the handle on the side, trying to get the chair to go flat. I believed Granny was exceptionally smart, and knew things that regular people didn’t. My opinion came from two sources: Granny herself, who had told me several times that her 140 score on an IQ test proved she was a genius; and secondly that she could predict the weather. I didn’t know that forecasts were printed in the newspaper, so when I’d ask her what the weather was going to be like and she’d foresee sun or rain or frost, I thought she had some direct line to the universe.
She dropped phrases in Latin and Italian every once in a while, which sounded cosmopolitan to me. As the cocktail hours piled up, I was slowly starting to adopt her worldview, dividing people into those who were wrong and those who were right. I didn’t know what a Democrat or a Republican was, but I had heard the words so often that I knew we were on the Democrat team. Granny’s world was black and white, and therefore easy to follow. She was right, and anyone who disagreed was dim-witted and therefore deserved our pity.
“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 to make something beautiful with my hands. My pulse sped up when I watched them work together in a harmony of familiar dance movements, passing frames of dripping honeycomb between them and taking turns capturing the honey into glass jars as it flowed out of the spouts. I could tell the bus made them happy, and I believed it could do the same for me.
I was struck by a certainty, from some deep place inside myself, that something important was waiting for me in the bus, like the answer to a question that I hadn’t yet asked.
All I had to do was get inside.