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

feeling now, this impatience, the childish urge to reach across the counter and yank Joyful’s dreadlocks? She took the paper and walked to the side yard.

A couple of regular staff, Nick and Steve, helped Alice duct-tape the tops of the cardboard boxes and carefully load each one into the back of her pickup. She tightened a tie-down strap around the bases of the boxes to keep them from sliding around.

“Sorry, Alice,” Nick said, rolling his eyes toward Joyful. He was a nice guy about her age with a handlebar mustache.

“New management while Tim’s in Arizona. Family stuff, I guess.”

Alice shrugged, tried to smile, and failed. She shut the gate of the truck harder than she needed to. It wasn’t Nick’s fault that she’d wasted more than an hour on what was meant to be a fifteen-minute stop, but she wasn’t going to stand around making small talk.

“Thanks, Nick,” she said. “Tell Tim to give me a holler about that honey extractor when he gets back.”

Now on the clogged highway, Alice huffed with annoyance. She reached across the seat and grabbed the bag of mini Chips Ahoy! cookies she knew she shouldn’t have bought at Costco earlier that day. She pulled out a handful of cookies and tossed them into her mouth.

She hated to admit it, but she’d been running late long before she got to Sunnyvale. She stopped at Tillicum Lumberyard and then at Costco, that great behemoth of retail they didn’t have in little Hood River. People shoved past her, and one harassed-looking mother of two banged her cart into Alice’s heels and didn’t even apologize. Alice waited forever in the checkout line, which made her stressed. Then she’d lost an hour waiting for her bees and was now smack in the middle of the afternoon traffic she’d tried so hard to avoid. It was why she’d called ahead two days ago. It was why she’d taken the day off and gotten up early. She tried so hard to have everything organized. It was other people who fouled things up. She felt a bloom of anxiety then. The line of traffic inched along, and her chest felt tight. She cracked the window, but the hot smell of asphalt stung her nostrils, so she shut it again. She looked at the cars on either side of her. Nobody else seemed to mind sitting here. They were all looking at their phones. She gripped the steering wheel, feeling the tightness creep up into her throat. Then she heard Dr. Zimmerman’s calm voice in her head: “Do you know where that feeling comes from, Alice? Can you follow the thread?”

Alice inhaled deeply and flexed her hands. Being still was so hard for her these days. If she stayed focused, kept working, her thoughts couldn’t blindside her. No, Dr. Zimmerman, she thought, she couldn’t follow the thread. Not with 120,000 Russian honeybees in the back of the pickup.

She ate another handful of dusty cookies and glanced in the rearview mirror at the nucleus hives wedged together in the back of the truck. The spring sunshine was mild enough, so she wasn’t worried about the bees getting overheated on the ride home, slow as it was. Once there, she intended to get them hived before sunset. She could do it quickly, all twelve on her own, she was sure. She was efficient and had laid out her tools in the shop the night before, all cleaned and polished. Remembering that made her anxiety rise again. She stayed up late to set things up so she could get back early and install her hives before dark. She took a deep breath, trying to slow her thudding heart. She tossed the cookie bag into the back seat, where she couldn’t reach it.

At the exit for Multnomah Falls, which marked the halfway point to Hood River, Alice saw two cars pulled over on the shoulder—a fender bender, from the looks of it. The lane was cleared by the time she reached it, but everyone was still rubbernecking. Two men stood next to their dinged-up cars talking on their cell phones. Probably some tourist trying to take a photo without the inconvenience of stopping. It happened all the time—people leaning out the window to snap a photo of the 611-foot waterfall.

After the wreck, the highway opened up, and soon she was doing eighty, heading east as the sun dropped behind her. The freedom of movement made her feel calmer. Alice took off her hat and sunglasses. She unhooked one strap of her overalls, an admission that they didn’t really fit anymore, but she didn’t care. She turned up the music—Springsteen’s “Born to Run.”

Alice disliked Portland, with its confusing network of bridges, snarls of traffic, and aggressive panhandlers. But the open road leading away from it, she loved. Basalt cliffs overlapped each other in a view that unfolded mile after mile along the Columbia River. She knew the distinct monoliths by heart—Rooster Rock, Wind Mountain, Beacon Rock. In the early sunset, the green hills and rocky crags were cast in a pink veil. It looked like a painting, like a dream. Alice never grew tired of looking at it, this impossible beauty that she had lived within for forty-four years. She passed a semi and glanced at the wide river on her left. The dark green water was frothy from the wind, whitecaps whipped-up and pushing against the current. She saw a mass of white pelicans resting on a gleaming sandbar and towering Douglas fir trees leaning out over the water. An osprey circled the river, keening. On the right, she saw the headlight of an oncoming train. It passed her, and she heard the whistle blow and recede. The setting sun threw a gauzy light over the water, and Alice felt her body relax.

She took exit 62, slowed, and stopped at the top of the ramp. She rolled down the window, and the cool wind off the Columbia River blew through the truck and teased strands of hair