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

Pomeroy’s garage was the perfect man cave, with two old couches, a Ping-Pong table, a beer fridge, and a beefy sound system. His mother let him take it over after she divorced his father. Jake’s heart rose as he remembered being there. Shooting the shit, drinking beer, and taking leads on his trumpet.

“I’m sure I could still kick your ass at Ping-Pong, Stevenson.”

Jake shrugged.

“I’ll give you a handicap,” Noah teased, bumping Jake’s chair with his knee. “Just to be fair.”

Jake tried to smile, knowing his friend didn’t mean to be unkind. But then he said, “Dude, you know that isn’t really funny, right?”

Noah flushed red to the tips of his ears and looked stricken. “Fuck, Stevenson. I’m sorry. I just—”

Jake punched him in his side to cut him off. “I know,” he said. “I just don’t want to have to kick your ass.”

Relief flooded his friend’s face.

“I’ll think about Pomeroy’s,” Jake said.

Celia leaned across the seat and poked Noah in the side. “I thought you were in a big hurry, wey!” she said.

“Text me if you want a ride, bro,” Noah said. He bumped Jake’s fist and folded his big body behind the wheel and left.

Jake sat at the kitchen window watching the golden bodies flit toward the neighbor’s orchard. He thought about hanging out in Pomeroy’s garage. All the guys staring and pretending not to. It was too much. Never mind that he hadn’t picked up his trumpet in forever.

He put in his earbuds and scrolled through the music on his phone. There was nothing he wanted to listen to there, so he took them out again. He realized how often he’d been blocking out the sound of his parents moving around the house. It was so quiet at Alice’s, and there was so much more to listen to. Just sitting there he could hear the wind in the trees, the cluck of the chickens. A bee buzzed past the screen door and flew away.

He opened the recipe app on his phone and pulled the kale out of the fridge and set it on the cutting board.

“Sissy,” Celia had called over her shoulder at Noah.

“Sissy,” Ed hissed in his mind.

His father would not be impressed that Jake was learning to cook. Ed hated everything that didn’t seem outwardly masculine in the most redneck sense. Men drove trucks, drank beer, ruled the roost, and hunted in the fall. Manual labor was a thing to be admired, but only if it took place outside the walls of the house. As for his wife’s daily cooking, cleaning, and managing of the household, that was simply expected, even though she worked full time too. Jake had never once heard his father thank her for making dinner or offer to clean up.

“Sissy,” his father said when he had come home to find twelve-year-old Jake practicing an ollie in the driveway on his new skateboard.

He had lit a cigarette. “You should be playing football, not messing around on that stupid thing.”

Jake didn’t tell his father that there was no football team in seventh grade. Nor did he mention that some of the best Olympic snowboarders, like Shaun White, had started out on skateboards. His father probably thought snowboarding was stupid too.

By the time he was in high school, he was riding a longboard, the one his mom had brought over, and it had been his freedom. It got him to school, the skate park, and Katz’s house. That board was still precious to him, even though he couldn’t ride it now. It sat in the corner of his room at Alice’s. Would that make Ed happy?

He put the chili on low to simmer. With the afternoon ahead of him, he decided to go through the new hives again. And when Alice got home that evening, he would confess.

The inspection took him the better part of the afternoon. As he worked, he reflected that his time with them was growing short. The bees had already built out these first brood boxes almost to capacity. Soon Alice would add another brood box to each so the bees could make more wax comb for the brood. Then the hives would be too tall for him to open while sitting in his chair. He was becoming adept at spotting eggs, uncapped larvae, capped larvae, and drone and worker brood. The art of locating the queen was like a game. Listen, find the G-sharp sound, open the hive, and find the queen. His chest swelled with pride each time he managed to locate her.

The sound was the same with every hive. Last night he had found a reference on the Internet to explain it. A researcher at Washington State University had verified that queens had a tone all their own—G-sharp/A-flat. Why that same tone? he wondered. Was she singing to her children or to herself, and what was she saying?

He worked his way through the hives without issue, and then something weird happened when he got to Hive No. 23. He had to strain to find the sound. And when he opened the hive and looked inside, his stomach dropped. The queen was on the fifth frame, but she seemed lethargic. Her attendants were circling her, cleaning her body and her wings. Her buzz was intermittent and weak. Jake shut the hive with a cold feeling in his gut. No. 24 was worse. There was no queen sound, and he could not find her long, tapered figure among the vibrating mass of workers.

A layer of sweat sprang up on his scalp and upper lip. What had he done? He should have just left them alone. Fuck. Alice was going to be so pissed. Without the queens, these two new hives were doomed.

She had patted No. 23 the first day she had shown him the hives.

“You girls are the future,” Jake had heard her say. “You just do your thing and I’ll keep you safe.”

Jake spent the next couple of hours online looking