The Secret Life of Bees (15 page)

I opened my eyes. August stared through her spectacles. The bees had shaken the pollen dust off their feet and were starting to settle back into the hive. I could see tiny grains of it drifting in the air.

“Are you okay?” August said.

I nodded. Was I? I had no idea.

“You know, don't you, that the two of us need to have a good talk. And this time not about me. About you.”

I wished I could do like the bees, just bump her forehead with a warning, tap it with my finger.
I got my eye on you. Be careful. Don't go any further.

“I suppose,” I answered.

“What about right now?”

“Not right now.”

“But, Lily—”

“I'm starved,” I said. “I think I'll go on back to the house and see if lunch is ready.”

I didn't wait for her to speak. Walking to the pink house, I could almost see the end of the line. I touched the place on my shirt where I'd stuck the black Mary. She was starting to come unglued.

 

The whole house smelled like fried okra. Rosaleen was setting the table in the kitchen while May dipped down in the grease and brought up the golden brown kernels. I didn't know what had brought on the okra, since it was usually bologna sandwiches and more bologna sandwiches.

May had not had a crying jag since June performed her tomato-throwing fit, and we were all holding our breath. After going this long, I worried that even something as simple as burned okra might send her over the edge.

I said I was hungry, and Rosaleen said to hold my wild horses. Her lower lip was plumped out with Red Rose snuff. The smell followed her around the kitchen like it was on a leash, a combination of allspice, fresh earth, and rotten leaves. Between the okra and the snuff I could not get a decent breath. Rosaleen walked across the back porch, leaned out the door, and spit a tiny jet stream across the hydrangeas.

Nobody could spit like Rosaleen. I'd had fantasies of her winning a hundred dollars in a spitting contest and the two of us going to a nice motel in Atlanta and ordering room service with the prize money. It had always been my fond wish to stay in a motel, but at that moment if you had told me I could've had my choice of luxury motels with heated pools and television sets right in the room, I would've turned it down flat for the pink house.

There had been a few times, though, just after I woke up, when I thought about my old house, and I would miss it for a second or two before I remembered kneeling on the kitchen floor with grits digging into my kneecaps or trying to step around a great big pile of T. Ray's nasty mood but usually landing right in it. I would remember him tearing into me, shouting
Jesus H. Christ, Jesus H. Christ!
The worst slap across the face I ever got was when I interrupted him to ask just what did the H. stand for anyway? One quick walk down memory lane and the old-home feeling would blow right over. I would take the pink house any day.

Zach shuffled into the kitchen behind August.

“My, my. Okra and pork chops for lunch. What's this about?” August asked May.

May sidled over to her and said in a low voice, “It has been five days since I've been to the wall,” and I could see how proud of this fact she was, how she wanted to believe her days of hysterical crying were behind her, how this okra lunch was a celebration.

August smiled at her. “Five days, really? Well, that deserves a feast,” she said. And May, she beamed.

Zach plopped down in a chair.

“Did you finish delivering the honey?” August asked him.

“Everywhere but Mr. Clayton's law office,” he said. He was fidgeting with everything in sight. First the place mat, then a loose thread on his shirt. Like he was bursting to say something.

August looked him over. “You got something on your mind?”

“You won't believe what people downtown are saying,” he said. “They're saying Jack Palance is coming to Tiburon this weekend and bringing a colored woman with him.”

We all stopped what we were doing and looked at each other.

“Who's Jack Palance?” Rosaleen said. Even though we hadn't started lunch yet, she had bitten into a piece of pork chop and was chewing and talking with her mouth open. I tried to catch her eye, pointing to my closed mouth, hoping she'd get the message.

“He's a movie star,” said Zach.

June snorted. “Well, how dumb is
that
? What would a movie star be doing in Tiburon?”

Zach shrugged. “They say his sister lives here, and he's coming to visit and intends to take this colored woman to the movie theater this Friday. Not to the balcony, but downstairs in the white section.”

