The Honey Bus

by Meredith May

  The teacher called his name, and I let go of his leg. He walked to the front of his class and cleared his throat.

  “I’m Frank, and I’m here with my granddaughter, Meredith,” he said. “My family goes back four generations on the Big Sur coast.”

  I heard an interested murmur from the group.

  Grandpa said his great-grandfather was one of Big Sur’s earliest pioneers, William Post, who was eighteen when he left Connecticut in 1848 to become a whaler, finding work burning blubber into lamp oil and harvesting whale bones for corsets at the Monterey Whaling Station. Two years later, he married a local Native American woman from the Ohlone tribe named Anselma Onesimo inside the Carmel Mission. They built one of the first homesteads in Big Sur, the 640-acre Post Ranch, where they raised cattle and hogs and planted an apple orchard. They led cattle drives to Monterey, and packing trips to take hunters and fishermen into the Big Sur backcountry. And they had beehives.

  Grandpa explained that he began keeping bees as a teenager, after a swarm landed in his yard and his father showed him how to capture it and put it in a hive. The bees quickly multiplied, outgrew their hive and started developing new queens—a sign the crowded colony was getting ready to divide itself by swarming. So his father showed him how to move the incubating queens and some of the bees into an empty hive to make a second colony. Within two years, father and son had five beehives behind their home in Pacific Grove, a small seaside community an hour north of Big Sur made up of Victorians squeezed close together on tiny lots.

  The neighbors were patient, and somewhat fascinated, with his bees, he said. They became even more supportive when Grandpa placed a hive on the porch of a Japanese family that had been forced into a labor camp during World War II.

  “No looters dared go near that house,” he said.

  While many were enthralled with his bees, his mother was losing her patience. After getting stung one too many times while hanging the laundry, she finally put her foot down and demanded he find more open space for his new hobby.

  Friends and relatives in Big Sur were happy to help, and Grandpa relocated his hives to several coastal ranches where the bees wouldn’t bother anybody. He placed beehives in a remote clearing at the foot of Garrapata Canyon, on a cousin’s cattle ranch in Palo Colorado Canyon and in the nuns’ walled-in vegetable garden at the Carmelite Monastery. People started calling him The Beekeeper of Big Sur.

  Grandpa told tales of battling the seas to haul in nets of sardines along Cannery Row; he even made plumbing jobs seem exciting. He sounded like a superhero when he described tying himself to trees and dangling over the Santa Lucia cliffs to hammer rebar and secure pipes that directed water from a natural spring to Nepenthe, the landmark bohemian restaurant perched eight hundred feet above the sea.

  I looked around the room. The kids were never this quiet in class.

  “Sounds like you walked right out of a Steinbeck novel,” one of the fathers called out, putting Grandpa on par with Monterey Bay’s literary son. But Grandpa actually remembered Steinbeck, as well as some of the real-life marine biologists, hoboes and shopkeepers who appeared in his novel Cannery Row.

  So Grandpa took the man’s comment literally. “Steinbeck was a nice enough guy. Kinda kept to himself though. Doc Ricketts was more fun,” Grandpa said. “He used to pay us to bring him frogs from the Carmel River for his lab. He had good jazz parties, too.”

  “Did you know Henry Miller?” another parent asked.

  “Played Ping-Pong with him at Nepenthe once,” Grandpa said. “He cussed a lot.”

  The kids pelted him with questions about bees. Did they sting him? How did he get the honey out of the hive? How does he catch a swarm? Grandpa started having fun with his audience. He said bees stung him all the time, but that meant he’d never get arthritis. He said he got honey out of the hive “very carefully,” and told the students that he caught swarms with his bare hands. They couldn’t tell if he was joking or telling the truth and stared at him, dumbfounded. Grandpa held the floor until my teacher politely interrupted so another father could have a turn.

  He returned to my side, and I squeezed his hand. He had single-handedly erased all my prior social faux pas and given me a do-over at school. He was cool, and he told the class that I helped him with his bees, and therefore I could be cool by association. I should never have doubted him, and I felt sheepish that I’d thought he would mess it up. Grandpa was different, but that made him better, not worse. It made no difference anymore that he wasn’t my dad. We were together now, and that’s all that mattered. Grandpa squeezed my hand back.

