The Beekeeper's Anniversary

I've been the editor of the Pine Creek Courier for three years now, and I'm twenty-four years old, which means I've spent my whole adult life in this town arguing with people about commas. I like clean sentences. I like clean desks. I once returned a library book because someone had folded a corner. So when the anniversary committee put me in charge of the display cases at the old cannery, I brought disinfectant wipes and a stack of index cards and planned to be home by nine.

The cannery has been shut for a decade, but the town's hundred and fiftieth anniversary is next month, so everybody's been dragging crates of bunting and old parade floats onto the main floor. The place smells like dust and old fish and, ever since Reggie set up his workbench near the loading dock, beeswax.

Reggie is twenty-seven. He keeps bees on the ridge and cleans the cannery at night, and he started all of it five years ago after an internship at the county extension office that he describes as "life-changing" with a completely straight face. He wears a beekeeping veil sometimes even when there are no bees around, which I consider a red flag of the highest order.

So I was wiping down the display case by the front office when I heard his boots on the concrete. I turned around and there he was, ambling over with honey literally dripping off his left sleeve.

"You've got honey on your sleeve," I said.

"That's harvest residue," he said. "Listen, I hate to bother you, but the key to the supply closet is in what I call the danger zone. It's near my hives. I can't get in there alone and you're the only one with committee access."

"The danger zone."

"That's what I call it."

"Why would you keep a key near a beehive?"

"Because that's where I do my thinking, Mildred. Keys go where the thinking happens."

I looked at my wipes. I looked at my index cards. I thought about the fact that I had been at the cannery since five and had not yet eaten dinner. And then I sighed and picked up my bag.

"Fine," I said. "Lead the way."

He took a flashlight off his belt and walked me through the dark cannery like he was giving a tour of a museum nobody visited. "Pine Creek's first cannery," he said, waving the light at a wall. "Established when the town was established. Historic."

"Please don't touch the historic wall," I said.

"I'm respecting it with my light."

We wound through crates and past a float shaped like a giant peach, and then he stopped at the loading dock and I heard it. Rain. Not a drizzle. A full hammering downpour on the tin roof, so loud I had to raise my voice.

"Reggie, it's a monsoon out there."

"The danger zone is outside." He reached into his workbench drawer and pulled out a big black umbrella, popped it open, and held it over both of us at the dock door like this was all part of some plan he'd had since Tuesday. "Stay close. Bees don't fly in rain anyway, so we're safe."

"That's not reassuring the way you think it is."

We stood there under the umbrella with the rain beating the tin above us and the whole loading bay smelling like fish and wax and wet gravel. And then Reggie turned his head and said, completely casual, like he was commenting on the weather.

"I've been watching you edit all week, you know. You chew your pen when a sentence bothers you. And I'd bet money you've never been properly fucked in a place that smells like fish and beeswax."

Let me explain what happened in my head at that moment, because it was not what most people's heads would do. Most people would have walked back inside. My brain instead went straight to outrage on behalf of my own reputation, because I have spent three years in this town being treated like a delicate flower, and I am tired of it.

"Excuse me," I said. "I have had plenty of sex, thank you. I've had a normal amount of excellent sex. Just not, apparently, with someone who wears a veil to work."

He laughed. He actually threw his head back and laughed, rain hammering the roof like applause he hadn't earned.

"The veil is protective equipment," he said. "Okay, fine. Here's my real question. Have you ever done it standing up? With lube? Because standing up is where patience and the right angle make all the difference, and I've got a demonstration that would change your whole editing process."

"You're unbelievable," I said.

"I'm a professional. Angles are my whole thing. Bees build in hexagons, Mildred. Hexagons."

And then, and this is the part I still think about, he reached into his jacket pocket and produced a small bottle. A small, clearly labeled bottle of beeswax-based lubricant.

"For the hive tools," he said. "Stops the rust. But it's body safe, I checked the ingredients twice."

"You carry personal lubricant in your work jacket."

"I carry hive tool lubricant that happens to be body safe. There's a difference and it's mostly marketing."

I should have gone back inside. I should have said goodnight and driven home and eaten the leftover casserole and gone to bed at a reasonable hour like the responsible editor everyone believes I am. Instead I heard myself say the exact wrong sentence.

"I'm not scared of a little mess," I said. "Is that what you think? That I'm too prissy for a little mess?"

Reggie smiled at me under that umbrella with rain roaring down all around us, and he held up the bottle between two fingers like he was a man presenting evidence.

"Well then," he said. "Prove it."

"I'm proving nothing on the strength of your marketing claims."

"Okay, then how about this. You ask me one question about the ingredients. If my answer satisfies you and you want to, we do this thing right here where nobody can see us. If it doesn't, or you change your mind at any point, we go find the supply closet key and I never mention hexagons again. Nothing about the key depends on any of it."

"That's the dumbest proposition I've ever heard."

"Thank you. Question?"

I looked at the bottle. It was a small amber bottle with a plain white label and it said, in honestly very tidy handwriting, beeswax glide, body safe, external and internal. Somebody had even noted a batch date. Reggie was many things, but he was not careless about his supplies, and that was somehow the most irritating part.

"Fine," I said. "What's in it besides beeswax?"

"Sunflower oil, beeswax, and vitamin E. That's it. I make it myself at the kitchen in the extension office, which is inspected monthly, so it's cleaner than anything in your kitchen."

"That is genuinely a disturbing amount of quality control."

"I told you. Professional."

The rain kept coming down and the tin roof kept banging and I stood there doing arithmetic I hadn't planned on doing. He was twenty-seven, I was twenty-four, we were both sober and standing up and fully in possession of our own opinions, and he had asked, plainly, and I had not said no. In fact I had said the opposite of no in several different ways, which he had counted, because