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

and breath at the same time. He didn’t know what else to say. Alice’s face wore the look he’d seen on other people’s faces his whole life: “dumbass.” He could already imagine the conversation with his mother, which would end with her offering bus fare to Florida. He’d ride back across the country on a smelly Greyhound like the one he’d taken west in February. Sal would be pissed off but would let him move in. Then what would he do?

But now Ronnie was talking.

“We had a big party for Abuela and Abuelo’s fiftieth last month at Aunt Connie’s,” he was saying. “We missed you. Man it was something! We did a whole roasted goat, you know. Birria and all that. Everyone was there but you and . . .”

He faltered and then finished, “Everyone but you.”

Alice just looked at him but didn’t say anything. Ronnie, who barely looked old enough to shave, had just turned twenty-one when his uncle died and Alice had only seen him once or twice since—at the funeral, of course, and once near the post office last winter, when she’d crossed the street to avoid being seen by her dead husband’s family. She didn’t return their calls and had pulled the shades when they drove to the house, which they’d stopped doing months ago. She watched Ronnie, her face blank, as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He turned his deputy’s hat over and over in his hands.

She heard the crunch of Jake’s wheelchair on the gravel behind her. Ronnie looked over Alice’s shoulder at the young man with the mohawk in the wheelchair. Confusion passed across his face and then embarrassment as the silence bore down on them all. His eyes lit upon the beehives, and he smiled, as if grateful for something to talk about.

“Oh! The bees! How are your bees doing, Auntie?”

Ronnie’s mother, Evangelina, was from Michoacán, like so many Mexican immigrants to the valley. Consequently Ronnie was short and dark, but his dad was Buddy’s older brother, Ron. And when he smiled, her nephew looked so much like her dead husband that she could barely stand to look at him. He beamed at her now and pointed at the hives. She thought of her first hive, now dead along the western fence line, and how Buddy had brought it to her parents’ house that Saturday after the fair. Buddy laughing at himself in his bulky bee suit. Buddy tap-dancing across the yard in it to make her laugh. Alice’s heart, which had folded in two at the sight of her nephew, now broke wide open.

She put her hands on her knees and struggled to breathe. The feeling came crashing down on her, and she couldn’t get away. She felt the hole inside her open up right there in the driveway. Her darling Buddy. The stupid, pointless circumstances of his death. Alice felt herself split in two, and her anguish poured out. It was a primal, animal grief.

Ronnie froze, and Harry looked ready to run. The sounds that spilled from Alice’s mouth didn’t seem like English or even quite human. The two young men were at a complete loss—both silent and terrified.

But Jake was unafraid. Sitting behind her in the driveway, he heard only her terrible sorrow. He recognized very clearly that Alice was in pain, which was something like the others probably couldn’t. He pushed his chair forward until he was right beside her. Then he reached out and took her by the wrist with his slender hand.

“Hey, Alice. Take a breath.”

He didn’t raise his voice, and he didn’t have to.

She fell silent. She looked down at Jake and then back at her nephew.

“Buddy,” she said.

Her legs failed, and the ground caught her. She put her hands over her face and wept like a child, like she hadn’t since that day the state police came to her front door and told her that her funny, kind husband had been in an accident and pronounced dead at the scene. It washed over her again, the terrible loss that opened up and opened up until it was impossible to contain. It had finally flooded her life.

Jake put his hand on her shoulder and patted her lightly. Alice sat in the driveway and wept with the sun shining down and the thoughtless beauty of spring swelling around them.

“It’s okay, Alice,” he murmured. “It’s gonna be okay.”

It was all he could think of to say, but in that moment, it was enough. His mother had said the same thing to him, over and over again last year as she sat next to his hospital bed. He hadn’t believed her then, but it had helped somehow, to hear it.

Jake knew what it felt like when you finally understood that the life you had was gone and you would never, ever get it back. For him, it had come in a brutal moment, early in rehab, when he lay on a therapy mat, drenched in sweat and trying to relearn how to sit up on his own. That day he had felt like a broken version of himself.

He had lived with that loss for more than a year now. Every morning the sight of the chair would bring it all back. His old life was gone, and he would never be okay again. But that wasn’t the truth at all. Now Jake understood that his life had been shifting imperceptibly for months. He didn’t feel broken, and he hadn’t for some time. He was becoming something else. Sitting there with Alice, he realized he had come out the other side. His reference point for the accident had been “before.” Now there was “after.” His after was the farm. His after was the bees. His after was helping his new friend Alice bear her terrible sorrow simply because he could.

Alice sat with her face in her hands, her shoulders heaving. The three young men looked at each other and didn’t speak. They just waited, not knowing what