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“How about you bring it to me out at the hives?”
She sighed, but I’d appeased her. “All right. Tell Mama we’ll be there in a few.”
I agreed before heading to my room to throw on jeans and a T-shirt, with a chambray shirt on top. Out the back door I went, to the array of vehicles I had at my disposal, which included two ATVs, a golf cart with thick-tread tires, Dad’s old truck, and several bicycles. Mama had the work truck back at the hives, and though I’d have liked to bike to her, I’d probably need some gear. So I hopped in the stocked golf cart and headed deeper into the farm.
We lived on a twenty-acre patch of land that had been in our family for five generations of bee farming. What had started off as a single room house became two, then three. Then the big ranch-style house was built and expanded on, which was where we all lived now. Well, most of us. Jo and her boyfriend Grant lived in one of the small houses that had been converted into cottages before I was born, but otherwise, the house remained a haven for Blum women, since there were no men to speak of.
It had been this way for a long, long time. Daddy died when I was eleven, and he was the only male around before that, since my grandaddy died when Mama and Daddy were dating. It was a curse we Blum women were burdened with, a simple fact of life. If you’d asked my grandmother, she’d have told you about the feud with a local witch over a man, but we were ever the suspicious sort. Better safe than sorry, we figured. Because loving and losing so tragically was too much to bear.
I knew that well enough on my own. I was eighteen when my boyfriend Drew died, the promise of forever on our lips. A car accident, the way so many in our town had been lost to us. Too many back roads with no streetlights. Blind corners and crossways without stop signs. Breaks of trees at the mouths of farm driveways for privacy that could be a deadly trap under the wrong circumstances.
Eighteen and promised to each other, freshly graduated and ready to eat the whole world. And just like that, he was gone. I wouldn’t have survived it without my sisters, and it scared them enough to make a pact, one we’d even pricked our fingers and made a promise over. It wasn’t worth it, to date. The risk of falling in love was too grave, not just for our hearts but for whatever poor fool was dumb enough to get caught up with us. So we locked up our hearts and threw away the key.
My sisters went out with guys, but they never got serious, never saw them more than a few times. Our cousin Presley hadn’t had much better luck, not until she moved back to Lindenbach and reconnected with Sebastian, her first love. I, on the other hand, had remained alone entirely, despite the men brave enough to come poking around our door.
Six months ago, Grant Stone came to town and flipped the most aggressively single of us before even she realized it. Jo was tempting fate with Grant—every time he got on a tractor, used an axe, or drove more than a few miles away, I felt sick.
Conditioning, I was sure, but terrifying nonetheless.
I passed through fields of wildflowers our bees ate from that doubled as a wholesale floral business, with patches cleared for hives. On seeing the truck up at hive six, I smiled, finding Mama easily in a red plaid shirt and jeans, pulling honeycombs out of their slots with nothing but a mesh veil and a smoker for protection.
Bee witches, they called us. They weren’t wrong.
There were plenty of instances when we’d wear suits, but for the most part, we didn’t need it. Mama, my sisters, and I were the only ones who could do it without ending up in the emergency room. Our cousin, Presley, tried once. Never saw her run so fast, not before or since.
On hearing the whir of the little electric engine of the golf cart, Mama looked up, shielding her eyes, waving when she saw me. I pulled up next to her and hopped out. The only hum I heard then were the bees.
The hive she was working on was ripe for harvest, and as I approached, she smiled and greeted me, handing over a frame so I could move it into the box for transport to our small cannery.
For a few minutes, we worked silently that way. She’d check a frame, careful to avoid the brood nest, looking for combs that were capped off and ripe for harvest. Bees flitted around, alighting on us before deciding we were friends and fluttering away. Of my sisters, I was the most like Mama, and as the oldest, I supposed it made sense that we were so close. We’d had the longest time together, after all. But where my sisters were willful, I was the one who did as I was told, especially when Mama asked. I was old enough to understand what Daddy’s death did to her, and where Jo stepped into his shoes as best she could for all her nine years, I devoted myself to Mama.
