Page 13 of Happy Trails & Honey Pots

AJ made a scrunched-up face. “Water?”

“What? I like water. It’s good for you.”

Zoe came back with a glass of water as Walter was telling me stories about Austin as a kid. He sounded like a handful. He liked to play pranks and got in his fair bit of trouble. Some were fairly innocent, but there were more serious incidents, like driving a tractor into one of the canals and getting it stuck when he was eight and herding fifty cows into the downtown area when he was ten.

“But all that stopped when he met his Zoe.” A sad smile pulled on Walter’s face. “All that energy he spent on gettin’ in trouble, he just transferred it all into his love for her. I thought I’d be bailin’ him out of jail before he could drive, but she got him on the straight and narrow. Once he met her, that’s all he cared about.”

“Tell him about the honey, Mom.”

“I don’t…it doesn’t…” She shook her head.

“That’s how my dad asked my mom to be his girlfriend. He made her a pot of honey.” AJ took a big bite of macaroni and cheese.

“He made it?” I repeated, sure that AJ must be mistaken.

Zoe sighed. “The summer before my sixth-grade year and Austin’s eighth, I volunteered for a reading program in the library where I read to four and five-year-olds. He was there doing community service because he’d egged the library.”

“Told you, he was a rascal,” Walter chimed in.

“Anyway, I guess he saw me reading to the kids and heard me telling them that Winnie the Pooh was my favorite book. How much I loved it, that I had all the stuffed animals, and I’d alwayswanted a pot of my own honey. So, I guess…well, Walter you can tell this part.”

“So now that was in June,” Walter continued. “He came home that day sayin’ he needed to get him some bees to make honey. Now, it just so happens that Lincoln Rooney, who I served with, is a beekeeper. He’s got him a whole farm up near Charleston in South Carolina. An apiary, he calls it. Anyhow, I called him up and told him what the boy was talking about, and I drove him on up there. Figured it might keep him outta trouble here. Austin worked there for six weeks that summer to get that jar of honey; got stung somethin’ awful.”

“I didn’t know anything about this.” Zoe smiled as she shook her head. “Since he was older than me, I’d always known him, but he hadn’t known me. I had a crush on him, but I guess he didn’t know I existed until that day in the library. So, the first day of school, I show up and am walking down the halls, and Austin James, an eighth grader, comes up to me with a pot of honey, and he said that I was the sweetest thing he’d ever seen, so he had to get me the sweetest thing he could think of. I thought it was a joke or one of his pranks, but it wasn’t. He really liked me. He asked me to be his girlfriend a week later, and the rest is…” Her voice trailed off, and tears pooled in her eyes. She wiped them away. “Well, you know the rest.”

Walter and AJ continued telling stories about Austin all through dinner. Walter’s were firsthand. AJ’s were ones that he’d heard from the men he called uncles, Harlan Mitchell and Jack Dawson. Zoe didn’t say another word.

We didn’t only discuss Austin. I learned that AJ was dyslexic, something that he and I shared in common. We talked about how frustrating school was and how much of a relief it was to find out there was a reason behind our behavior. I also learned that Walter’s daughter, Austin’s mom, never returned afterabandoning Austin, and Walter learned she passed away a few years after Austin did.

Once dinner was over, AJ went upstairs to finish his homework, but on the down-low, he told me he was going to play video games, and Walter retired to his room.

“You really don’t have to do this,” Zoe said for about the sixth time as I rinsed off a plate in the sink.

I’d insisted on helping clean up despite the fact that I was pretty sure I was overstaying my welcome. I couldn’t help it. I just didn’t want to leave. Tonight was the first time in a long time I could remember feeling…anything.

“You cooked. You shouldn’t have to clean, too.”

She let out a forced laugh. “Says who?”

I glanced at her over my shoulder. “Me.”

She sucked in a shaky breath as a flush rose on her cheeks. I turned back around, liking the fact that I’d been the one to put color in her face.

I heard her behind me wrapping up food. “So, did you have a big family growing up?”

“No. It was just me and my mom.”

“Oh.”

“What about you? Did you have a big family?”

“Just me and my parents.”

“So, we’re both only children.”

“Yep.”

There was a beat of silence as I rinsed out the dish the macaroni and cheese had been in. “The dinner was really delicious,” I told her again.

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