Rooftop Honey

Jen had been in the city for exactly three weeks when she climbed the last flight of stairs with two vinyl records under her arm and a bag of takeout she regretted ordering, and by the time she reached the top floor of the old walk-up she was breathing hard and wondering again why a personal trainer could be in this bad of shape. She was thirty-four, newly single in the technical sense of having been single for years, and she had moved out here for a fresh start that so far mostly consisted of a cramped one-bedroom apartment she could barely afford and a landlady she barely knew.

The landlady was Milly Hendricks, twenty-nine, a radiology tech who worked odd shifts at the clinic six blocks down and kept three beehives on the rooftop like it was the most normal thing in the world. Jen had found the listing through a friend of a friend, and the rent was the only number in the entire city she could actually make work, which meant she had jumped on it before she even saw the apartment, and had then promised, in a text she still cringed about, that she would return the two records the previous tenant had left behind, because Milly wanted to hear them. It was a small favor, and nothing to do with the rent, and Jen had learned the hard way that you kept those things separate, because money left sitting between people turned into something else entirely.

So here she was, on a Thursday evening, knocking on the door at the end of the hall with the little brass H that had been screwed on crooked sometime during the Sanderson years, holding the records like an offering.

"Just a second!" came a voice from inside, and then some shuffling, and then the door opened and there was Milly, barefoot in jeans and an old camp counselor t-shirt, holding a mason jar of something amber and looking genuinely surprised and genuinely pleased in equal measure. "Jen, hey. You're the last person I expected tonight, and I mean that in the good way."

"Hey," Jen said, holding up the records like they were a game show prize. "I said I'd bring these by and I'm only three weeks late, which for me is basically on time."

"Oh my god, put them down before you drop them," Milly laughed, stepping back to let her in. The apartment was small but warm, full of plants and books and a record player that looked older than either of them, and it smelled like candle smoke, which struck Jen as odd because it wasn't the kind of building where anybody burned candles for atmosphere.

"Are those for, like, ambiance?" Jen asked, nodding at the half dozen candles on the kitchen counter.

"Oh, right, you wouldn't know, you were at work all day," Milly said, taking the records and setting them carefully on top of the player like they were made of eggshell. "The whole block's out. Power's been gone since about two this afternoon. Something with the substation, they're saying midnight, they're saying tomorrow morning, who knows. I got home and lit everything I own."

"Wait, seriously? My building lost power too?"

"Whole neighborhood, hon. It's very cozy and very annoying." Milly raised the mason jar in explanation. "Honey wine. I make it from my hives, which sounds more impressive than it is, it's basically me fermenting sugar in my kitchen and hoping nobody dies. Do you want a glass? I was about to go sit on the roof, and I'll be honest, sitting on the roof alone during a blackout is only about half as fun as sitting on the roof during a blackout with company."

Jen thought about her sad takeout bag and her sad apartment with no lights and no wifi, and the math took about half a second. "Yeah, okay, I'd love one. I've never had honey wine that didn't come from a bottle with a Viking on it."

"That's the correct way to be introduced to it," Milly said, already pulling down a second jar. "The Viking stuff is an insult to the art form. Come on, up through here, mind the screen door, it sticks."

The rooftop was small and mostly concrete, with the three white beehives lined up along one wall like little houses, and a rusted lounge chair that had clearly been there since before Milly, and a second chair that had appeared sometime in the last week, which Jen noticed and chose not to read into. The sky was doing that Pacific Northwest thing where the sunset went on for an hour and made the whole city look like a photograph of itself, and with the power out there were fewer lights than usual below, just candles in windows like the whole street had agreed on it.

"Okay, so," Milly said, settling into the lounge chair and passing Jen a jar, "house rules. The bees are chill, they've all gone to bed basically, but don't wave your arms around like a maniac anyway, and if one lands on you, do not swat, just blow at it gently and it'll leave. They're mostly interested in the lavender, not in you."

"You're very calm about having thousands of bees twenty feet from your bedroom window."

"Five years of practice," Milly said with a shrug, and took a sip. "I got into it because my granddad kept bees, and then I kept doing it because it turns out it's the only hobby I've ever had where I actually shut up and relax. Also, free honey, which I keep in frankly irresponsible quantities, so expect jars. Consider it a landlord perk."

Jen tried the wine and it was genuinely good, sweet and dry at the same time and warmer than she expected, and she said so, and Milly beamed like she'd been handed a trophy. They talked about nothing for a while, the neighborhood, the clinic where Milly spent her shifts sliding people into giant magnets, the roastery where Jen went every morning and where the guy behind the counter had strong opinions about oat milk, and it was easy, the kind of easy that Jen usually had to fake and wasn't faking now.

"So can I ask a kind of blunt question," Milly said after a while, tucking her legs up under her in the chair, "or is it too early in the neighbor relationship for blunt questions?"

"Those are my favorite kind, go ahead."

"You moved here alone, right? Like, fresh start alone, nobody with you?"

