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

without focusing too long on one person. She had delegated the grill to the biggest guy, named Hootie, who ran a food cart somewhere in Portland. He looked like he could have picked Moira up in one hand and flipped burgers with the other. Clearly the alpha. The others surrounded him, all bragging about their afternoon river sessions.

It felt like high school all over again, only it was the kayakers instead of the football team. Harry had never managed the macho camaraderie necessary to fit in. Instead he went to the shop after school when he didn’t want to go home to an empty house. Mr. O’Brien, the crusty old shop teacher, had shown him how to use every tool—the table saw, the chop saw, the jointer, the planer, and the router. But nobody under thirty knew what a router was. Making dovetail joints was definitely not as cool as shredding Class V white water.

In his uncle’s wool shirt and his dirty pants, Harry felt like Bilbo Baggins when the trolls were about to make a meal of him. He sat by the bonfire and sipped his beer, morose, and thought of the long journey back up Highway 141 to BZ. What an idiot to think someone like Moira could actually like him. She had offered to lend him a bike, at least—an old Schwinn her last roommate had left behind.

Moira was giggling at something Hootie said. Harry would not be crashing on her couch, as she had suggested earlier. He could see there would be lots of competition for that. Harry stood and stepped out of the light of the bonfire into the shadows. He walked around to the side of the house, grabbed the old Schwinn, and rode away.

The wind rose in the dark and blew over him like a blessing as he climbed the highway toward Uncle H’s trailer. He felt better and realized that being alone wasn’t always bad. Sometimes being by yourself was better than keeping the wrong company. He felt happy, choosing that. He still had no clear plan, no job, and no friends here. But it was okay. Somehow, he knew it was going to be okay. And he would go see his uncle at the hospital tomorrow.

The wind gusted and buffeted the bike. Harry, who rarely had confidence in his ability to make good choices, felt briefly, wildly happy and didn’t know why. He looked up at the sky above the highway. A band of stars shimmered in the long corridor of trees. He could hear branches creak and groan as the wind blew through the forest, building in force as a front moved through the deep river gorge. He thought of the kites and the white froth of waves out on the wide green river. He rode twelve miles uphill and didn’t even feel tired.

He dismounted at Uncle H’s mailbox and walked down the rutted road to the trailer eating a River Daze kitchen sink cookie, his last bittersweet taste of the day with Moira. He made a list in his head of the good and bad things that had happened and thought about how he would write them down in his notebook. He leaned the bike against a tree, climbed the ladder, and stood at the door, looking up at the stars before crawling into bed. He didn’t feel the eyes on him in the dark just beyond the first row of trees. Watching. Hungry.

8 Bee Space

Requisites of a complete hive . . .

5. Not one unnecessary motion should be required of a single bee.

—L. L. LANGSTROTH

Alice awoke with a crick in her neck and a sense of foreboding. She hadn’t slept well, listening for sounds from the guest room indicating that the boy might need help. Though she hadn’t heard anything, her worry kept her vigilant. It was like when her mother was in hospice and Alice had spent those last weeks sleeping on the couch in her parents’ town house. Even though there was a night nurse on duty, Alice only dozed for a few hours at a time with an ear turned to her mother’s room. One night Alice fell into a heavy sleep, and the nurse shook her awake to tell her that Marina had passed.

Last night she had listened, heard nothing, and asked herself again just what in the hell she’d been thinking bringing the kid home with her. It was so unlike her, so impulsive. And getting up in Ed Stevenson’s grill! It just wasn’t her way. She didn’t involve herself in other people’s dramas. Well, apparently, she did, because she hadn’t paused to think. It was like stepping off a dry bank and entering a rushing river before gauging its depths.

Not a mile from the Stevensons’ driveway, the white heat had evaporated and the victorious rush of confronting a bully had drained out of her like air from a birthday balloon. For one thing, her threat of calling her brother-in-law was a bluff. Though Ron Ryan was, in fact, the Hood River County Sheriff, he hadn’t spoken to Alice in months and would not have picked up the phone if she’d called. And though it was true that she was looking to hire someone, she didn’t have a job for Jake. She needed someone able-bodied to help her on the farm. Someone who could lift heavy things and dig holes.

And the idea of offering room-and-board—where in the hell had that come from?

She heard her parents’ voices in her head.

“Aggressively compassionate!” Al hooted. “That’s my girl.”

“Pot, kettle, black,” said Marina.

She had glanced at Jake, who sat with his head back and his eyes closed, smiling, and bit the inside of her cheek in frustration at herself.

Once they had arrived at the farm, it seemed like the right thing to invite the kid to stay the night. She made dinner and they managed an awkward conversation that expressly