A Recipe for Bees (2 page)

“Thanks. I’ll get one from there. That’s a lovely brooch you’re wearing.”

“It was my mother’s,” Rose replied, and Augusta promptly caught her in a web of conversation about the brooch a man named Joe had given her, a brooch Augusta pulled from her purse and showed Rose: a silver setting hemmed a real bee suspended in amber. When Augusta held it up, it cast a little pool of honey light on the floor. “It was the only lasting thing he ever gave me, in the way of presents,” she said. “And that was decades after I’d stopped seeing him. I still dream about him, you know.” Rose nodded and smiled and moved slowly backwards,
away, to a toilet stall. Augusta, seeing her discomfort, left before she came out again.

Yet Rose did turn up at the newsstand where Augusta was buying a bag of combs. Augusta was talking to the clerk because the bag of combs had been opened and who knew how many were missing? She was successful, too; the clerk gave her the bag of combs for a dollar. Augusta grinned and winked at Rose when she saw that she’d been watching her dicker. Augusta enjoyed haggling. She often checked out the plants displayed at supermarket entrances, and if there was one going brown from too much water or sun, she took it to the produce clerk and (leaning a little more than usual over her cane, with a hint more creak in her voice) talked him into giving it to her. She always got her fern or African violet, and without fail she would bring it back to the car and say to Rose, “Look what I scored.” Augusta nursed nearly every plant back to health; her apartment was filled with plants that the kittens regularly knocked from the plant stands, the shelves, the windowsills.

After Augusta had collected her change, she walked right up to Rose, holding out the bag of combs. “What colour do you like?” she’d said, as if she and Rose were old friends. Rose selected a blue one, a comb she still carried tucked away in her purse, though she never used it. Augusta introduced herself.

Then Karl was there, opening a canvas bag for Augusta to put the extra combs in. He looked up at Rose, surprised, as if to say,
Who the hell are you?
And Rose stared back at him the same way. She later said that she had imagined Augusta a widow, like herself. Rose’s husband had been
dead ten years by then. Augusta introduced her to Karl, and when Rose shook Karl’s hand, her hand slid right up his wrist, as there was no thumb to stop it. He grinned at the look on her face. He took a quiet, perverse delight in offering that thumbless hand to strangers last minute, so they didn’t suspect. He had shot the thumb off while hunting when he was a kid, and there was nothing but scarred flesh from his forefinger to his wrist. When he flexed the muscles, even though he was in his eighties, he still felt the missing thumb bending. It itched but he couldn’t scratch it. That itch would have driven most people to distraction, but not Karl. He appeared to bear all things, as he had his father’s demands and Augusta’s infidelities, with equilibrium. Augusta believed he was missing a certain quality of imagination. He accepted things as they came to him because he couldn’t see the use in trying to change them. She had spent a lifetime battling this quality in him. Still, he was a dear man, and Augusta couldn’t help loving him, even if he sometimes did put cheddar cheese into his tea instead of milk, even if he sucked his coffee loudly through a sugar cube held between his teeth.

That meeting was how Augusta and Karl came to live in Rose’s apartment building. The three of them had got to talking on the ferry and Augusta said she and Karl had sold their farm in the Shuswap, in the interior of British Columbia, and were staying with their daughter, Joy, and son-in-law, Gabe, outside Victoria until they found a place of their own. Rose said that she managed an apartment building for seniors, in Courtenay, and that there was an apartment coming up for rent at the end of the month, as Mrs. Meecham was getting too old to live by herself and
was moving into a home. One thing led to another and Karl and Augusta moved into the apartment. There was a three-hour drive or train ride between Karl and Augusta, and Joy and Gabe. That was a good distance between a mother and a daughter. Close enough, but not too close.

“Joe asked me to give the brooch to Joy,” said Augusta.

“Joe? When?”

“At the auction.” Rose sat Augusta’s two bags on the landing of the second floor and crossed her arms. “I’m not going any farther until you tell me the story.”

“Oh, Rose. I’m too tired for this right now. All this worry over Gabe—” She made her way to the apartment door, hooked the cane over her arm, and put the key to the lock. She sighed. “You bring the bags inside and I’ll make a nice cup of tea, and if Karl’s down at the seniors’ centre I’ll tell you all about it, okay?”

