“Do You Have Anywhere to Go?” — Part 2 (Complete)

“There’s the road, Dorsey,” Hazel said, her voice steady over her honey table.

“I’d take it before my bees take an interest in you.

They’re particular about who comes round the honey, and they can smell a thing gone bad.

For one long, suspended moment, nobody at that harvest gathering made a sound.

Then somewhere near the cider barrels, a laugh broke loose, followed by another, and within seconds the whole crowd was laughing — not at Hazel, not this time, not in the way Bonham had laughed and whispered at her a year before, but at Dorsey Lott, standing there with his hand still half-extended toward a woman who had just handed him, plainly and publicly, the exact humiliation he’d once handed her.

Dorsey’s face went red, then white, then red again.

He looked around at the crowd he’d been so certain would witness his triumphant return, and found instead nothing but amused, unsympathetic faces watching him fail.

He mounted his horse without another word and rode off down the same road Hazel had once sat upon with nowhere left to go, and in that country, he was not much spoken of again, except as a cautionary tale mothers told their daughters about men who mistake a woman’s kindness for weakness.

Micah Hart, who had come up quiet behind Hazel partway through the whole exchange and stood at her shoulder without saying a word, waited until Dorsey’s dust had settled on the road before he spoke.

“When Dorsey was gone,” he said, “you didn’t need me for that at all.

”

“No,” Hazel agreed, setting a jar of honey back on her table with hands that weren’t shaking, not even a little.

“But I was glad you were there.

There’s a difference.

I spent my whole life needing someone to stand between me and the next bad thing.

It’s a finer feeling to fight your own and just be glad of the company at your back.

”

Micah didn’t say anything more about it right then.

But that evening, once the crowds from the harvest gathering had thinned and the light had gone gold and low across the orchard, he found her among the trees, checking the last of the hives before dusk, and asked her to marry him properly.

“I asked you once, did you have anywhere to go,” he said, turning an apple over slowly in his hands the way he did when he was working up to something.

“And I told you now you do, and I meant it plain — a room, a wage, your bees back.

That was all I had the right to offer a woman I’d just watched get her heart broken in front of the whole town.

I’ve been a year wanting to offer you the rest of it, and not daring, for fear you’d think it was the deal all along.

Which it never was.

”

Hazel stood very still among the humming trees, listening.

“But you faced Dorsey Lott down today without a hand from me,” Micah went on, “and chose this place with your eyes open, no one left to fall back on.

So now I reckon I can ask, and you can answer free.

” He took her hands then, sticky as they still were with honey from the day’s work.

“I don’t want a beekeeper for my orchard, Hazel.

I want you for my life.

Marry me.

Not because you’ve nowhere else to go — you could keep bees anywhere in this county, and they’d line up to have you.

Marry me because there’s an orchard here that’s yours, and a man who’s been yours since about the day he found you on that rock.

” He almost smiled, the apple still turning slowly in his free hand.

“You bit my apple under these trees a while back and didn’t give it back.

I’ve been hoping ever since that meant what I thought it did.

”

Hazel Lyndon, who had once stood at an altar and been handed a note instead of a husband, looked at the plain orchardman asking her plainly beneath the very trees her bees had saved, and found the answer was the easiest thing she had ever said in her life.

“I stood up to be married once,” she told him, “and a coward sent a boy.

And then a decent man rode out and found me on a rock and asked did I have anywhere to go, and gave me bees and a door that locks and a year to remember I was worth something — and never once pressed for a thing in return.

” She looked at him steadily.

“You want to know what the bitten apple meant, Micah Hart? It meant yes.

It’s meant yes since the harvest.

Ask me proper, and hear it.

”

He asked her proper.

She said yes beneath the loaded trees, with the bees going home to their hives all around them in the last of the gold evening light, and neither one of them had ever felt more certain of anything in their lives.

They married that autumn, in a ceremony that could not have looked more different from the one that had once left her standing alone in a borrowed wedding dress.

There was no crowded church full of pitying faces this time, no note carried up an aisle by a frightened boy.

There was the orchard itself, heavy with fruit, and the hum of bees Hazel had brought back from nothing, and a town that had once whispered about her now standing quietly, respectfully, glad to be included in something they understood, at last, they had no right to have doubted.

Hazel Hart kept the bees and the orchard famous across three counties for the rest of her life.

The dark orchard honey sold before she could finish putting it up each season, and the fruit grew so heavy every autumn that the trees needed propping year after year, a small miracle repeated so often it stopped feeling miraculous and started simply feeling like home.

She trained up every motherless or castaway girl the county ever sent her way in the gentle art of the hives, because she had never forgotten what it meant to carry a gift with no place left to use it, and she made certain, for the rest of her days, that no other woman in Bonham would have to sit on a stone by the road wondering if there was anywhere left for her to go.

She and Micah raised a house full of children beneath those same apple trees, and when the children were old enough to understand it, Hazel told them the story of the wedding she never had — not as a tragedy, but as the truest piece of luck of her entire life.

“The worst day I ever stood through,” she’d tell them, sitting under the trees in the evening light with honey still faintly sweet on her hands, “turned out to be the road to the very best one.

A girl jilted by a fool is only a girl set free to be found by a good man — if she can just sit on the rock long enough to be found.

”

And that was the story of Hazel Lyndon, the bride left waiting at the altar with nowhere on earth left to go, who was asked one plain question by an orchard man on a country road, and answered no — and heard him say, now you do — and found, at the end of all of it, her bees, her worth, and a home she was never once jilted from again.