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

around her face. She could smell the water, the pines along the road, and the faint scent of woodsmoke. She could smell the distinct green breath of spring. She passed the Red Carpet Tavern, its roof sagging sadly, and noted that the parking lot, as usual, was full of pickup trucks of guys stopping for a beer on their way home from work. She smiled to recall her father so often in their midst—slender and reticent, but drawing others to him with the force of his kindness under his cutting sense of humor. The road past the bar would take her south to her little house outside of town down in a dell at the end of Reed Road. There was orchard on one side and forest on the other. It was the perfect spot for honeybees—sheltered from the wind and with Susan Creek running down off the hillside providing water for her girls, as she liked to call them. Beside the irrigation ditches were tangled miles of clover, blackberry, and dandelion. Bee heaven.

The dell was perfect for Alice too, because she hardly ever saw anyone out there. Other than Doug Ransom, whose large orchard sprawled pleasantly to the west of her, she had no real neighbors unless you counted Strawberry Hollow, a messy collection of trailers at the foot of Anson Road. She didn’t know anyone who lived there and kept her distance. Meth heads and pit bulls, she imagined. Rapists and creeps of all sorts, she thought. She started making up headlines.

“Ten Arrested in Trailer Park Drug Bust.”

“Shallow Grave Discovered at Strawberry Hollow.”

Then she stopped herself. Like the anxiety, this was also new—making up ugly stories about people she didn’t know.

“They are just thoughts, Alice, and the pattern promotes a negative outlook,” Dr. Zimmerman had said to her. “But you can shift those patterns and rewire your thinking. It just takes practice.”

Dr. Zimmerman was obviously very smart. She had diplomas from Harvard and Stanford on her wall. She had worked in Palo Alto, ostensibly fixing the tech crazies, before moving to Hood River for semi-retirement. Despite the diplomas and her chic looks, which were unusual in this rural outpost, she wasn’t arrogant. Just confident. And kind. Still, the fact that she, Alice Holtzman, was seeing a therapist was absurd. You had to laugh, she thought. Only it wasn’t funny, was it?

Alice steered the truck south toward Mount Hood, toward the home she had bought with the help of her mom and dad. They were third-generation orchardists, both of them. It was hard work, but they had loved it.

“Never be afraid of hard work, Alice,” her mother would say.

“Or I’ll come back from the grave and kick you in the rear, my dear,” her dad would say with a wicked grin.

A life lived outside, they always said, was a good life.

“A good life,” she said aloud, glancing into the rearview mirror at the twelve nucleus hives, each holding a queen and her workers and so much promise.

“Almost home, girls. You’ll have a good life. I promise.”

Though it was no longer the quiet backwater it had been when Alice was born, Hood River was still a great place to live. The 1980s brought the windsurfers with their vans and long hair. There were some fights between them and local loggers and farmers, like the ones who hung out at the Red Carpet. But the hippies who caused trouble ultimately left. The ones who stayed started families, fixed up the town’s old houses, and opened businesses—cafés, pizza places, and windsurfing stores. The town grew. The last decade had seen an explosion of wineries, fancy boutiques, breweries, and restaurants. It wasn’t the same town anymore, but for locals like the Holtzmans, who lived outside all that, it didn’t matter. Their lives kept chugging along the same tracks. The sunburned tourists who plodded through downtown clutching iced coffees had no idea that the heart of this place was far from Oak Street, up the valley, and out in the orchards. Those long rows of trees were far more than a postcard backdrop for their scenic drives. They were history, part of a tradition that was more than one hundred years old.

Alice’s family was part of that history. The Holtzman orchards were small, but they were all heirloom stock from the 1900s—Gravensteins, Pippins, and Winesaps—nothing like the mushy Red Delicious apples from your average school lunch. This was fine, flavorful fruit. Al and Marina Holtzman had taken over the orchard from Al’s parents, who had taken it over from his grandparents—German immigrants who’d arrived in the valley before World War I. Al and Marina had made a living for themselves and Alice, their only child. They’d been happy there.

Alice rolled to a stop at Country Club Road, signaled right, and glanced left, alert for the plodding tractor one was apt to see on a spring evening like this. The quiet lane was empty. She hung a right and continued toward home.

Alice had been planning to take over the orchard from her parents since she was ten years old. When the time came, she knew she’d have to work hard and keep her job at the county to make ends meet. But to her shock, Al and Marina had decided to sell eight years ago. Her dad had become disheartened by changes in the industry. The big producers had forced spray laws on the county that the smaller farmers couldn’t stomach. Not that the Holtzman operation had ever been fully organic. Al Holtzman was too much of a libertarian to let those words cross his lips. But he was German, after all. Sensible. He sprayed minimally and by hand. The county regulations were too much, he said, and went too far.

“It’s poison, Alice,” he said, shaking his head. “The fools are cutting off their noses to spite their own faces.”

She hated to see her parents pushed aside by the demands of the larger orchardists, who were too stubborn, busy, or just plain wrongheaded to consider