Honey in the Bells

Aly was elbow-deep in a kitchen sink in the new subdivision when her phone went off, rattling against the countertop like it was trying to escape.

"Miss Aly! Miss Aly, it's Jeremiah Graves!" The voice on the other end was doing that thing he did when he got excited, where every word had its own exclamation point. "The bell tower! Water's coming through the ceiling of the choir room like the Good Lord turned on a tap."

"Whoa, whoa, slow down. Water's coming through where?"

"The choir room. And there's a puddle up in the tower itself, right by the bells. Can you come? Can you come now?"

Aly looked down at the sink she was halfway through. The homeowner, a nice lady named Francesca who was seventy-one and baked way too much for one person, waved her hand from the doorway.

"Go on, honey. I'll put a pot under it."

So that was that. Aly gathered up her wrench bag, promised Francesca she'd be back by three, and climbed into her dented blue Tacoma, which had forty thousand more miles on it than the sticker said it should, because Hawthorn was a town where everybody's pipes were older than everybody's marriages.

She was twenty-eight, a plumber by trade and by inheritance, in the sense that her grandfather had left her his tools and nobody in her family had ever held a desk job. She drove down Main Street past The Rusty Nail, which was not a nail salon no matter what the tourists hoped, and past Ramsey's Feed and Seed, where Walter Ramsey was out front sweeping the porch like he did every day at noon, whether it needed it or not.

"Aly Emerson," he hollered. "Where you off to in such a hurry?"

"Church is flooding."

"Church is always flooding. Church is a hundred and forty years old." He leaned on his broom. "Say, did you hear Abi Hollis is back in town?"

The name landed like a wrench dropped on her foot.

"Nope," Aly said, and drove off before he could add anything else, because Walter could smell gossip the way her grandfather's old hound could smell a raccoon, and there was nothing Walter liked better than watching somebody's face when he said a name like that.

Anyway. There wasn't anything to hear. Abi had been gone eight months. Aly had a system about it. Work, TV, an occasional beer at the Nail, and absolutely no thinking about the woman who had lived next door to her for two years and then taken a job in Chicago and left without so much as a proper goodbye. That was the system. It was working great. It was working so great that she had cried into a taco on Tuesday, but that was between her and the taco.

The stone church sat at the end of Main like the grumpy grandfather of the whole town, all gray blocks and a tower that leaned a little, or didn't, depending on how much you'd had to drink. Jeremiah was waiting on the front steps, wringing his hands, which was a bad sign. Jeremiah did not wring his hands. Jeremiah was sixty-two years old and had taught Aly to solder a joint when she was twenty-two and fresh off a community college certificate, back when she'd fixed his water heater for free and he'd paid her in casseroles.

"There she is. Oh, thank heavens." He hurried down the steps. "Up in the tower, Miss Aly. There's a pipe that runs up through the stairwell, some kind of old supply line, and it let go somewhere near the top. There's water running down the stairs like a creek."

"Anybody been up there?"

"Nobody's been up there since Easter. I can't climb those stairs like I used to, my knees have opinions..." He stopped. He looked at the church doors. He looked at Aly. He looked, very briefly, extremely guilty.

"What?" Aly said. "Why are you making that face?"

"No face. No face at all. Go on up, I left the door at the base unlocked for you." And then he was very busy looking at a pigeon.

Aly hauled her bag out of the truck and went around the side of the church to the tower door, the little one tucked in the shadow of the buttress, and pushed it open onto the stairwell. The air was cool and smelled like stone and old dust. Water plinked down the steps ahead of her, a nice steady trickle that meant the break was slow, thank God, not a full-on burst.

She climbed. And climbed. And around the third landing, where the stairs turned and the light came through one narrow window, she heard a voice say, "Oh. Oh no. Hi."

Aly stopped with her boot on the second step from the top.

There was a woman standing in the tower, near the bells, holding a jar of honey.

The woman was Abi. Abi was twenty-nine, tall, a trans woman who had been out since college and had never once apologized for it, with dark hair she'd cut short since the last time Aly saw her, and she was wearing nice Chicago clothes, the kind with no paint on them, and she was holding a jar of honey like it was a bomb she'd forgotten how to defuse.

"You," Aly said.

"Hi," Abi said again.

"You're supposed to be in Chicago."

"I missed my train." Abi held up the honey like that explained anything. "And then there was a later one, and I thought, well, I could get a coffee, and then Walter Ramsey told me you were at the church, and I thought I'd..."

"You asked Walter Ramsey where I was?"

"I asked him where the church was." Abi's ears went red. "The honey just sort of came out of it. He sold it to me. He said, and I quote, 'Nothing says I'm sorry like local honey.' He thought it was for my ex. He laughed at his own joke for a full minute."

"Did you say something?" Aly called down the stairwell, because she could hear a faint shuffling below, and Jeremiah's guilty cough floated up the stairs like a smoke ring.

"Just the water, dear," he called back, unconvincingly.

Aly turned back around. Abi was still there. Of course she was still there. Eight months, and now here she was in a bell tower holding honey, which was somehow the most Abi thing that had ever happened.

"So," Aly said, planting her bag on the step. "You missed a train. To come stand in a flooded tower with a jar of honey."

"Not the whole plan, no." Abi waved a hand and nearly knocked the honey off her own grip. "The whole plan was, I came back this weekend, and I was going to come by your shop, and say... things. Things I've been practicing on the train for four hours! And then I got here and the church was flooding and Jeremiah looked like he was going to have a heart attack, so I ran up to see if I could help, and I can't help, I don't know anything about pipes, I just moved buckets around until there were no more buckets!"

