Mrs. Garza reached into her purse and pulled out a folded drawing, a childs crayon picture of a man covered in bees with a big smile, and under it, in careful letters, Thank you Mr. Bee Man.
Our granddaughter drew this, Mr. Garza said in careful English. She is in the second grade at the school in Kerrville. In April, forty thousand bees came into the walls, and the children could not go to class, and everyone said just kill them. But a man came, and he spent three days, and he took every bee out alive, by hand, because he said the bees did not do anything wrong either. Our granddaughter watched from the window. She has not stopped talking about him since.
Erik had gone still at the grill.
Chad called it babysitting the bugs, and a beekeeper spent three days getting forty thousand bees out of a school without killing one, so a room full of children could go back to learning.
The Garzas had only moved in that spring, and my daughter had invited them to the cookout that morning, and they had no idea until Chad stood up and made his joke that the bee man in their granddaughters drawing was sitting right there flipping brisket.
I am Eriks daddy. He passed the potato salad and said pass it back, Chad, and took the joke, because a man who keeps two hundred hives does not get stung by a fellow in a Porsche. Mr. Garza shook my sons hand with both of his, and Mrs. Garza gave Erik the drawing to keep, and he hung it in his honey booth at the market, where it still is.