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

It is with great pleasure that we welcome you into the Cornish College of the Arts community . . .” The words made him giddy. But then, when it came time to send the school a down payment on the balance, his father had refused to lend him the money. Ed wouldn’t listen to his wife’s pleading and barely took his eyes off the TV to respond.

“Music school? Please,” he scoffed. “I was working full time at his age.”

Case closed. Jake didn’t want to think about it, that crushing loss. But under the wail of Gingras’s trumpet, his mind was invaded by questions with no answers that played in an unending loop: What if his father had lent him the money? What if he’d earned more than a 2.3 GPA and gotten the full ride? What if he’d worked a weekend job and saved some money of his own? How pathetic to have this thing he’d so wanted slip away because he hadn’t tried harder a little earlier.

The questions unraveled from there like always, becoming more and more impossible. What if he hadn’t been at Pomeroy’s that day, but had cleaned up the yard for his mom, like she’d asked? Instead he stepped around the rake and leaf bags, promising himself he’d go to the party for an hour and finish the yard before she got home. What if he hadn’t been showing off for Megan Shine? What if he could do it all over again?

Jake turned up the music to drown his thoughts. He hit the bottom of the hill by the Indian Creek Golf Course and threw himself into the climb. The clouds had lifted, and the sky was turning from orange to yellow over the ridgeline. The apple and pear trees had unfurled into an embarrassment of beauty, their blossoms rippling along the valley floor to the foot of snowcapped Mount Hood. The temperature dropped, and Jake inhaled the wet green scent of the irrigated orchards. He could taste the faint, acrid tang of whatever they sprayed on the trees in the back of his throat. He told himself the pesticides were making his eyes sting.

He sailed down the next hill, ignoring the old dude who had stopped his golf cart to gawk at the boy with the mohawk in the wheelchair flying toward the four-way intersection. Don’t worry about me, old man, he thought. The worst has already happened.

Was that true? Maybe the worst thing was that nothing else was going to happen in his miserable life. A month from now, Hood River Valley High School would host another graduation. Class of 2014. Hip, hip hooray! Two hundred young people would move forward in their lives to college or work or at least someplace other than this hick town. He’d been thinking about it all week. It was right there in his face, the anniversary of the day his life stopped. Nice job, Jake. You fucked up. Just like your old man has been saying your whole life. Nice job, fuckup.

The afternoon deepened into dusk, and Jake sped past the old Oak Grove Schoolhouse, which cast long shadows into the apple orchards. Out in the trees he watched lights coming on in the fruit workers’ shacks. He could see figures up on ladders, their shadows lengthening between the rows of trees. He rolled south toward the shape of Mount Hood, which was kissed with alpenglow against the green-yellow horizon.

“Give you a knife and fork and send you on your goddamn, merry way.”

The words echoed in his head, and he turned the music up as loud as it would go. He could smell his sweat, which was different now than it had been before. He smelled like an old man, like someone sick, like a stranger to himself. He tried to focus on the white line of the road, which wasn’t a bike lane this far outside of town in the orchards, just a skinny shoulder.

He fought a flood of images: Megan Shine’s smile and the sun bright on her bikini top. His fingers flying along the valves as he blasted a trumpet solo with his heart in his throat at the state jazz band competition. Watching Noah rip the half-pipe at the skate park. Passing around a can of chew in the back of the band bus. Running after his brindled dog on the sandbar. All of it gone. Those things were part of the life he used to have, the one that was lost to him. His heart ached, and he hated himself for it. He hated the tears that were coursing down his cheeks, which he could no longer pretend were sweat. He hated what he had done to his stupid life and that he had no one else to blame. In that moment he felt broken in a way that could not be undone.

Jake was turned so far inward that he didn’t hear the sound of the pickup truck coming up behind him. He was facing away and wouldn’t have seen one wheel riding inside the white line of the shoulder. A truck whose driver didn’t see the boy in the dusk until the headlights hit the back of his chair. Then Jake heard the squeal of brakes over the sound of the music and everything stopped.

2 Twelve Queens

The queen bee is the only perfect female in the hive, and all the eggs are laid by her.

—L. L. LANGSTROTH

Alice Holtzman would have rated her mood below average even before she hit the wall of traffic creeping down Interstate 84 back to Hood River. She blamed the young imbeciles at Sunnyvale Bee Company in Portland who had mixed up her order, which had delayed her departure and landed her in this late-afternoon sea of cars and trucks. To be more precise, they had lost her order, which was frustrating because Alice was a regular customer at Sunnyvale