The Music of Bees by Eileen Garvin (free ereaders txt) 📗

“Yeah.”

“I’ll go explain,” she said, and jumped out of the truck.

“No, Alice. Wait!”

The boy’s mother marched across the gravel drive, closing the gap between them and pulling her gray cardigan tight around her. Before Alice could fully explain what had happened, she’d moved swiftly toward the truck.

“Jacob, honey! Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Mom,” the boy said. “And it wasn’t Alice’s fault. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Wait. What?” His mother whirled on Alice. “You said you found him. You hit my son?”

She pointed a finger in Alice’s face. “Have you been drinking? What kind of irresponsible—”

“No, that’s not—”

Jake’s mother started yelling then, and Alice raised her voice trying to be heard.

“Ma’am! If you could just calm down, I can—”

The door banged open on the house, and a man strode toward them, his sunburned face clenched with anger.

“What in the hell is going on out here?!” he yelled.

Jake’s mother was now struggling to open the truck tailgate and weeping audibly.

Jake leaned out the window and called back at her. “Mom! Just calm down!”

Alice turned toward the father to reassure him that his son was all right but quickly realized he was simply upset about having his evening interrupted. He leaned down, jabbing a finger in Alice’s face, and said a series of unrepeatable things. Suddenly the kid was right next to her.

“Ed! Shut up!” he yelled. The man sneered down at the boy, spat on the driveway at Alice’s feet, and walked back inside.

“Alice—” Jake said.

She looked at him and didn’t speak. She spun on her heel and strode to the truck.

“Wait!” the kid called.

She climbed behind the wheel and watched Jake pull away from his mother and move toward her. She was overwhelmed by the feeling that she was abandoning him. Ridiculous. She didn’t even know him. She shook off the thought as she drove away. She flew toward home like an errant worker bee trying to find her way to the safety of the hive as darkness took hold of the valley.

6 Hive Siting

A hive of the simplest possible construction, is a close imitation of the abode of bees in a state of nature; being a mere hollow receptacle, where, protected from the weather, they can lay up their stores.

—L. L. LANGSTROTH

The wind banged around the house all night like it was looking for something it had lost. It stole under the windowsills and crept into corners, rattling doorknobs and whistling along the hallway. Alice lay in bed listening. Living there in the valley between the old volcano and the river gorge was to live with the wind. She’d grown up with the near constant westerlies that whipped the river into a froth all summer and pummeled the forests with snow in winter. When she was a girl, she thought of the wind as a live thing like some enormous winged creature galloping across the valley. Some days it danced above the orchards with its voluminous skirts flying about. Other times it was arrow-thin and dove between the storefronts and tight alleyways of the town core. Tonight, the wind was small and fretful, buzzing around like a stray honeybee caught in the corner of the room. It was like a memory, a wish, or a forgotten dream.

She heard the throbbing call of an owl, a sign that dawn was distant and night was still holding sway. She dozed until she awakened to the cooing of the mourning doves that descended in a gray flurry to the chickens’ water trough around 5:00 a.m. Then Red Head Ned, her ever-faithful bantam, began his predawn shouting. It was the wind, the birds, and the chickens that kept her up, she told herself as she came fully awake. Not the boy. She surrendered to wakefulness when that thought arrived and sat squarely on her chest, like a stubborn cat, unwilling to leave. The boy. She swung her feet out of bed and sat up sighing. Of course it was the boy. She’d thought about him all day yesterday at work too.

Alice made coffee and sat, her elbows on the Formica table, looking out across the yard. The kid was clearly fine. The chair was probably okay too, but she hadn’t had time to talk about it before all the yelling had started two nights ago. She understood his mother was just worried about him. She wasn’t even bothered by what the kid’s moronic father had said to her. But she wondered about his well-being. What did Jake do all day? Did he have a job? Go to school? She thought he said he’d graduated from high school. But what did he have to fill up his life? What was life like with a father like that?

“Alice, dearie. What could you do for the boy, anyway?”

She could almost hear her own father’s voice—the quick cadence and the remnants of a German lilt.

“He’s not your responsibility. He has people.”

That was what Al would say. He was one to talk, though. For all his insistence that people should mind their business, Al Holtzman had been a serial philanthropist. He hadn’t gotten involved in people’s problems. He had gotten involved in their solutions. That was what he said. Alice grew to understand that he’d always asked that question—what could you do, anyway?—because if he could see some specific way to help, he would. He assisted in his quiet way, not wanting to draw attention. He paid for Mrs. Travis’s groceries when he was far enough ahead of her white, curly head in line at Little Bit that she wouldn’t hear him, because he knew she was living on a widow’s pension. He dropped off a cord of wood at Tom Connolly’s drafty house one cold fall day, complaining it wouldn’t burn worth a damn. He paid off a lien on Juan Garcia’s auto repair shop. Marina hit the roof about that one. But Al just said