Stranger's Toolbox, Secret Desires

The rental site said one cabin, one bed, one guest, which is what I paid for, so when I swung my truck up the dirt track at six in the evening and saw a white van already parked beside the hives, I figured I had the wrong place. I checked the printout on the passenger seat. Right place, right day, right town in the Alps, right name on the gate. So the van belonged to somebody, and that somebody was standing at my third hive with her veil pushed up on her head, smoking a cigarette down to the filter like it was her property and the bees were hers too.

I sat in the truck a minute and thought about it. Fifty-five years old, bridge inspector for the county, weekends mostly given over to eight hives of bees I drive three hours into the mountains to tend, and my first thought was not who is this woman but whether she was smoking close enough to bother the bees. She wasn't. She was careful about it, standing downwind, and that told me something before she said a word.

I got out and she turned around and pulled her veil off entirely. Fifty-two, she told me later, a plumber, used to work as a climbing guide back in her twenties, and she had the forearms to back up both stories. Gray coming in strong at her temples, sun lines around her eyes, the kind of face that has spent actual years outdoors and never once apologized for it. We had met once before, six months back, at the regional beekeepers' meeting in the valley. I remembered her because she asked the speaker three questions in a row and didn't let him slide on any of them. Her name was Catalina.

She held up her phone with the booking confirmation on it. Same cabin, same dates. I held up my printout. Same. We both laughed, which helped, because the alternative was getting angry at each other over a website's mistake, and neither of us struck the other as the angry-at-strangers type. The nearest hotel with a room was forty kilometers down the valley and it was getting dark. The cabin had one bed, a loft above the main room with a mattress on it, plus a worn leather sofa that I had slept on before and knew was honest about being too short for a man my height.

So we split it, no drama about it. She took the loft one night, I took it the next, and we drew straws over it with an actual straw off the ground by the door, and she won first night, which surprised her more than me. We carried our gear in and she put a kettle on the propane stove and I went back out to check what she'd been doing with my hives.

She had opened two of them already, careful, calm hands, no smoke, which is either arrogance or skill and in her case it was skill. She pointed at the entrance of the third one and asked if I'd noticed the reduced traffic and I hadn't and she was right, there was something off about it, and we spent a half hour in the dusk going through the frames together. She knew her bees. More than me, honestly, and I've kept them eight years.

It was on the last trip to the truck, both of us hauling my gear up to the cabin in the near dark, that she stopped at the tailgate and looked at the cardboard box wedged behind the toolbox.

Workshop stuff, it said, in marker, on masking tape that had gone brown with age. Below that, initials. R.M.H. And below that, a date from when I was still in school.

Whose is that, she said.

I looked at it and my stomach did something strange, because I genuinely did not know. I told her the truth, which is that my uncle died two years back and I cleared out his house and threw anything with a tool-shaped silhouette into the truck bed and drove home, and somewhere between his garage and my driveway that box got wedged in behind my toolbox and forgotten. I never opened it. Two years, it rode in the bed of my truck through winters and one move, and I never once looked inside.

You never opened it, she said, and it wasn't a question, it was the way you'd say wow to a man who told you he never once looked under the hood of his own truck.

I said the uncle thing like it explained something. He was a quiet man, kept to himself, never married, and when he died the house was full of drawers nobody had ever opened and we boxed most of it up for the tip and I kept what looked useful. The box said workshop stuff. I figured workshop stuff.

Catalina looked at me the way she'd looked at that hive entrance. Like there was something worth finding and I was the only one who couldn't see it.

Okay, she said. Wine first.

We sat at the heavy pine table with a bottle of local red that was honestly better than the price suggested, and the stove ticking, and the last light going lavender out the window over the actual lavender, and she got to talking about curiosity like it was a duty. She said something I've kept since. She said curiosity is wasted on the cautious, that the cautious die with sealed boxes in their trucks and never learn what they were carrying around all those years. She'd spent three years as a climbing guide watching careful people stand at the base of routes they were fully capable of climbing, and then drive home, and she said those were the ones who looked old at fifty. She was fifty-two herself and said it without any sadness, just as a fact, the way she'd tell me the hive had a failing queen.

Then she got up and walked out to the truck without asking and came back with the box and set it on the table between the glasses and the candle stub, and I felt my face go hot, which was ridiculous, it was a cardboard box.

She opened the flaps.

I don't know what I expected. Wrenches, probably. Old sandpaper. What was in there was tissue paper, packed by somebody who cared, and under the tissue paper a collection of things I recognized slowly, one by one, in the candlelight, each one wrapped separate, each one clean and completely unused, still with tags on some of them.

A silicone sleeve, ribbed, the kind you slide over yourself. A string of beads, graduated, dark red. Two plugs in different sizes, glass, heavy in the hand. A stroker, soft and closed at one end. More besides. All of it quality stuff, expensive even now, bought decades ago by a man who never once worked up the nerve.

My uncle bought all this, I said, and never used any of it.

Looks that way, she said, lifting one item, turning it, setting it down gently. And now it's yours.