  “Very good,” I whispered.

  When it was time to go, I could feel eyes on us as we crossed the playground toward home. Grandpa had a stack of new orders for honey, names and phone numbers scribbled on punch napkins. And I had something worth more than money—his loyalty. Grandpa had claimed me before the whole class, and that meant he had been listening to me when I told him the troubles I was having at school. He had been thinking on it, and came up with his way of turning things around for me.

  I learned on that day that Grandpa would stick up for me, in the same way a bee will defend its hive or die trying. He was letting me know, in his silent way, that he had made a promise. He would never leave me.

  7

  Fake Grandpa

  1975—Winter

  Shortly before Christmas, the Volvo, which had never fully recovered from its cross-country voyage, was gone. In its place was the strangest car I’d ever seen. It was Porta Potty blue and shaped like an avocado, wide in the rear with a long snout in front. It squatted low to the ground, and looked like its back end had been whacked off with a giant ax. A white racing stripe on each side swooshed all the way from tail to tip, tapering to a point just behind the headlights. It was an AMC Gremlin, advertised as the most affordable economy car in America, what Granny could buy for Mom on an installment plan.

  Matthew and I approached cautiously, peering through the hatchback—one solid piece of glass on hinges. We saw white upholstery perforated with small dots, and plush ice-blue carpet, not yet stepped on. There was a radio with push buttons, and a white steering wheel as big around as a garbage can lid. The car gleamed with untouched possibility.

  “I don’t want you kids touching it,” Mom said.

  She was propped up in bed with all the pillows behind her back, reading the driver’s manual.

  “Can we go for a ride?” I asked.

  She slapped the manual onto her lap. “What did I just say?”

  “No touching,” Matthew answered.

  “That’s right. Now go,” she said, waving us away with her hand.

  * * *

  Granny disguised her gift to Mom as a loan, proposing a repayment plan once Mom found a job. It was a bribe of sorts, one that worked in Mom’s favor. She didn’t drive the Gremlin to a place of employment, but she took it other places. She fetched groceries now and then, and hit up a garage sale on the weekends. Ultimately, she never paid Granny back the two thousand dollars, but it was the carrot that lured Mom out of bed. The car gave her a modicum of autonomy, and I was grateful for this welcome blip of progress as Mom tentatively stepped back into society.

  Then one day Mom broke her no kids in the car rule, offering to take us to Carmel. Mom opened the car door, and a clean and faintly chemical smell wafted out. She lifted a lever and the passenger-side seat bent forward, giving us a few inches to wedge ourselves into the back seat. This was a decade before children’s car seats were required, and if there were seat belts in the car, they must have been buried in the cushions because we didn’t use them.

  “Watch where you’re stepping!” Mom said, licking her thumb and wiping away invisible scuff marks where our shoes had touched the seats. She bent down and shucked the shoes off our feet, knocked them together to dislodge the dirt and carefully placed them on the floorboards. I watch
ed her walk around the car, get in and sling her purse into the passenger seat. The white interior glowed around us like an orb. Once seated, she revved the engine twice, then eased up on the clutch. She pressed too hard on the gas, and the car pitched forward and stalled.

  “Shit!”

  She checked us in the rearview mirror.

  “Don’t tell Granny I said that.”

  Mom turned the ignition and the car bucked again, harder this time. Matthew grabbed the seat in front of him for support. He shot me a mischievous smile. Shit, he mouthed. I turned away so he wouldn’t see me laughing. There was something so funny about a foul mouth on a cute kid. Mom sighed heavily and sat for a moment with both hands gripping the steering wheel, her elbows locked.

  “Are we going to Macy’s?” Matthew asked. Santa was there inside the department store in Monterey, receiving gift requests.

  “No, we’re going to see your grandfather,” Mom said.

  A wrinkle appeared between my eyebrows. That made no sense. We already had a grandpa, the one who just yesterday hauled a Christmas tree from the back of his truck into the living room and covered it in blinking lights. I explained this to Mom.

