by Karen White
She spotted her ninety-four-year-old grandfather wearing only a long-sleeved shirt and baggy dungarees on his tall, thin frame, walking down the middle of his ten bee boxes, five on each side. He was getting ready to move eight of his hives into the swamps around the Apalachicola River, where the white Ogeechee tupelo trees were beginning to blossom. There was only a small window of time between late April and early May when the trees bloomed, and if a beekeeper wanted the much-sought-after pure tupelo honey, he had to make sure his hives were in the right place at the right time.
Turning to her mother, she said, “It’s still pretty cool outside and there’s a nice breeze. I thought we’d sit in the shade of the magnolia for a bit if that’s all right.” She watched her mother as she considered. By all estimations, Birdie was most likely in her mid-seventies, but looked a decade or two younger, owing in part to good genes and an almost fanatical aversion to letting any sun on her skin.
Birdie tilted her head to the side and began to sing, her voice still as clear and pure as a girl’s. It wasn’t a song Maisy knew, but that wasn’t a surprise. Her mother had studied voice since she was a child, accumulating a repertoire that spanned decades and styles. And it had been the only sound she’d made for nearly ten years.
Maisy followed her mother down the steps from the back porch and then through the yard of sandy soil and sparse grass toward the majestic tree that had held court over this part of the yard since she and Georgia were little girls.
Her thoughts skittered over memories of her half sister, something she rarely allowed them to do, and she wondered whether Georgia remembered the tree and the old swing—gone since Hurricane Dennis—or thought about her home at all. Or the people she’d left behind, frozen in time. In the nearly ten years since Georgia had left, nothing had really changed. More tourists and construction on St. George Island, more fishing regulations and fewer oysters in the bay. But Maisy had remained, along with their grandfather and mother, and her memories of a childhood that were incomplete without including Georgia.
“Mama!”
Maisy turned to where her nine-year-old daughter, Becky, stood on the back porch in her bare feet and pajamas. “The phone keeps ringing.”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know—they hang up before I can answer. Caller ID says it’s from a number starting with five-oh-four. They didn’t leave a message. Do you want me to wait by the phone and see if they call back?”
It took a moment for Maisy to find her voice. “No, Becky. That’s all right.”
Becky returned to the kitchen, letting the screen door slam shut behind her.
Birdie stopped singing and Maisy knew that she’d heard, too. Had understood what it meant. Maisy’s mother was a conscientious objector to her own life, but that didn’t mean she was unaware of it swirling around her.
“That’s New Orleans,” Maisy said unnecessarily. Georgia never called the landline, just in case Maisy happened to answer it. Maisy knew her sister had monthly conversations with their grandfather, and that he initiated the call from the old black Princess phone in his bedroom.
Birdie and Maisy watched as Grandpa began walking toward them from the apiary, his slow movements confirming his age. His mind was as quick and agile as that of a man of half his years, but his body had already begun to betray him with stiffened joints and an irregular heartbeat.
The faint ringing of the telephone began again from inside. Knowing it would continue until she answered it, Maisy left her mother and ran back to the house. She grabbed the kitchen phone, the long cord that was so knotted and kinked now that it reached only about three feet.
“Hello?” Something buzzed by her head and she jerked back as the bee darted past her and up toward the ceiling. A bee in the house means there will be a visitor. Her grandfather’s bee wisdoms seemed imprinted on her brain no matter how much she wished she could erase them.
There was a brief pause on the other end of the phone. “Hello, Maisy? It’s Georgia.”
Like she needed to introduce herself. Like Maisy wouldn’t know the voice almost as well as she knew her own.
“Hello, Georgia.” She had no intention of making this any easier. The bee buzzed past her again, and Maisy turned toward the wall and retrieved the flyswatter she kept on a nail. If that damned insect bothered her again, it would be the last thing it would ever do.
“I need to ask a favor.”
I’m fine—thank you for asking. “Is this about that soup cup?”
A pause. “Yes. I guess Grandpa told you then. He didn’t remember it, but said he’d look for it. He said he didn’t find it.”
“Well, then. It must not be here.” She held the phone to her ear, listening to her sister breathe.
“I’d like you to look,” Georgia said finally. “To make sure.”
“It’s not here,” Maisy said quickly. “I helped him look, and we were very thorough. We even looked in Birdie’s closet and didn’t find it. I thought he already told you that.”
She pictured Georgia’s lips tightening over her teeth, clamping her mouth shut. Grandpa used to say it made her look like an oyster unwilling to give up her pearl. It was an expression Georgia always used when pitting herself against what she was hearing and what she wanted to hear. An expression that was usually reserved for interactions with their mother.
“He did,” Georgia said slowly. “It’s just that this is pretty important, for a potentially very big client. . . .”
“Well, I’m sorry we can’t help you.” Maisy was thinking about whether she should think of something innocuous to say or just hang up when Georgia spoke again.
“I guess I’ll be coming home, then. To see for myself. It’s not that I don’t believe you—it’s just . . .” Georgia paused, and Maisy imagined that closed-oyster look again. “It’s just that my boss is insisting on it. It’s for what could be one of our biggest clients, and there’s a possibility it could be from a very rare and valuable pattern. He wants to hear from me that it’s not there.”