"You moved buckets."

"There was a bucket situation."

Aly pinched the bridge of her nose. Above them the old bronze bell hung dark and patient, dripping one slow drop at a time, like it was timing them.

"The pipe," Aly said finally. "Show me where it's leaking."

Abi brightened as if she had been told she was going for a walk. She led Aly around the bell platform to the north wall, where an ancient galvanized line ran up through a hole in the floor, wrapped in enough old cloth and wire to look like a mummy's arm. Water beaded along a cracked joint and ran down the wall into a line of buckets, five of them, arranged in what could only be called a system.

"I organized them by size," Abi offered.

"Why?"

"I panic organizationally."

"Sit down before you hurt yourself." Aly knelt, got her light on the joint, and swore softly. Corroded right through. She could patch it, but it was a half-day job at best, cutting and re-threading pipe that old, and the light was already going gray through the window.

"Well?" Abi crouched down beside her, too close, the way she always used to crouch down beside her, close enough that Aly could smell her, and she still smelled the same, which was unfair, frankly.

"Well, it's a half-day job, and I've got half a sink waiting at Francesca's, and you," Aly pointed a wrench at her, "owe me about eight months of explanations."

"I know," Abi said quietly. All the bright chatter went out of her voice at once. "I know I do. Can I... hold the light? I'm actually good at holding lights."

Aly looked at her. The bell dripped. Down in the town, somebody's dog started up about something.

"Fine," Aly said, and handed her the flashlight. "But you're talking while you hold it."

Aly cut the old cloth wrapping off the joint in strips while Abi held the light and talked, which was the deal, and Abi kept the deal the way Abi kept all deals, loudly.

"So the Chicago job, it's a design firm, and it was good, it is good, it's just..."

"Just what?"

"Just not here." Abi shifted the light and the beam wobbled across the bell like a searchlight in a war movie. "And I told myself, Abi, you take the job, you do it for a year, you save money, and then you come back and..."

"And what?"

"And by then you'd have met somebody. Obviously. You're you," Abi said it like it was the most reasonable thing in the world, which was the most annoying thing about it. "Everybody loves you. Francesca loves you. Jeremiah loves you. My grandmother, who hated everyone, loved you."

"Your grandmother hated me."

"She said your soldering was acceptable, which for her was basically a hug."

Aly twisted the shut-off valve at the base of the line and it did what old galvanized valves do, which was nothing. She put more shoulder into it. The stem turned a quarter and then ground to a stop with a crunch like a jaw breaking. "Great. Great. The shut-off's frozen. Of course it's frozen. This church is a hundred and forty years old and nobody's touched this pipe since Easter, why would the valve work?"

"Is that bad?"

"That means the main's still live while I cut, which means when I cut, water comes out. A lot of water. Fast." Aly sat back on her heels and wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist and left a smear of something rusty behind. "I need to get to the basement shut-off. Where's Jeremiah?"

"Making sure the water is water, apparently."

"Fantastic."

There was a pause. Abi pointed the light at the floor, which was polite, in a way, because it meant Aly could think without a beam in her eyes. "I really did come back to apologize," Abi said, quieter now. "I wrote it down on the train. Nine drafts. Draft six had a metaphor about bees, which is where the honey came in, sort of, and then Walter Ramsey got hold of it and the whole thing turned into a gag..."

"A gag." Aly heard her own voice go flat and dangerous, the voice she used with suppliers who shorted her on fittings. "The honey was a gag."

"No. Yes. Not like that."

"Because there was a joke, Abi. You remember the joke. The bee thing. You made it up at two in the morning in my kitchen, and I put honey in everything for a year because of you, and then you got on a train and didn't even..."

"I know."

"And you brought a jar of it as a JOKE to the town where you LEFT me?" Aly was standing now, and the wrench was in her hand, and she didn't remember picking it up. "Walter Ramsey laughed at you, and he was right to laugh. That's the funniest thing that's happened in Hawthorn since the church flooded."

"The church is flooding right now."

"GOOD POINT!"

She was so angry she went back to work angry, which her grandfather had specifically told her never to do. He'd said a plumber who cuts angry cuts wrong. She hacksawed the corroded joint anyway, furious, precise enough on the first stroke and then sloppy, and the pipe gave a shudder under the blade as if the whole building had its own judgment about her technique, and then the crack in the joint let go all at once.

Water hit her in the chest like a thrown bucket. Cold, rusty, church-flavored water, straight down the front of her shirt and into her boots, which filled immediately, which was going to be a whole thing later. She grabbed for the pipe to angle the spray away from the electrical conduit and got shoved sideways, hard, and it took her a second to realize Abi had shoved her, Abi who had never touched a tool in her life, both hands on Aly's shoulder, yelling something like "MOVE!" at a volume that probably reached the basement.

"I'm fine. Aim it at the window, not the conduit."

"WHICH ONE'S THE CONDUIT?"

"THE GRAY ONE!"

"The GRAY one, the METAL one, there are FOUR METAL ONES!"

"THE GRAY METAL ONE, ABIGAIL!"

The spray found the window, eventually, and hammered against the glass in a flat white sheet while the two of them stood there dripping, and Aly discovered two things at once. One, her tools were soaking and her phone was in her pocket and it was probably dead. Two, Abi's nice Chicago shirt was made of some fabric that turned completely, morally transparent the second water touched it, and she was not wearing anything under it, and the cold water had done what cold water does, and Aly's anger took one look at all that and tripped over its own feet.

"Stop staring," Abi said.

"I'm not staring."

"You're staring at my..."