Honey and Clover

The jar was sitting on my porch step the first Saturday of October, right in the middle of the mat, like it had been delivered by a very polite ghost. I'm Dara Cummings, fifty-five years old, a paralegal at the same firm going on nineteen years, and widowed four years now. I'd like to say I bounced out of bed that morning full of hope, but mostly I was carrying my coffee out to check whether the gutter guys had actually shown up, and there it was, a squat glass jar of honey the color of old gold, with a strip of paper tucked under the lid.

Enjoy. B.

The note contained nothing else. Two words and an initial. I stood there in my slippers, holding it, feeling something I hadn't felt in a while, which was itself worth noticing. My wife Elsa died four years ago, and in the time since I've become very good at being invisible. Invisible is easy. Invisible doesn't get your heart involved.

The only B I knew of was Brody Perkins, my neighbor in the adjoining townhouse, sixty-two, retired, quiet as furniture. He kept bees somewhere out past the edge of town and sold at the farmers market on the green, or so I'd heard from Jessica at the coffee place. I'd seen him maybe six times in all the years we'd shared a wall, always at a distance, always a nod, never a word. He had a way of moving like he didn't want to bother anybody, which I understood completely, because I had the same way.

So I did the only reasonable thing. I wrote him a thank-you note. It took me four drafts, which is embarrassing to admit, but there you are. The final version said, Thank you for the honey. It's the best I've ever had, and I don't say that lightly, because my mother kept bees and I have strong opinions on the subject. That was a lie about my mother, she kept a garden, but it sounded good. I signed it, Your neighbor in 4, and left it on his porch Monday morning before work, the way you'd leave a ransom payment.

His reply came two days later, and it wasn't a note, it was a letter, two full pages in handwriting that slanted as if written on a knee. He told me the honey was clover, from hives he kept behind the county line because the town had rules about bees and he'd decided at some point in his sixties that he'd rather keep bees than fight committees. He told me he'd been keeping them for forty years. And at the bottom, typed on a separate slip like an afterthought he'd almost not included, was a recipe for honey-baked pears, with instructions so precise I laughed out loud. Peel them lengthwise, he wrote, so they hold their shape. Nobody needs a pear that's given up.

I made the pears that Friday, and here is where I learned something about Brody Perkins that I don't think he'd told anybody. The recipe was scaled for two. Every measurement, the pears, the honey, the knob of butter, was for a table of two, and I stood in my kitchen with my single dish and my single fork and understood that this man had been eating alone for a long, long time.

I ate them alone too, after dark, standing at the counter because the table felt too big. And then I wrote him back, because apparently that's who I am now, a woman who writes letters to her neighbor about pears. I told him the recipe was good enough that I'd eaten the whole thing myself, standing up, in the dark, which I admitted was either sad or honest and I hadn't decided which. I told him the truth about my mother and her garden instead of bees. I signed it, Your neighbor, because by then it felt like ours.

He answered with a jar no bigger than a salt shaker, clover honey again but lighter, from a different stretch of flowers, and a note that said, I eat alone too. Want to trade a story for a taste?

Well. I read that note four times on the porch, and I'll admit I checked my hair in the hall mirror afterward, which made no sense at all, because the man wasn't even there. But something in that little jar felt as if a door had been left open a crack, and I have spent four years not opening doors.

I wrote him the longest letter of the two. I told him about the first time Elsa and I came to the Cedar Grove Farmers Market, twenty-two years ago, the autumn after we bought the townhouse. We were thirty-three and thirty-six then, and I remember because we argued about it in the car, she insisted she was still thirty-five and I insisted the math was the math. She'd bought a paper cone of apple cider donuts and eaten three of them before we got ten feet into the green, and when I raised an eyebrow at her she said, what, they don't count before ten in the morning, that's the rule. And I'd laughed so hard a woman selling soap asked if I was all right.

We went every year after that, every September and every October, rain or shine, and it was our thing the way couples have things. She always bought honey from a stall near the fountain, and I always said we had honey at home, and she always said that wasn't the point, Dara, the point is the man at the stall. We hadn't known then that the man at the stall was Brody. I figured it out later, putting the timeline together, the bearded man with the quiet hands and the scale, the one she called the honey monk because he never talked. Eighteen years of Saturdays, and she never got more than a nod out of him, and here he was leaving jars on my porch and asking for my stories.

I told him all of it, or most of it. I told him I hadn't been back to the market since she died, four years of September Saturdays spent finding reasons, the car needs an oil change, the gutters, the yard, anything. I told him that reading his handwriting was the first time in years I'd looked forward to the mail. I told him the little jar of clover honey was nearly empty because I'd been eating it off a spoon like a heathen, straight, standing in front of the open fridge at eleven at night, and I wasn't proud but there it was.

I did not tell him I was scared of the green. That one I kept, because some things you write and some things you keep in your chest until someone asks you out loud, and nobody had asked.

I sealed the letter on a Tuesday night and left it on his porch Wednesday morning, and then I stood in my own doorway longer than a grown woman should, watching his door like it owed me money. It was raining lightly, that thin October rain that doesn't commit to anything, and his porch light was still on from the night, yellow through the gray. I thought about the recipe scaled for two. I thought about a man who'd been leaving honey for a neighbor he'd never spoken to, timing it so I'd never catch him at it, and I finally worked out the rest: he had stood at that stall every Saturday for eighteen years, and he had noticed the Saturdays the two of us stopped coming.

He knew we came. He knew when we stopped. And he'd never said a word until the honey showed up on my mat.

The light went off while I stood there, which meant he was up, and awake, and probably watching his own door the same foolish way I was watching his, and that thought got me through the whole drive to work.

His reply came two days later, which I have decided is his natural speed, the man writes the way he keeps bees, slowly and with a great deal of purpose and no wasted motion at all.

It was four pages this time, and most of it was about his father, who had kept hives on a farm past the edge of town back when Brody was a boy, and how Brody had hated the bees at first because he got stung six times the first summer and cried in front of his brothers, and how his father had sat him down on an upturned crate and told him that the bees weren't mean, they were just busy, and that fear and respect lived closer together than most people thought. He wrote that his father died over forty years ago, almost to the month, and that the first hive Brody set up on his own was from his father's last swarm, and that he had been keeping bees ever since, which if you do the arithmetic means the bees and the grief arrived together and he never quite separated them. He wrote, I don't keep the bees because it's what he loved. I keep them because it's the only conversation we ever finished.

And then at the bottom of the last page, in the smaller hand he used for the parts that cost him something, he asked what I did on Saturdays now. Four years of Saturdays now, which were the