“I washed my hands before I left the restaurant!” Helen insisted, sounding offended, then wrinkled their nose. “But actually, my tip money is filthier than the deep fryer.”

They washed their hands, then slumped into a kitchen chair and pulled a pipe and a bag of weed from the space between two cookbooks in the corner of the retro kitchen table.

“How was work, dear?” Veronica trilled.

“Terrible as always, darling. How are the bees?”

“Wonderful. And Greta didn’t even scream or run away when she met them.”

Greta’s stomach fell. “Did you think I would?”

Veronica snorted.

“No. That’s what I did,” Helen confessed. “I didn’t scream, thank you. I might have cried out, but I am not in the habit of being swarmed.”

“First of all, that’s not what Jenna’s sex party friends tell me, and second of all, you were decidedly not swarmed. Three bees flew toward you and you ran like…like some member of the Saints whose job it is to run really fast.”

Greta had the vague idea that the Saints were a football team but wasn’t entirely sure.

“An-y-ways,” Helen said, “I’m glad we have honey, and do you want?” They held up the freshly packed pipe.

“Sure.” Greta took it from her.

“Blow the smoke away from the honey, please,” said Veronica.

Helen rolled their eyes at Greta but nodded.

By the time they finished the bowl, the beeswax was ready, and Veronica took a silicone mini muffin tin from the shelf.

“Hold this cheesecloth on here?” she asked, and Greta did.

The water had mostly boiled out, leaving Veronica pouring the melted beeswax through the cheesecloth, which caught a skin of impurities.

“I love this part,” Helen said.

With a practiced hand, Veronica poured the clean beeswax into the muffin cups. “Now, we just let it cool, and we have fresh beeswax,” she said triumphantly.

She had already moved the honey on to strain through the finer strainer, and now she poured it into two jars. One of the jars she slid into the cupboard next to the window. The other jar she wrote something on and handed to Greta.

“Huh?”

The lid said V’s Kick-Ass Honey and the date.

“You helped. You get honey.”

“Seriously?” Warmth suffused Greta like a hug. “That’s…wow. Thank you. I love it.”

She felt surprisingly overwhelmed, holding in her hand the precious distillation of the work of flowers and earth, sun and bees, Veronica and heat and knowledge.

“So what are we making with this batch of wax?” Helen asked, rescuing Greta.

“Dunno yet.”

“Dang, I wish I wrote letters. Then I could make cool seals out of beeswax and stamp them with my initials. It’d be awesome,” Helen mused.

“Well, write someone a letter then,” Veronica suggested.

“Ugh, no.” Helen looked horrified and Greta laughed.

“Do you put the king cakes in boxes?” Greta asked.

“Yeah, why?”