The Hive and the Honey by Paul Yoon

Author:Paul Yoon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books
Published: 2023-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Harry never found out who the kid was or what exactly had happened to him. He didn’t know if there had indeed been a father or a car, if they ever found a car. He looked for news online about a neighborhood incident the following day and the whole week but there was nothing mentioned. He even asked a policeman who stopped in, a different one, who wanted a coffee. Harry explained. The policeman picked up a few of the pens on the counter and said that he was sorry, it wasn’t his case, but that it seemed Harry had done everything right.

Harry wasn’t sure what the policeman meant.

Grace was better at finding things on the internet, but she came up with nothing as well. “Forget about it,” she said, and moved on to whatever it was she was watching on her phone in bed.

Maybe Harry himself had watched too many of those TV shows the kids liked lately. He felt a small knot inside him he wanted to pick at but couldn’t reach. He wondered if the kid’s memory had come back. He wondered if the father was sick or into drugs or both. When Harry was a child, a man had approached his father one day and asked if he was “right in the head.” He was delivering plants to the restaurant down the street the day before it opened and he had dropped a box. It wasn’t the box, though, but because his father hardly spoke and people wondered if he was mute.

What was right about the head? Harry thought.

The next day, Harry asked Grace to cover for him and walked down to the restaurant on the same street as their shop. The owner, John, was sitting at a table, preparing takeout kits, placing chopsticks and napkins into plastic bags. If he was surprised to see Harry, he didn’t show it. Harry himself was surprised to find that John’s hair had grown more gray. How long had it been? John had lived not far from the home and garden shop—he had even gone to the Freddie Mercury tribute concert with them—but they hadn’t seen much of each other since Grace’s mother left for Arizona.

Harry brought up the cousin.

“He’s no longer working at the hotel,” John said.

He proceeded to tell Harry that his cousin had slipped on a step last winter and shattered his hip. The hotel couldn’t keep him on, so he had gone farther north, to York. “We send him what we can,” John said.

He asked if Harry was looking to get a deal at the hotel again, but Harry didn’t go on. Instead, he flipped through the menu and ordered lunch for Grace, pretending not to notice that John was looking at him. He knew John was wondering why they hadn’t come by in a while, not even for a dinner at the restaurant. He waited for John to say something like he was angry, upset, or confused, but John only smiled and kept going with his takeout kits.

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