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

Too nice.

Why had she been doing Bill’s job for him instead of demanding a promotion? Staying after the Labor Day picnic to clean up. Volunteering for the high school football team fund-raiser every year when she was the only employee without kids. Sitting there at the booth all day in the rain, and she hated football.

Too nice. Too nice to say no.

Her face flushed with shame. No, too afraid to say no. Afraid to stand up for herself and speak her mind. Afraid of being herself.

She had never understood it so clearly before. But now it was all she could see. She had felt the shape of it that night she confronted Ed Stevenson. It was buried way down deep, that white heat, the anger that had seemed to come from nowhere. Alice was deeply angry at having pretended to be someone she wasn’t for so long. Why would she do that? Just to avoid making other people uncomfortable, like Rich Carlson? She saw his ferret face, his comb-over. Fury rose up in her like a wall of fire. How dare she fail her parents that way. How dare she fail herself.

She kept walking past the waterfront beach. She climbed down the rocky bank and out onto the wide sandbar that spilled into the confluence of the Hood and Columbia Rivers. She hiked around the big logs and boulders that had tumbled down from Mount Hood in flood after flood. That powerful rushing water had pushed those obstacles down the mountain one mile at a time. The wind stung her face as a squall blew in from the west. When she reached the end of the sandbar, she stood in the spattering rain and let it all spill over—her anger, sorrow, loss, and despair. That was where the thread took her, Dr. Zimmerman.

She named it all: Buddy, her parents, the orchard, the children she might have had, and the irrevocable passage of time. She let it all course through her, everything she had lost and could never retrieve. Her body throbbed with the understanding that she was alone in the world. She had been alone before Bud and now would be until she died. Alice Island, drawbridge up. Alice All Alone.

But she hadn’t minded before, had she? That was essentially who she was in her core. Just Alice. So it would be okay. Yes, she thought, her breath slowing. She could be content with that, content with exactly who she was. She could be herself. She would belong wholly to herself. And like water from a turned-off faucet, the anxiety just stopped. She could feel the clean edges of her grief, but it was a contained, manageable thing. Alice stood at the river’s edge, not caring how she might look—a pudgy, middle-aged woman bawling her head off in the middle of a spring rain shower.

The knot loosened in her chest and released its grip in her throat. She saw them all lined up in her mind’s eye—Buddy, Marina, and Al. They had all loved her. That still mattered. And they expected her to be herself. Then the last bit of fear flew away like a balloon cut from a string. She smiled, wiped her eyes, and laughed. She felt 100 percent Alice Holtzman—daughter of Al and Marina, wife of Buddy Ryan, and keeper of bees. She was very much herself, and she was deeply pissed off.

She reached into her pocket, pulled out her phone, and dialed.

“Hello, Stan,” she said. “It’s Alice Holtzman. Do you have time for coffee?”

16 Colony Collapse

If the Apiarian keeps his stocks strong, they will usually be their own best protectors, and, unless they are guarded by thousands ready to die in their defence, they are ever liable to fall a prey to some of their many enemies.

—L. L. LANGSTROTH

The guiding principle of the hive was order, Jake understood. And the first element to be ordered was food. A queen could lay upward of two thousand eggs a day, but if the harvesters didn’t locate enough nectar and pollen, those eggs simply wouldn’t survive. The second element of order was cooperation. The most experienced bees, the foragers, often visited several thousand flowers in a single day in the course of collecting resources for the colony. The house bees were responsible for delivering that food to the nurse bees, who fed the eggs, larvae, and callow bees. The queen’s retinue kept her fed and clean so she could keep doing the work she needed to do. It was a perfect system of interdependence, a high-functioning, interconnected household.

Not unlike humans, Jake thought as he chopped kale for white bean chicken chili. In his family home, he had never felt a sense of cooperation. It almost felt like the three of them lived together separately. But at Alice’s, once he started cooking, he felt like he was making a contribution. They had eaten together every night at the dining room table since Jake had moved in. He liked sitting down with her at the end of the day and talking about the bees. He was also surprised to find that he had a knack for cooking. No matter that Noah was now calling him “la dueña de la casa.”

“All you need is a flowered apron, man!” Noah teased when Jake offered him a dish of flan—one of Celia’s family recipes.

Celia elbowed Noah, accepted her plate graciously, and handed Jake a small package wrapped in tissue paper. He opened it to find a retablo of St. Pasqual painted on hammered tin—the patron saint of kitchens, Celia explained.

“From my mom,” she said, rolling her eyes. “‘Cada cocina lo necesita, mi’ja,’” she said, her voice rising to imitate her bossy little mother. “You’re supposed to hang it near the stove.”

Under that there was a second retablo, this one from Celia—St. Deborah.

“Patron saint of bees,” she said, smiling shyly.

Noah, meanwhile, was wolfing down the