August turned to May. “Why don't you go out to the garden and pick some fresh tomatoes to go with our lunch?” she said, then waited till May was out the door. I could tell she was afraid Jack Palance trying to integrate the movie theater might ruin May's okra feast. “Are people stirred up about this?” she asked Zach. Her eyes looked serious.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said. “In Garret's Hardware there were white men talking about standing guard outside the theater.”

“Lord, here we go,” said Rosaleen.

June made a
pffff
sound with her lips while August shook her head, and it washed over me for the first time in my life just how much importance the world had ascribed to skin pigment, how lately it seemed that skin pigment was the sun and everything else in the universe was the orbiting planets. Ever since school let out this summer, it had been nothing but skin pigment every livelong day. I was sick of it.

In Sylvan we'd had a rumor at the first of the summer about a busload of people from New York City showing up to integrate the city pool. Talk about a panic. We had a citywide emergency on our hands, as there is no greater affliction for the southern mind than people up north coming down to fix our way of life. After that was the whole mess with the men at the Esso station. It seemed to me it would have been better if God had deleted skin pigment altogether.

As May came back into the kitchen, August said, “Let's enjoy our meal,” which meant Jack Palance was not a lunch topic.

May plopped down three big tomatoes, and while she and Rosaleen sliced them up, August went to the den and put a Nat King Cole record on the player—a machine so old the records would not even drop automatic fashion. She was crazy about Nat King Cole, and she returned, with the volume up, frowning in that way people do when they bite into something and it tastes so delicious they appear to be in pain over it. June turned up her nose. She only cared for Beethoven and that whole group. She went and turned the sound down. “I can't think,” she said.

August said, “You know what? You think too much. It would do you a world of good to stop thinking and just go with your feelings once in a blue moon.”

June said she would take her lunch in her room, thank you.

I guess that was just as well, because I was looking at the tomatoes May and Rosaleen were slicing and rehearsing in my head how I would say,
So will you have some tomatoes, June? Don't you love tomatoes?
Now at least I would be saved from that.

We ate till we were tired out from eating, which is the way people in South Carolina eat at family reunions. Zach pushed back from the table, saying he was heading to Clayton Forrest's office to leave a dozen jars of honey.

“Can I go?” I asked.

August knocked over her sweet tea, a thing so unlike her. You did not associate spills with August. With May, for sure, but not August. Tea ran across the table and onto the floor. I thought this might set May off, the tragedy of a spilled drink. But she only got up, humming “Oh! Susanna” without real urgency, and grabbed a towel.

“I don't know, Lily,” August said.

“Please.” All I really wanted was some time with Zach and to expand my world by visiting the office of a real-life lawyer.

“Well, all right,” she said.

 

The office was situated one block off Main Street, where Rosaleen and I had paraded into town that Sunday more than three weeks ago. It didn't look like my idea of a law office. The whole operation was really a large house, white with black shutters and a wraparound porch with big rocking chairs, which must have been for people to collapse into with relief after they'd won their cases. A sign on the lawn said
CLAYTON FORREST, ATTORNEY AT LAW
.

His secretary was a white lady who looked about eighty years old. She sat at a desk in the reception area, putting on fire-red lipstick. Her hair was permed into tight curls that had a faint blue cast.

“Hi, Miss Lacy,” Zach said. “I brought more honey.”

She worked the lipstick back into the tube, looking mildly annoyed. “More honey,” she said, shaking her head. She let out an overdone sigh and reached into a drawer. “The money for the last batch is in here.” She dropped an envelope onto the desk.

She looked me over. “You're new.”

“I'm Lily,” I said.

“She's staying with August,” Zach explained.

“You're staying in her
house
?” she said.

I wanted to tell her that her lipstick was bleeding into the wrinkles around her lips. “Yes, ma'am, I'm staying there.”

“Well, I'll be,” she said. She gathered her pocketbook and stood up. “I've got an appointment at the dentist. Put the jars over there on the table.”