But Karl was there in the apartment, as Augusta knew he would be, sitting at the kitchen table by the phone. The kitchen and living area were all one room and each wall was lined with shelves filled with teddy bears and dolls and ceramic figurines; not a collection, exactly, just a lifetime of purchases and gifts. It was a hot day; Karl had the fan in the living-room going. He stood when the door opened. “Anything?” said Augusta.

“Nothing yet.” He walked up to kiss her, but Augusta was already leaning down to scratch the spines of the many cats that slid and meowed around her unsteady legs. Karl hoisted the bag she had carried, took the two from Rose, and hauled them all into the bedroom. Augusta hugged the kitten she had named Blondie to her chest as she watched him walk away. Why did she do that? she wondered. Why
hadn’t she accepted his kiss? Now and then Augusta still caught Karl watching her, when she was busy putting together tea for the two of them, or washing the breakfast dishes while Karl and Rose took in a game of crib. He didn’t smile or say anything, but she saw it in his face, how he loved her. Then he glanced away, at the crib board, or lifted his cup for a sip, and she really saw it—burning in his face, reddening his ears—all the years of unsaid things.

Even so, Augusta took Karl somewhat for granted and even turned her eyes elsewhere. She had a crush on the old man with the garden beside the seniors’ centre, and she had never even met the man. She knew nothing about him, other than what he revealed of himself through his garden. When she walked by his house, she sometimes caught him hovering out of sight behind his dark window, watching; there was some movement there, the flick of a curtain, a shape in the black. Although he lived right next door, he didn’t go to the seniors’ centre; he kept himself locked away.

She had once stopped at the old man’s garden, leaned across the fence, and broken off a piece of bittersweet. It was a bush that produced bright purple flowers all summer long, and then brilliant red berries come fall. The twig tasted bitter, then sweet, as its name promised. Karl’s father, Olaf, had once told Augusta that sheep herders hung bittersweet around the necks of sheep they thought had been rendered sick by the evil eye. She chewed the twig with a deliberate slowness, knowing the old man was watching, knowing she should really walk on. But instead she leaned on her cane and inspected his garden. He had filled the
lawn with snowball bushes, a flowering plum and quince, a hazelnut tree too lanky to produce nuts, and trembling aspens with leaves that now scattered like spilled pennies. Here and there he grew beds of sunflowers mixed with banks of pink and white cosmos, and yellow marigolds and calendulas. Against the warmth of the house he grew tomatoes, love apples, Eve’s temptation.

She wanted to know the old man. She wanted to share the time of day with someone capable of sweet-talk and tenderness in a way that Karl wasn’t. She wanted to hold hands and feel the thrill of a secret so dangerous she could tell no one, not even Rose.

Augusta sighed and put the cat on the floor. “Let’s get some tea on,” she said. But before she plugged in the kettle she picked up the receiver and listened for a dial tone.

“Funny that Joy hasn’t phoned,” said Rose.

“They did say the operation could take anywhere from five to eighteen hours.”

“We could be waiting all day, then.”

“You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to. I’ve asked a lot of you today. Missing the train and then having you drive all the way to Parksville to get me.”

“And driving that woman back besides.”

“Esther. Her name’s Esther.”

Esther had got on the train at Langford, just outside of Victoria. Augusta had been struck by a weeping spell on leaving the city, and was blowing her nose when a very fat Native Indian woman struggled up the last step onto the train with a huge basket. A mother and her young son of perhaps four followed the woman on board, and waited as she turned herself sideways and made her way slowly
down the aisle. The boy asked his mother, in a voice so clear and loud that it made Augusta wince, “Why is that lady so fat?”

The Indian woman closed her eyes for the briefest of moments. She turned awkwardly in the aisle and bent down towards the boy, showing her ample backside to Augusta and the three young men sitting two seats down from her. The young man facing Augusta looked at the big woman and then sniggered with his two companions.

