The Music of Bees by Eileen Garvin (most read book in the world TXT) 📕

nephews in the truck to go fishing and running back to the house to kiss Alice goodbye.

Alice didn’t realize she was speeding when she hit the curve at the top of the hill. She was thinking about her husband, Robert Ryan, who everyone knew as Buddy. Buddy, who had arrived so suddenly in her quiet life, bringing such unexpected happiness. Buddy, who was now gone.

The pressure ballooned in her chest, and her throat caught. Her breath grew ragged and shallow and then exploded into hot sobs. Her vision blurred as her eyes filled. Triggered, her grief loosened like a load of big timbers from one of the logging trucks she had passed on the highway.

Alice wiped an arm across her streaming eyes as she swerved toward the edge of the road. In the twin arms of her headlights, she saw a shape in the shoulder. She slammed on the brakes, swerved, and banged to a stop against a fence post.

Alice felt 120,000 Russian honeybees crash together in the back of her truck. Her head bounced as the seat belt arrested her. Time slowed. Her head rang. She saw spots of white and blue zipping around her field of vision. She looked in the rearview mirror and saw a wheelchair on its side, one wheel spinning like a runaway Ferris wheel.

Alice scrambled out of the truck and ran across the road. She could not move fast enough and felt like she was swimming through the cool air. She began to pray, her eyes searching the tall grass in the waning light. She saw a person on the ground next to the chair. Was he hurt? Alice crouched, her hands on her knees, and peered down. The figure rolled onto its back. Alice expected to see some confused old person, a little guy in his bathrobe and slippers doing a runner from Riverdale Retirement Center up the road. But she saw a boy—a teenage boy with crazy hair and a tangle of earbuds and sunglasses on his face. Holy shit! She’d hit a damn kid!

The boy pushed his sunglasses off his face and looked up at her. He smiled. Relief surged through her, and she wanted to cry. Instead she yelled.

“Christ on a crutch, kid! What in the hell are you trying to do? Get yourself killed?”

3 Foraging

The drones begin to make their appearance in April or May; earlier or later, according to the forwardness of the season, and the strength of the stock. In colonies too weak to swarm, none as a general rule are reared; for in such hives, as no young queens are raised, drones would be only useless consumers.

—L. L. LANGSTROTH

If Harry Stokes had to choose one word to describe how he was feeling on this particular morning, he would have said, unequivocally, “hungry.” But it was just a medium kind of hungry, nothing serious. This was not “famished” or “ravenous.” And yet it was well beyond “peckish.” It was the kind of hunger that made him pay attention, a hunger that left him keenly aware that his present situation was untenable.

He sat on the steps of his uncle’s trailer and dragged his finger along the bottom of the Jif jar. He sucked his fingertip, confirming that the plastic container held nothing but a faint memory of its previous contents. He peered wistfully into the bottom and then lobbed it toward the trash pile. It fell with a thunk and rolled back toward him. A light breeze rose and circled his thin neck like a cool scarf. Harry shivered and pulled up his hood. It was midmorning, but the sunshine had not yet penetrated the wall of towering Douglas fir trees that rose around the clearing in which the trailer sat. His stomach growled, uncoiling like a cartoon spring.

To distract himself from the empty yawn of his appetite, Harry pulled out his notebook and opened it up to a half-full page upon which he’d been tallying the pros and cons of his current situation. He picked up his pen and glanced around. What Harry liked best about where he found himself, he decided, was the setting. The Klickitat River roared behind the trailer, a white-water highway that drowned out all other noise. You couldn’t even hear the county road from here where the trailer was tucked away in the woods. Harry also liked the view of Mount Adams. The sleeping volcano crouched under heavy spring snow to the north like a white monster.

“Pastoral Beauty,” Harry wrote in the left-hand column of his notebook. He couldn’t remember what “pastoral” meant, exactly—something outdoorsy—but it had a nice ring to it. Anyway, it was a good list word—short and punchy.

This list-making strategy was something Harry had employed for at least two decades of his young life. It was a habit conceived of the day he perched in a booster seat in the back of his mother’s Lincoln Town Car, clutching an orange crayon in his four-year-old fist. That was the day his mother had driven out of Mississippi and toward New York City, leaving his father and the sweltering South behind. Harry could barely remember his father. But he remembered the wet heat of the summer day and the joy on his mother’s face when they reached the city limits of Hattiesburg. She lit a cigarette and rolled down the window.

“What’s in New York, Mama?” he asked.

She blew smoke out the window and looked at him in the rearview mirror.

“The Statue of Liberty, son. And the Empire State Building. Broadway, where all the famous actors go. Central Park has a pond and a zoo. In New York, they have policemen on horses. You’re gonna love it, Harry.”

She smiled, waving the smoke out of her face, and Harry wanted to believe her because he liked it when his mother smiled.

“What about Daddy?” he asked.

There was a pause, and then she said, “Nope.