Chapter 1: Honey in the Walls
The car knew the way, or at least that was how it felt—like Nora’s hands on the wheel were only along for the occasion while something older and more stubborn navigated the last forty miles through hill country that smelled of cedar and coming rain. She’d told herself on the drive down from Nashville that she was not going to cry until she actually saw the place. That had seemed like a reasonable promise to make to herself at seven in the morning with a gas station coffee going cold in the cupholder.
She was revising that estimate now.
The county road narrowed the way she remembered, shedding a lane and then a shoulder and then any pretense of recent maintenance as it bent around the long curve before Clover Creek proper. The dogwoods on either side were done blooming—she’d missed that, she’d missed it by two weeks because the lawyer had needed three phone calls and a certified letter before the particulars of Mae’s estate had resolved themselves into a shape Nora could actually act on—and their leaves were that new, almost acid green that meant real summer was still a few weeks out. The sky above them was the color of old pewter. Everything smelled like rain and clay and something green she didn’t have a word for in the life she’d been living in Nashville, which was mostly a life that smelled like espresso and dry-cleaned things.
She passed the grain co-op and the Methodist church and the diner with the hand-painted sign that still read OPEN EARLY, CLOSED LATE, GOD BLESS, and then the road curved again and she was on the long flat stretch before the meadow, and there it was.
Mae’s Honey and Pie.
Or what was left of the sign that said so.
Nora pulled the car onto the gravel apron and sat with the engine running for a moment, looking.
The sign—that wonderful, ridiculous sign Mae had commissioned from a local artist sometime in the late nineties, a painted wooden board with a honeycomb border and a little bee in the corner whose wings had always reminded Nora of a bow tie—was hanging from a single bolt on the left side of the post. The right side sagged toward the ground at an angle that suggested it had been thinking about this for a while and had simply run out of reasons not to follow through. The bee’s bow-tie wings pointed skyward now, which was either hopeful or absurd. Nora couldn’t decide.
She turned the engine off.
The building itself was—it was standing. She would start there. The little roadside shop with its wide front porch and the old screen door Mae had never replaced because she said the slap of it was better than a welcome bell, the white clapboard siding that had once been the tidiest thing on the county road and was now the pale gray of something that had given up on white but wasn’t ready to commit to another color—it was standing. The roof at the left rear corner had developed a sag that was new, or new since Nora had last been here, which was three Christmases ago, and she’d driven up for four days and spent three of them pretending she didn’t notice how Mae moved more slowly, how she napped after lunch, how the pie cases held fewer varieties than they used to. The fourth day she’d driven home to Nashville and not thought about the sag in anything except her own life.
She got out of the car.
The gravel was weedy at the edges. The window boxes under the porch railing, which Mae had always planted with herbs—thyme and lavender and once a disastrous experiment with rosemary that Mae had called a federal failure—held nothing now but last year’s dirt and a volunteer dandelion that looked extremely pleased with itself. The screen door, when Nora climbed the three porch steps and pushed it open, let out its familiar complaint and slap, and that sound—that specific sound—hit her somewhere below the sternum, hard.
She stood in the doorway.
Inside: the shop counter with its old glass cases, the small café tables Mae had added the year Nora was twelve because, Mae had said, people eat pie better when they’re sitting down, it’s simple physics. The corkboard on the wall behind the counter where Mae had pinned recipes and notes and a photograph of Nora at eight years old holding a jar of honey up to the light like it was a specimen. The ceiling with its bead-board panels, most of which were fine but two of which had the yellowish bloom of water damage spreading from the corner like a bruise discovering itself. The ancient register on the counter. The small kitchen visible through the pass-through window, its surfaces clean—Mae had been many things and none of them was untidy—but still, still: empty. Closed. A kitchen that had not made a pie in six weeks because the woman who made pies in it was gone.
Nora set her purse on the counter and pressed her fingertips to the glass case.
The lawyer, Mr. Tatum, had said the shop was in a period of dormancy. That was the phrase he’d used. Dormancy, like it was a bulb waiting for spring. He’d mentioned some deferred maintenance items and the outstanding operating loan and what he called a period of below-threshold revenue in the final quarter, and Nora had taken notes on a legal pad and thought she understood. She was good at understanding things in the abstract. She’d spent ten years in Nashville as a brand consultant, which meant she was professionally fluent in the gap between what things looked like and what they were.
She had not understood this.
She moved through the shop into the kitchen and opened the back door and stood on the small wooden step that led down to the meadow path. The apiary was about two hundred yards back, past the garden Mae had kept and the old shed that housed the honey extraction equipment, set at the edge of the meadow where the clover and wildflowers ran down to the creek. Mae had always said the bees knew something she didn’t—that they’d chosen this particular bend in this particular creek for a reason that didn’t require explaining to humans, it just required respecting.
Nora could see the hive boxes from here.
There should have been—she tried to remember—fourteen active colonies last time she’d seen the apiary records, which she’d requested from the estate and reviewed in her Nashville apartment on a Wednesday night with a glass of wine, treating them like any other client brief. The boxes she could count from the doorway numbered eight. And even from this distance, the activity around them was quieter than it should have been in early May. A few bees spiraling up into the gray afternoon, but not the sustained hum, not the ambient industry Mae had always called the sound of something knowing its purpose.
Nora went back inside.
She sat down at one of the small café tables, the one by the window that had always been Mae’s preferred spot for her afternoon coffee, and she looked at the dandelion in the window box outside and the broken sign beyond it and the county road beyond that, empty in both directions, and she did the thing she had been not doing since Mr. Tatum’s first phone call.