I pictured her whispering the news to all the people in the waiting room who were about to get their cavities drilled. This white girl, Lily, is staying with the colored Boatwright sisters. Now, doesn't that seem strange to you?

As she left, Mr. Forrest came out of his office. The first thing I noticed was his red suspenders. I'd never seen a thin person wear suspenders, and it was a nice look, the way it matched his red bow tie. He had sandy hair, and bushy eyebrows that curled toward his blue eyes, and smile crinkles in his face that signaled a good person. So good that apparently he couldn't bring himself to get rid of Miss Lacy.

He looked at me. “And who would this pretty young lady be?”

“Lily uh—” I could not remember what last name I was currently using. I think it was because he'd referred to me as pretty, which had been a shock to my system. “Just Lily.” I stood there looking gawky, with one foot tucked behind the other. “I'm staying with August till I go live with my aunt in Virginia.” Him being a lawyer, I worried he might ask me to take a lie-detector test.

“How nice. August is a good friend of mine,” he said. “I hope you're enjoying your stay?”

“Yes, sir. Very much.”

“What case are you working on?” asked Zach, stuffing the envelope of honey money into his pocket and setting the box of jars on the side table by the window. It had a framed
HONEY FOR SALE
sign on it.

“Run-of-the-mill stuff. Deeds, wills. I got something for you, though. Come on back to the office and I'll show you.”

“I'll just wait out here and arrange the honey,” I said, hating to intrude but mostly feeling uncommonly awkward around him.

“You sure? You're welcome to come, too.”

“I'm sure. I like it out here.”

They disappeared down a hallway. I heard a door close. A car horn on the street. The blast of the window air conditioner that dripped water into a dog bowl on the floor. I stacked the jars in a pyramid. Seven on bottom, four in the middle, and one on top, but it looked misshapen, so I took it apart and settled for plain rows.

I went over and inspected the pictures that covered one whole wall. First was a diploma from the University of South Carolina and then another one from Duke University. Next was a picture of Mr. Forrest on a boat, wearing sunglasses and holding a fish about my size. After that, Mr. Forrest shaking hands with Bobby Kennedy. Last, Mr. Forrest and a small blond-headed girl, standing in the ocean. She was jumping over a wave. The spray made a blue fan behind her, a peacock tail of water, and he was helping her, lifting her up and over it with his hand, smiling down on her. I bet he knew her favorite color, what she ate for afternoon snacks, everything she loved.

I went and sat on one of the two red sofas in the room. Williams. My made-up last name finally came to me. I counted the plants in the room. Four. The floorboards from the desk to the front door. Fifteen. Closing my eyes, I pictured the ocean stretched out the color of fresh-polished silver, the white froth on it, light scattering everywhere. I saw myself jumping a wave. T. Ray held my hand, pulling me up and over. I had to concentrate so hard to make this happen.

Thirty-two names for love.

Was it unthinkable he could speak one of them to me, even the one reserved for lesser things like peanuts in your Coke? Was it so out of the question that T. Ray knew I loved the color blue? What if he was home missing me, saying,
Why oh why didn't I love her better?

Miss Lacy's telephone sat right there on her desk. I picked up the receiver and dialed 0 for operator. “I am making a collect call,” I told her, and gave her the number. Almost faster than I would've believed, I heard the phone in my house ringing. I stared down the hallway at the closed door and counted the rings. Three, four, five, six.

“Hello.” His voice caused my stomach to pitch into my throat. I was unprepared for the way it buckled my knees. I had to sit down in Miss Lacy's chair spraddle-legged.

“I have a collect call from Lily Owens,” the operator said. “Will you accept the charge?”

“You're goddamn right I'll accept it,” he said. Then, without waiting for me to say P-turkey, he launched right in. “Lily, where the hell are you?”

I had to hold the phone from my eardrum for fear of him rupturing it. “T. Ray, I'm sorry I had to leave, but—”

“You tell me where you are right now, do you hear me? Do you have any idea the trouble you're in? Busting Rosaleen out of the hospital—holy shit, what were you thinking?”