Panic filled the back of Maisy’s throat like bee venom. “But you promised, Georgia. You promised.” The last word was mostly air.
“I know. But that was ten years ago. Things are different. I’m different.”
“How do you know that, Georgia? How can you really know that? This is not a good idea.”
There was a hint of something in Georgia’s voice. Resignation, maybe? Or was it more like anticipation, the hum of bees approaching a summer garden? “I’m sorry, Maisy. I have to come.”
Maisy relaxed her jaw, aware she’d been grinding her teeth. “Will you be staying here?”
“No,” Georgia said quickly, as if she’d already anticipated the question. “I’ll probably stay at Aunt Marlene’s. I don’t want things to be . . . awkward.”
“Lyle and I are separated. He’s living at his parents’ old place until we figure things out.” Maisy wasn’t sure why she’d said that, why she wanted to advertise her biggest failure. Maybe it was simply the old habit of needing to share all her heartaches with her sister, as if they were still children and life hadn’t happened to them yet.
“I know. Grandpa told me last time I called. I’m sorry.”
Maisy closed her eyes for a moment, considering the word and how useless it was, how much it resembled a teaspoon bailing out a sinking boat. “When will you be here and how long will you stay?”
“I should be able to get there by Monday. What I need to do shouldn’t take more than a few days.” After a moment in which neither of them spoke, Georgia asked, “How’s Birdie?”
“The same. And you don’t need to pretend you care just because you’re coming home.”
“I didn’t say I cared. I just asked how she was.”
Silence. Then, “How’s Grandpa?”
“The same. You’ll see them both, I expect, when you’re here.”
“Of course,” Georgia added quickly, almost as if to convince herself. A longer pause, and then, “And Becky? How is she? Is she in third grade this year or fourth?”
“We’ll see you when you get here,” Maisy said as she gently replaced the telephone into the cradle.
“Who was that?”
Maisy turned to find Becky standing in the doorway, her blond hair still tousled from sleep, her bare toes peeking out from too-short pajama bottoms and polished in different shades of orange and purple.
“That was your aunt Georgia. She’s coming for a visit.”
“The same Aunt Georgia who always sends me birthday and Christmas presents?”
“Yes.” Maisy didn’t say any more, although it seemed as if Becky was waiting.
“Have I ever met her?” Becky’s eyes, so dark they seemed almost black, peered back at her intently.
“Once. When you were a baby.”
“Daddy said I’m not supposed to mention her to you.”
Maisy stared back at her daughter, wondering whether her expression was as guileless as it seemed. “Did he? Well, your aunt Georgia and I don’t get along, is all. We had an argument a long time ago and she left. That’s pretty much all there is to it.”
“What was the argument about?” Becky leaned against the kitchen counter, as if preparing for a long story.
You. “I don’t remember,” Maisy said. “Maybe if you had a sister you might understand how one can drive you crazy more than anyone else in the world.”
“I wish I had a sister,” Becky said.
The bee chose that moment to land on the phone’s receiver. Without thinking, Maisy brought down the flyswatter. When she lifted it, the bee slid to the floor, completely still.
“Did you kill a bee?” Becky asked with the same sort of drama one might use if a person had unexpectedly died.
“It kept buzzing around me. I was afraid it was going to sting me.”
Becky pried the swatter from Maisy’s hand, then used it to pick up the dead bee. “A bee in a house means a visitor’s coming. But if you kill it, the visitor will bring bad luck.”
Maisy watched as Becky carefully carried the small corpse to the back door, then flung it into the grass. She rehung the swatter on the doorjamb before facing her mother. “Do you think that’s t-true?”
Becky stuttered only when she was nervous or upset, and Maisy felt worse for causing that than for killing the bee. “Of course not, sweetie.”
Becky stared at her for a moment. “I’ll g-go get d-dressed.”
Maisy listened as the creaks in each step marked Becky’s slow path up the stairs.
When Maisy returned to the backyard, bringing her mother’s wide-brimmed straw hat, her grandfather had pulled up a worn lawn chair next to Birdie. To any bystander, it would look like they were having a two-way conversation. But as Maisy approached, she could hear her mother humming a show tune as her grandfather talked about the recent heavy rains and how they might affect the upcoming tupelo honey harvest.
“I thought you might want this,” Maisy said as she set the hat on Birdie’s head, adjusting it just so. Even at her age, Birdie was a vain woman, protecting the beauty she’d been famous for. Her skin, sheltered from the sun by an overprotective mother since she was a child, had few lines, and her dark eyes hadn’t faded to a lighter hue. Every morning she painstakingly applied her makeup, purchased on regular trips into Jacksonville she made with Maisy.
Since Birdie no longer communicated in normal ways, Maisy was often asked how she knew what her mother wanted. People didn’t understand that she’d had a lifetime of studying her mother, trying to decode her. Trying to understand how a woman with no maternal instincts could have hoped to raise two daughters. Trying to piece together the woman her mother had been before her life had jolted off the rails one final, permanent time ten years before, sending her into a dark place from which she didn’t appear to want to return.
