a stain that’s lyin’ there, we were laughing too hard to sing along. I peed a little and had to change my underwear at a rest stop, and he called me Betsy Wetsy the rest of the trip.
We arrived in the late afternoon. From what Luke had told me about Matt, I was picturing a guy in a shack with piles of garbage in the back, but he lived in a bright red house with window boxes full of flowers. His wife, Jen, came out first, and she and Luke bear hugged, swaying with exaggeration and affection.
‘Caliope was so angry when I told her you were coming,’ she said. ‘She’s at sleepaway camp for three nights.’
‘A big three-night camp?’ Luke said.
‘It’s an experiment. She said you could sleep in her tree house, which is not an invitation she extends very often.’
Luke nodded and there was a sudden silence, broken by Matt when he came out holding a small boy, who sat erect and vigilant on his father’s arm. I didn’t know many couples. My friends seemed to get married and disappear. Or maybe I disappeared. Nia and Abby had stayed in touch until they had babies. I’d tried to see Abby in Boston before taking a bus to Rhode Island, but she never returned my call. I had the gift I’d bought for the baby in my suitcase at Red Barn. When people have babies they stop calling you back.
We went inside and they fixed us drinks—cranberry juice and seltzer—and the boy, who’d just learned to walk a few weeks ago, staggered around the black-and-white tile floor. When he made his way to me he held up a knitted brown goat with tiny white horns. I squatted down to have a look, and he squeaked in surprise. Instead of backing up he put his face unnaturally close to mine.
‘Well hello, little fellow,’ I said.
Another squeak.
I touched the goat’s soft horns: one, two. He did the same. He smelled faintly of poop and Desenex. I was surprised how quickly that word ‘Desenex’ came to me. How did I even know it?
One, two on the horns. Three on his nose.
He opened his mouth—a dark toothless cavern—and after a few seconds a loud cackle came out.
I imitated him—the open mouth, the delay, the laugh—and he took it as an invitation to sit on my lap, which, because I was squatting, had to be created quickly. We dropped down onto the floor at the same time.
Jen shot me a grateful smile. She was talking to Matt and Luke about their plans for creating a neighborhood CSA and protesting against the Starbucks that had bought out the local doughnut shop.
Matt took us out back to see the bees. They didn’t have a yard. They had meadows and woods beyond the meadows. We followed a path that had been cut through the long grass and wildflowers to the white boxes of bees. Matt picked up a can and stuffed it with a burlap cloth and lit the cloth on fire and pumped air into it from a bellows on the side, and smoke started coming out of the nose at the top of the can. He lifted up the lid of a white box and set the smoker nearby then pulled up one of the trays of combs. It was covered in layers and layers of bees, and they clung on as he raised it high, every bee moving on top of other bees. As he continued to hold it up, the whole mass of them began to change shape and sag with gravity, some dribbling off like drops of liquid back into the box. It was revolting. I had to work hard to not imagine a sudden swarm.
Luke was mesmerized. I didn’t understand what the bees meant to him. The grass we were standing in was itchy and I just wanted Matt to lower the lid so I could go back into the kitchen and sit back down on the floor with their squeaky little boy, but we stayed out there a long time, going from box to box, though they were all the same, always a huge churning drooping clump of bees.
Dinner was to be an herb pasta and salad. Jen brought in basil, rosemary, sage, red lettuce, and a bowlful of misshapen tomatoes from their greenhouse. Matt, Luke, and I were put to chopping, and the kitchen smelled like we were still outside. They were the kind of people who were only inside