Buzz Off - By Hannah Reed Page 0,10

and Moraine is no exception. Customers flowed through the door of the store, hanging around to get more details and to commiserate.

“Manny started me out with my first queen bee,” I said to nearby customers. “When I wanted to have hives in my backyard, he gave me thousands of worker bees. And when he realized I was serious about beekeeping, he included me in his business, teaching me what he knew and giving me a cut on any sales I made.”

I wasn’t telling anybody anything they didn’t already know. Everybody knew how Manny had taken me under his wing, but we were all reminiscing and sharing stories. I wiped away a renegade tear and continued, “Other beekeepers have lots of problems with diseases and mites. Not Manny. He was the best beekeeper and he left some big shoes to fill.” Which was true. Bee management came with all kinds of problems—parasites, pests like ants and mice getting into the hives, predators, and diseases, both old and new. Manny was always on the cutting edge of new technology and preventive care.

“We target practiced together,” Stanley said. “Right out in his backyard with Grace and Carol egging us on and critiquing every shot.”

“Manny was one of a kind,” Milly Hopticourt added. Milly was a seventyish retired schoolteacher built like Julia Child and, like the famous chef, she loved to cook so much that I’d made her the official tester for all of the recipes that appeared in The Wild Clover newsletters.

“He’ll be missed plenty,” other folks agreed.

That was an understatement from my point of view, and not only from a personal perspective. The future of his honey business was in serious jeopardy with his death. I’d secretly counted on a full partnership at some point in the near future, and with him gone, that dream was totally shattered.

Manny, or rather Grace now, owned the honey house, the land, the equipment, and most of the bees. All the bees, actually, except for the two hives in my backyard I kept to pollinate the neighborhood gardens and to provide me with a little honey for my own personal use. Could I carry on without him, keep Queen Bee Honey going? Would Grace even agree to sell the business to me?

Not to mention another pressing business-related problem—my total lack of expertise at managing bees. I’d been in training for a year and a half, but it was only this spring that I started with my own hives. Could I manage eighty hives alone? If Grace would give me the opportunity, I’d make it work. Manny had known what he was talking about when he said that bees would get into my blood. They had.

I gave up on reshuffling the honey products, since it wasn’t helping numb the pain I felt, and went outside where people were loitering in front of the store. The crowd not only filled the assortment of Adirondack chairs lined up on the grass, it spilled out onto the sidewalk. “I heard the sirens early on,” Emily Nolan, the librarian, said. Her presence made me realize how the day had flown. If Emily was here, the library must be closed, meaning that it had to be after five. “Didn’t all of you hear the sirens?” she asked.

I hadn’t, but then I’d been focused on myself, living inside my own head, laughing and celebrating, boozing it up while Manny’s life oozed away.

I must be a slow learner because it took a while after I went back into the shop for the reality of the situation to sink in. I suddenly realized I had bigger worries than an employee drinking on the job and an ex-husband living next door to me. It didn’t take long for the news of Manny’s death to spread, for people to find out that I’d been at the scene and saw some of what happened. My presence in his beeyard and the manner and place where Manny died didn’t help matters one bit.

It only took one excited town gossip named P. P. Patti Dwyre to put what I feared the most into words. P. P. Patti, short for Pity-Party Patti, lived next door to me (on the opposite side of Clay) and spent most of her time trying to convince people to feel sorry for her, making sure everyone knew just how crappy her life was. Her life wasn’t one bit worse than anyone else’s. She just complained more.

“Raccoons got into my attic,” P. P. Patti whined to me,