She let herself feel it.
Mae Callahan had been seventy-eight years old and sharp as a new jar lid and had possessed opinions about pie crust, local politics, the correct way to speak to bees, and the fundamental misuse of the word *literally* that she had shared freely and without apology. She had raised Nora’s mother in this house and then raised Nora here most summers after Nora’s parents’ divorce when Nora was seven, because Nora’s mother had been navigating her own particular wreckage and Mae had simply shown up and said, send her to me, I have room. She had taught Nora to crimp pie crust and to hold a hive frame steady and to read a county road like it was telling you something. She had been the most competent person Nora had ever known and also the warmest, which Nora had always thought was a harder combination to achieve than people acknowledged.
She had died in her sleep on an April night six weeks ago, which was the right way to go if you had to go, and Nora had not been there, and the shop was sagging, and the bees were reduced, and Harlan Cole—that name from Mr. Tatum’s notes, the developer who’d apparently been making inquiries since before Mae died, which Nora found she had a feeling about—had left a business card tucked into the screen door that morning with a number written on the back in ballpoint pen.
Nora had looked at the number. She had not thrown the card away. She had put it in her purse.
She pulled it out now and set it on the table and looked at it.
It was not a small number.
It was, in fact, a number that would pay off the operating loan and her own Nashville lease and leave a remainder she hadn’t thought she’d see in one place until she was significantly older and more financially disciplined. It was a number that looked like a solution.
She turned it face-down.
Outside, the first drops of the coming rain found the window, and then more of them, and the sound on the old roof was the sound she’d fallen asleep to a hundred summer nights in Mae’s back bedroom, rain on tar paper and wood and then the drip into the bucket Mae kept at the corner of the porch for the gutter that had always run slightly wrong. Nora looked at the ceiling and identified, within thirty seconds, the beginnings of a new drip working itself free from the water-stained bead board in the corner.
She got up and found the bucket. It was exactly where Mae had always kept it, in the cabinet under the counter, and it hit Nora so suddenly—the rightness of it being there, the Mae-ness of it, the whole life of preparation and practicality that a bucket in the right cabinet represented—that she had to stand still for a moment with both hands on it before she could carry it to the corner and set it down under the drip.
*Plink.*
She listened.
She was—what was she here, exactly? She’d taken a leave from the firm, sixty days, which her manager had framed as generous and which Nora had understood as the firm confirming that her position was not, in the last analysis, indispensable. She’d put her apartment on a month-to-month. She had no plan, or she had many plans, none of which had survived contact with the actual sight of that sign.
She had an apiary with eight working colonies when there should be fourteen.
She had a pie shop that needed—she was mentally itemizing now, she couldn’t help it, this was how she managed distress—a roof assessment, a structural look at that rear corner, the register probably needed servicing, the cold cases were obviously not running, the kitchen equipment she hadn’t checked yet, the garden that would need—
She had a very large number on a business card lying face-down on a café table.
She had a grandmother who was gone and a shop that was grieving in its own way, settling and sighing around her in the rain, and Nora stood in the middle of it with her arms wrapped around herself and finally, briefly, allowed the crying she had been conducting an orderly prohibition against since the morning she’d gotten the call.
It lasted about four minutes. Mae had also not been a person who approved of prolonged crying, not because she thought it was weak—Mae thought crying was entirely practical—but because she believed in finishing it properly and then moving on to what needed doing. Nora had absorbed this ethic early.
She wiped her face with a dish towel from the counter drawer, which still held dish towels, which meant Mae had folded them and put them away and not known she was doing it for the last time.
Nora put the dish towel back and closed the drawer.
She went to the pass-through and looked into the kitchen. The stand mixer. The wide farmhouse sink. The spice rack Mae had built herself, inexpertly, when Nora was ten, which had always leaned slightly left and had been leaning slightly left for twenty-plus years without anyone’s permission to do otherwise. The window above the sink that looked out toward the bee yard, now blurred with rain.
On the counter by the window, propped against the backsplash: a piece of notepaper in Mae’s handwriting. Nora hadn’t seen it from the doorway.
She pushed through to the kitchen and picked it up.
It said: *The honey in the east wall is from the ’09 swarm. I never had the heart to move them. Let them stay.*
That was it. No date. Mae had had a habit of leaving notes to no one in particular around the house and shop, small annotations on her own life, and Nora had grown up reading them like marginalia in a book she wasn’t quite old enough for. She didn’t know if this note was recent or years old. She didn’t know if Mae had left it knowing, somehow, that there would be a someone to read it—that the shop would pass to Nora and Nora would come and stand in this kitchen in the rain.
Nora pressed her palm flat against the east wall of the kitchen.
And there it was: the faintest vibration. So slight it was almost a memory rather than a sensation, almost something she was choosing to feel rather than actually feeling. But there, steady and low and certain—a hum.
The bees that Mae had never had the heart to move.
Still there. Still humming.
Nora stood with her palm against the wall for a long time while the rain came down and the bucket caught its drips and the broken sign turned in the wet wind at the end of the drive. The number on the business card sat face-down on the café table. The east wall hummed.
She didn’t call Harlan Cole.
She didn’t call anyone.
She went out to the car to get her suitcase, ducking her head against the rain, and she carried it up the porch steps and through the screen door that slapped shut behind her the way it always had. In the morning, she told herself, she would make a real inventory. She would look at all of it clearly.
But tonight she was going to sleep in Mae’s house, and in the morning she would figure out whether staying was brave or foolish or both.
She’d always found those two things harder to tell apart than people pretended.