"Nobody with me," Jen said. "Nobody chasing me either, if that's the next question. It was just time. Thirty-four years old and I realized I'd never actually picked a city, I'd just ended up in them. So I picked this one, and here I am, sitting on a roof drinking bee wine with my landlady, which honestly is already a better outcome than my last three years combined."

"That's a nice way to put it." Milly looked out over the dark rooftops for a second, then back. "For what it's worth, I did the same thing, kind of, five years ago. Not the city, but everything else. I came out, and I started over. It's scary and then one day you notice it's just your life."

"Yeah?" Jen said, and she meant it as a question but Milly was already nodding.

"Yeah. And you know, most days it's fine, and some days it's really good, and the worst part is the evenings like this when there's a blackout and the whole world's quiet and you think, man, it'd be nice to have somebody to share the candle situation with." She said it lightly, the way people say true things lightly, and then laughed at herself and waved the jar. "Ignore me, the wine talks for me sometimes."

"I'm not ignoring you," Jen said. "I'm sitting on your roof drinking your wine. That's basically the opposite of ignoring you."

"Fair point." Milly grinned and settled back, and the last of the light caught the edge of the beehives, and somewhere below a car went by with its radio up, and Jen thought that maybe the fresh start was going to be better than advertised. Then Milly sat up like she'd remembered something. "Oh! Before I forget. Nick's probably going to come banging on my door at some point tonight, he does this every outage, comes over to raid my pantry because he's convinced bodegas close at dusk. He's a friend from college, works nights at the roastery, total sweetheart, you'll like him. Fair warning so you're not weird about a third person showing up."

"Nick comes over during blackouts to beg for sugar," Jen said slowly. "That's the most specific and adorable thing I've ever heard."

"It's for his espresso and it's a whole thing," Milly said, rolling her eyes fondly, and she reached over to top off Jen's jar without asking, which felt like something you did for somebody you'd decided to keep around. "More wine?"

"Definitely more wine," Jen said, and settled deeper into the rusted chair, and the candles in the windows below flickered on and on.

They were maybe twenty minutes into a second jar when footsteps came clattering up the stairwell door, fast and familiar, and Milly didn't even turn around, just lifted a hand off the arm of the chair and said, "Pantry's open, Nick, you know where the sugar lives."

"That's cold," said a voice, and then a head appeared around the rooftop door, a guy around her age with a roastery apron still on and a flashlight held under his chin like a bad campfire story. "That's cold, Hendricks. I came all the way up seven flights out of concern for your wellbeing and you treat me like a vending machine."

"You are a vending machine," Milly said happily. "One that I feed and it never gives me anything back. Jen, this is Nick. Nick, this is Jen, she rents the apartment downstairs and she's been here three weeks and she's already better company than you."

"Three weeks and she's finally on the roof, huh," Nick said, coming over and sticking out a hand to shake, which he did seriously, like it was a job interview. "Nick Grainger. Hi. Nice to meet you, sorry about the flashlight, it's all I've got, the roastery runs on candlelight too, the whole block's dead."

"I heard," Jen said. "I was actually at work when it all went down, that's how this whole evening happened. Milly rescued me off a plastic chair and fed me wine."

"Sounds about right," Nick said, dropping into a fold-up chair he apparently kept by the door for exactly this purpose, because of course he did. "She rescues people and then they never leave. I've been trapped in this building since college." He pointed the flashlight toward the beehives and squinted. "Hey, the girls holding up okay in the dark? Bees don't care about blackouts, right, they just clock out when the sun does."

"They're fine, they're just clustered and humming at each other," Milly said. "They've survived worse than the power company having a bad Thursday."

"See, this is what I mean about her," Nick said to Jen, waving the flashlight around in the manner of a tour guide. "Full-on bee civilization in her spare time, honey wine like a little homesteader, and meanwhile I can't keep a fern alive. Anyway. I actually came up for a reason, believe it or not." He dug in his apron pocket and came out with a small paper bag and held it up. "Flour. I owe you flour from the last outage, I finally went to the bodega, it only took a civic emergency."

"You paid your debts," Milly said gravely, taking the bag. "The ledger is clear. Get your sugar and go home, some of us are having an evening."

"Yeah, yeah." Nick got up, but he paused at the door and looked back at the two of them in the candlelight, the jars, the second chair that hadn't been there a week ago, and his grin went a little crooked. "Good record choice by the way. That album's a Thursday night album. Anyway, bye, don't do anything I wouldn't do, which is a low bar because I do basically nothing."

And then he was gone, clattering back down seven flights with his bag of sugar, and the rooftop felt different with just the two of them again, quieter in a way that Jen noticed right away and wasn't sure what to do with.

"He's a good one," Milly said, watching the door. "Been my friend since we were twenty and dumb at the same college. He checked on me the day I told everyone who I really was, brought over a frozen pizza and said, cool, do you want anchovies now or was that a lie too, and that was it, that constituted the entire conversation, and it made everything feel normal. He's been coming to raid my pantry ever since." She turned back and pulled a canvas bag out from beside her chair. "Speaking of which. You promised me two