The clues were everywhere in picture frames around the house of the beautiful Birdie in various costumes from school plays and regional theater productions that had been her life for most of her youth. They were there in the thick photo albums stuffed with old Polaroids of her mother with her first husband, handsome in his army uniform before he left for Vietnam in 1965, and then of Birdie holding baby Georgia in a christening gown. It had only recently occurred to Maisy that there weren’t any photos of her own father, Birdie’s second husband, or more than the requisite school photos of herself. It almost seemed as if they were an afterthought, a failed attempt at a second chance.
Maisy sat down on the ground near her mother’s chair and leaned against it. She remembered other times here, under this tree, other spring mornings before the Florida sun scorched the earth and burned the skin. When she and Georgia had been as thick as bees in a hive. If only she didn’t know how badly it hurt to be stung.
“Georgia’s coming home for a visit,” she announced without preamble. “Just for a little while. She said she wants to make sure for herself that the soup cup you and I looked for isn’t here. She says her boss needs her to make sure.” She wanted to add that the real reason was because Georgia didn’t trust them to do a thorough job. But then that would mean that Georgia wanted to come back to Apalach, and they all understood why that couldn’t be true.
“The soup cup?” her grandfather repeated, an odd note in his voice.
She sent him a sharp look, wondering whether he could have already forgotten. “Yeah—remember? Georgia called you the day before yesterday and we looked all over the house for it. You said it was probably just another stray piece of junk Grandma brought home and we got rid of long ago.”
He regarded her steadily, but his eyes were empty, sending a cool shudder down her spine. He’s ninety-four, she reminded herself. That’s why he doesn’t remember; that’s why his eyes are so blank. But there was something else, something behind his eyes. Something he didn’t want her to see.
Maisy looked away, toward the house that held so many memories that she sometimes imagined she could hear the old nails and joists at night groaning with all the secrets they contained, and thought again of Georgia, and how she was coming home to the place she’d promised she’d never return to.
chapter 3
“Even bees, the little almsmen of spring bowers, know there is richest juice in poison-flowers.”
John Keats
—NED BLOODWORTH’S BEEKEEPER’S JOURNAL
Georgia
The wooden floorboards complained like the bones of an old woman as I walked from the small kitchen in the back of my shotgun cottage straight through to the front room, where my dining table sat littered with china catalogs and reference volumes. I sat down in the rustic farmhouse kitchen chair I’d found at a garage sale somewhere between Mobile and Pensacola and placed my steaming cup of coffee on the coaster beside my notebook. A classic jazz standard drifted from my circa-1980s clock radio, the dial permanently stuck on WWOZ FM 90.7. If I ever decided to listen to different music, I’d have to buy a new radio.
After rolling my shoulders, I returned to volume two of the Schleiger books, my eyes already feeling the strain from looking through the first one. It was harder because I didn’t have the cup and saucer to reference, and I had to go on memory. Not that I really needed to stare at them to remember. The pattern seemed to be imprinted on the inside of my eyelids, like the light from a camera flash.
I wasn’t procrastinating about leaving. Not really. I felt sure that Maisy was desperately looking through the house one more time, as eager as I was to find it and probably for much the same reason, and would find the piece of china so that I wouldn’t have to go down to Apalachicola.
The 1880s wooden school clock chimed eight times on the wall behind me just as a firm knock sounded on the front door. I sat back in my chair, deliberating on whether I should answer, when th
e knock came again, followed by a male voice. “Miss Chambers? Georgia? It’s James Graf. I’d like to talk with you.”
I looked down at my clothes, mortified to realize I was still wearing my pajamas, albeit vintage silk men’s pajamas from the twenties. I’d half risen from my chair, ready to dash to my bedroom, when he called through the door again. “Just five minutes of your time—I promise.”
With a sigh of resignation, I went to the door and unbolted the six locks that laced it like a corset. James was dressed in khaki pants and a long-sleeved shirt rolled up at the sleeves, and he carried a bag that looked suspiciously like the ones from the Maple Street Patisserie that I usually brought to work.
He held it toward me like a peace offering. “Mr. Mandeville said you were particularly fond of the chocolate croissants, so I stopped by on my way over.”
My stomach rumbled as I smelled the pastries inside the bag, and tried to remember the last time I’d eaten. It was always this way when I was lost in the hunt for a singular piece of a collection, an unbroken lid, a missing key.
“Thank you,” I said, hesitating only briefly before I took the bag. “I thought you’d be back in New York by now.”
James smiled, and I liked the way the sides of his eyes crinkled easily, as if that meant he smiled a lot. “I need to ask a favor.”
I stepped back into the room to allow him to enter. “I don’t have a lot of time. I was hoping to get through one more Schleiger book before I head out of town.”
I motioned for him to sit at one of the mismatched chairs around the table, then excused myself to get coffee and plates. When I returned, I found him examining the small collection of antique locks under glass in a vitrine in a corner of the room. The collection was added to only when I matched a key to a lock, leaving a lot of empty space on the royal blue velvet cushion I’d placed inside.