  “Quiet. I can’t hear the clutch,” she said.

  Finally the engine caught, and she cautiously eased the car down the driveway. Once she maneuvered onto Carmel Valley Road, she shifted into second, keeping it there even though the engine screamed for a higher gear. A line of cars backed up behind us on the two-lane road, and the driver behind us flicked his high beams through the large glass hatchback, lighting up the inside of the Gremlin like a pop of lightning. We ducked instinctively, but Mom ignored the tailgater as she pushed in the cigarette lighter and knocked a pack of cigarettes on the steering wheel until one poked out the top. She pulled it out with her lips and tossed the pack back into her purse. When the lighter popped out, she held the red coil to the tip and lit it.

  “Grandpa isn’t your real grandpa,” she said, lowering the window and exhaling smoke out the crack. “My dad is. We’re going to see your real grandpa. Granny’s first husband.”

  A gong went off. The news that Grandpa wasn’t my grandpa was preposterous. I’d never seen this other man, nor heard of anyone else claiming to be my grandfather. I dug my fingernail into the white seat, trying to poke a hole. She was trying to tell me that Grandpa wasn’t good enough somehow, but I refused to believe it. I fumed in the back seat, at Mom for so casually dismissing Grandpa, and at this stranger for taking Grandpa’s place without my approval. Mom held her cigarette out the window to let the wind suck off the ash, then brought it back to her lips.

  “Grandpa is my grandpa,” I insisted.

  “No, he’s your step-grandfather.”

  My mood was good and foul when she eventually turned off Highway 1 onto Ocean Avenue, and we descended a steep hill that bottomed out before Carmel’s downtown shops. She steered the growling Gremlin away from the main street and up through a wooded neighborhood of cheery cottages that looked like gingerbread houses with icing. The roofs were thatched and wavy, some decorated with flags or weather vanes. Windows had flower boxes, doors were flanked by lanterns. Everywhere I looked I saw cobblestone walkways, and the homes had names instead of numbers: Country Comfort, A Whistle Away, Sea Shadows.

  These were the homes that originally belonged to painters and poets and actors when Carmel began as a seaside artists’ colony at the start of the twentieth century, but were now heavily renovated and occupied by descendants or wealthy outsiders. Each was unique, yet all were the same in that they were the kind of homes I’d never been in before. I felt suddenly self-conscious, and worried about just what, exactly, Mom was getting us into.

  My foul mood got a little fouler. Mom took the car slow around an oak tree that was growing right in the middle of the narrow road. In the twisting backstreets of Carmel, trees sprouted here and there from the asphalt with reflective tape around them, directing drivers to respect the landscape and please go around. Whoever had built the roads hadn’t had the heart to chop them down, and locals were accustomed to driving slowly to go around them.

  Mom pulled into a parking space above a house that clung to a hillside overlooking a canyon of Monterey pines. We walked on a narrow balcony that wrapped around the house, until we were facing a big red door flanked by two Chinese lion sculptures, one with a paw resting on a ball and the other with its paw on a cub.

  Mom smoothed her skirt and stood up taller, then knocked. As if someone was standing on the other side peering through the peephole, the door whipped open immediately, and a short, thin man in pressed khakis, tasseled loafers and an oxford shirt stared at us. His white hair was precision-combed as if he were still in the military. He had a pink, expressionless face, dark eyes and a mouth that relaxed into a natural frown. I had never met him, yet I felt he was already disappointed with me. He and Mom looked at each other in silence. I had a sudden urge to bolt for the car.

  “Sally.”

  “Dad.”

  He opened the door wider and motioned us in. I reached for Matthew’s hand.

  Our steps echoed as we entered what appeared to be a modern art gallery instead of a home. The two-story architectural home was cold and impersonal, empty in the center with a top floor that formed a ring around the one below. From anywhere on the upper balcony, you could peer over the ledge down to the first story, which had a decorative concrete floor with slices from a massive redwood tree trunk embedded in it. The wall facing the canyon was all glass. A floating staircase connected the two levels. The walls were decorated with Chinese paintings of fog-filled mountaintops and fighting warriors. A towering silvertip Christmas tree as giant as the one at Macy’s rose from the bottom floor. There wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere in this showpiece of a house.

