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

slept. His eyes had lit on the handle as he scoured the trailer for any remaining supplies. Bingo! A jar of peanut butter, three Hershey bars, two loaves of unfortunately moldy bread, a box of saltines, and a quart of whiskey.

He shivered in the cold damp of the trailer, went outside, and sat on the steps in the morning sunlight with a plate of peanut butter crackers. He held up the whiskey, unscrewed the cap, and took a swig of the golden liquid. It burned all the way down his throat. He coughed and put the lid back on, realizing the impracticality of getting drunk while waiting for the library to open so he could check his email. He brushed his teeth and examined his face in the chipped mirror.

In many ways, Harry’s twenty-four-year-old face was the same face he’d had as a child. His kindergarten photo showed a small boy with red-brown hair, a sprinkling of freckles across alabaster skin, and a worried brow. His pale blue eyes stared out of the frame, uncertain. Surely, he was being admonished to smile, but his lips were pinched in a straight line. The neutral expression made him look old-fashioned, like a miniature man in daguerreotype. His mother laughed when she saw it.

“You look just like my paw paw!” she exclaimed.

If everyone had a core, Harry’s was five years old—skinny, not brave, but not a tattletale. He didn’t ask for help, not wanting to be a bother. He suffered through things. He attached himself to people in a quiet way, hoping they wouldn’t notice, just wanting to belong. All the way through school, he was the boy just outside the circle, making enough noise to fit in but not stand out.

However, as the episode with the stolen TVs had shown, Harry was not what you’d call a great judge of character when it came to friends. Sam had come to see him once. He thanked Harry profusely for not ratting him out and promised to visit often. Harry hadn’t heard from him after that. Marty never bothered to come at all. It took six more months of silence from his supposed pals for it to sink in that Marty and Sam had never been allies. He had known them since high school but couldn’t remember a single kindness either of them had ever done him. He lay on his bunk at night, his face burning with the shame of it. They didn’t even like him. What a dope.

He met with his lawyer then and handed over their names, an act that reduced Harry’s sentence considerably. He walked out of the Stonybrook Correctional Facility after nine months, still skinny, still not brave, and now a tattletale.

His lawyer tried to help him see it another way. “What would Sam and Marty do in your shoes, Harry?”

Harry knew they would have thrown him under the bus. The realization shocked him—not that his friends weren’t trustworthy, but what he’d been doing his whole life. He’d always been the fall guy. No, the problem with Harry’s life was Harry. He knew that. He needed to change. He just didn’t know how.

“Follow your bliss!”

His teachers had been saying that since the sixth grade.

What did that mean? Did everyone else really sense some Oprah-like compass directing their lives?

“Work, Harry. Hard work, son. That’s my passion,” his mother said, when he’d been assigned to write about the power of personal passion for school. She pushed her hair out of her eyes with a gloved wrist and opened the tailgate of the truck.

“And pink zinfandel. Now help me unload these trees.”

Sal was no help either.

“My passion is blondes, kiddo. Like your mama,” he said, and winked.

Harry wrote his paper about having a passion for long-line trolling, which really didn’t interest him at all. He got a C+.

Forget about passion. Harry’s problem was far simpler and more daunting. How do you move forward? All he knew after a stint in jail, a cross-country bus trip, and two months in the woods was that he still had no idea how to direct his own life. Harry sighed and ran his fingertips across his upper lip. He needed to get his shit together.

He thought of Uncle H and felt a wave of guilt. He hadn’t gone to see him at the hospital yesterday as planned. He’d gotten as far as calling, but the nurse said she couldn’t release patient information outside the family. He hung up without saying he was family, the only family in the area. He should have gone straight to the hospital then, but he didn’t. Why he didn’t was another question he simply couldn’t answer, and really the same question that had dogged him his entire life—like the lunch money, the bike, the heist, his general failure to thrive. Why was Harry a passenger in the vehicle that was his life?

He washed up in the frigid eddy behind the house and hopped on the old Schwinn, which was rickety but faster than hitchhiking. The cool wind on his face cheered him. He rode the two-lane highway, swerving back and forth between the lanes as he went. He heard the chug of a big engine behind him and moved right to make way. As a logging truck blew past, he swerved to miss a pile of red and brown that he realized was something dead, a dog or a coyote. Harry could see its head and face intact like it was smiling above the torn body. He gagged as he passed and wished he could unsee it.

There was nobody in the little library in BZ besides the librarian, who nodded at Harry and said good morning. She gave him the computer log-in code, which hadn’t changed in the two months he’d been coming, but neither of them acknowledged that. He opened his email, and his stomach dropped at the five messages from his mother. They all had the same subject line: “Call me!”

He sighed and didn’t open those messages.

He scrolled down,