“It’s okay to be big,” said the woman. “Like it’s okay to be small like you.” Presumably she smiled and tweaked the boy’s cheek, but all Augusta could see was the shake of the woman’s massive shoulders. The boy’s mother made some half-hearted apology, then pulled him off the train. Augusta watched her as she led the boy down the platform and onto the second car of the train. Augusta’s car wasn’t completely full, but someone sat in each set of seats except those across from Augusta. The Indian woman glanced from seat to seat and then smiled apologetically. “You mind?” she said. Augusta could hardly say no. That seat was the only one in which the woman was likely to fit. She moved her feet to one side as the woman sat down heavily facing Augusta; she took up the whole of the two seats. She slid the huge basket between their feet on the floor, then rummaged through her handbag, found a cloth hankie, and dabbed the sweat from her face. “Hot,” she said.

Augusta smiled and stared out the window to avoid further conversation. When she glanced back, the Indian woman had leaned back into her seat and closed her eyes. The woman’s basket was decorated with woven designs of what appeared to be stylized feathers in purple and green.
It made Augusta think of a basket Karl had brought home for Joy so many years ago. He had bought it from an Indian woman who used the baskets she wove to pick berries on Olaf’s ranch. Augusta couldn’t recall the design on that basket, but it must have been very like the feathers on this woman’s; it had been decorated in the same way, with coloured fibres woven right into it, to form patterns. A bundle of shasta daisies drooped over the side of it. The old man living by the seniors’ centre grew shasta daisies, a huge patch of white that delighted the butterflies. But the flowers could be a nuisance. They took over a garden, just like mint; there was no getting rid of them. You could dig them out, but you’d always miss a root and they’d come right back next spring. They refused to die.

The fat woman’s name was Esther Joseph, though Augusta didn’t know that then. They didn’t introduce themselves until they were stranded in Parksville. Esther was a good three hundred pounds, and tall, a giant of a woman. She wore glasses but no jewellery, and her stumpy ankles disappeared into white runners. She wore a dress with a floral print, and its short sleeves exposed a gardener’s tan that ended at her elbows.

“I’ll stick around,” said Rose. “Maybe you can find some time to tell me about Joe.”

Augusta lowered her voice as Karl came back into the kitchen. “For God’s sake, Rose. Not while Karl’s here.”

“He wouldn’t hear anyway,” said Rose. “Eh, Karl?”

“What was that?” said Karl.

“See?”

“Rose!” said Augusta. “Have a cookie.” She put the cookie in Rose’s mouth.

Rose took a bite and spoke with her mouth full. “I suppose you’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

“Yes.”

“Have any inkling how Gabe’s doing? I mean, any more premonitions?”

Augusta set teacups and saucers, milk and honey on the table. Karl and Rose took their tea black, and Augusta normally didn’t put honey in her tea, but today she craved sweetness. “No, not really,” she said. “Nothing since that day I found myself on the floor.” Augusta had predicted Gabe’s illness; that is to say, she’d had a vision of it. She was fussing around in the kitchen, making supper as Gabe and Joy were about to arrive for a visit when, no matter which way she turned, she saw a patch of white appear in front of her, the edges sloping off into the kitchen scene around her, and in this white was Gabe’s face—or almost Gabe’s face, because his features retained little expression and his skin held the milky pallor of the gravely ill. His eyes were closed and there was a honeybee on his lip. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the vision was gone, and she found herself on the floor beside the kitchen table. She sat there with her stiff legs stretched out in front of her. Karl was down at the seniors’ centre playing crib. If she had thumped loud enough on the floor Rose might have heard, as her apartment was below Augusta and Karl’s. When Joy knocked on the door, Augusta had a hard time standing. She’d had to pull up her body using the edge of the table because her hip had locked on her. Then there was the rattle of keys outside the apartment, and the door opened and Joy pushed her way in, panicked, keys in hand. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” said Augusta.

“You look so pale.”

“I fell.”

“You fell? Are you all right?”

“Yes, yes. Fine. Nothing’s broken. I’m fine. I didn’t fall, exactly. I had trouble getting up.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. Just let me sit. There. Get me a cup of tea, will you, Joy? And a biscuit from the box on the counter? I need to gather myself. Gabe, sit by me. No, here, in Karl’s chair.”

As Joy was pouring tea, Augusta told Joy and Gabe about the vision. She said she thought it was a premonition of illness, but they both laughed it off. Rose took it seriously. She said, “We should write it down, don’t you think? So there’s proof when it happens?” She did just that. She had Augusta describe the vision again, and wrote down every detail, then put it into an envelope that she sealed with an Easter Seal and mailed to herself, so the cancellation mark would date it.