  Mom instructed us to say hello to our grandfather. I gave a wan smile. He shook my hand and contemplated me. I had the unnerving sense that I had to apologize for something. My heartbeat sped up and I swallowed apprehensively, waiting for him to tell me what I had done wrong and what my punishment would be.

  I heard footsteps behind me, and his wife broke the spell, swooping up to greet us in flowing robes, with a necklace of bulky red rocks and jade rings on her fingers. She had salt-and-pepper hair, a square jaw and prominent cheekbones, and stood a foot taller than her husband. She explained that she was going to make us a wonderful tea. She said the name of the place it came from, and we all stared at her blankly, and then she explained it was a very high mountain in China and the tea was served in the temples they had visited. We were led to a sitting room on the top floor, next to the kitchen, and took our places in rigid, antique Chinese chairs. We sat with Mom on one side of the room, and her father sat opposite us. Mom’s eyes darted around at the tapestries, out the window, anywhere but at her father. She spilled sugar stirring it into her tea. She hated tea and only drank coffee at home.

  I was afraid to touch anything. Matthew remained angelically still in his chair as his eyes scanned this strange place. There wasn’t a toy anywhere.

  I could tell that Mom was already regretting this visit. It was obvious that she and her father didn’t like being in the same room, that they had no idea what to say to one another. The air crackled with unspoken resentments.

  I would later learn that he’d been a brutal father, teasing her mercilessly for being overweight and bruising her for the slightest transgressions such as not cleaning the house to his satisfaction or scowling at him. His unpredictable tirades consumed her childhood, and Granny’s happiness, as well. They lived in fear of him until finally, when Mom was nineteen, her parents divorced. Mom was euphoric when he left, relieved to never have to speak to him again. Now here she was, a dozen years later, in his tearoom. It could have been that Granny had forced her to go, to ask her estranged father for financial help. But I think it was more likely she was drawn by mixed emotions of curiosity, hope and need.
Using the holidays as a pretense for reparations, she was testing her father to see if he had changed, if he felt remorse and if he would help her get back on her feet.

  He cleared his throat.

  “Well, Sally, how are you getting along?”

  She said things were okay, but that they were hard, too. She told him she might be able to get a job as a bank teller or a nurse’s aide at the hospital.

  “That’s good, Sally. But what about doing something with your sociology degree?”

  Mom began chipping at her nail polish.

  “Have you thought of graduate school?” he pressed.

  Mom said she couldn’t afford grad school. She had two kids to feed.

  I could see a light behind his eyes turn off.

  “I’ll be fine, Dad.”

  I wished I could say something to change the subject, but I felt frozen in front of this sudden grandfather. I tried to picture this man, his cashmere sweater draped over his back and the sleeves tied together in front, living among his art books and carved dragon sculptures inside our small, single-story country house, and it made no sense. He didn’t look like the kind of person who chopped wood to build a fire, or weed-whacked outdoors, or came in contact with dirt, ever. In his house, everything was on display and seemed rarely used. In ours, every corner was jammed with worn-out things. My grandparents collected rubber bands into balls, smoothed and reused tinfoil, and saved every paper bag. We were from different tribes, and I couldn’t picture this man in ours. It seemed as if Grandpa’s piles of junk had sprouted from the ground and laid claim to the property centuries ago.

  The wife appeared with a tray of butter cookies, placing them on the coffee table while telling us about their recent trip to China. The conversation blurred into a boring adult drone as they detailed treks to ancient sites dating back to such-and-such dynasties, and I wondered if I could fall asleep with my eyes open. I lifted my teacup and saw what looked like a piece of seaweed floating in it. I set it back down on the lacquered coffee table. Mom fake-listened to his stories but her mind was elsewhere, her gaze fixed on a point on the wall just above his shoulder. I watched his mouth move without listening to the words. When he finished talking, another long silence descended on our group. Her father cleared his throat again.