A Recipe for Bees by Gail Anderson-Dargatz Read Free Book Online

handsome Dr. Collier, he had congratulatedher. After he moved back east, to London, Ontario, Augusta had written to him twice, but he hadn’t answered. Too busy, she supposed.
    Augusta stroked Gabe’s hand and glanced around the intensive care unit. At the far end was a room made of glass, with curtains only partly covering the glass walls. Everything within the room was white—white blankets on the bed, a white nightstand with a glass vase full of white shasta daisies. There was a woman in the bed. Dead, thought Augusta, that woman’s dead. She stared at the woman for a long time, hoping for some sign she was wrong, then watched as the nurse who had opened the door for her led a young woman and two men, who were clearly brothers, from the corridor into the glass room. The young woman cried out. The nurses stopped what they were doing for a moment and braced themselves against whatever they stood beside—the foot of a bed, the counter, the sink, the open fridge with all its bottles lined up inside. The nurse closed the curtain around the inside of the room and shut the door as she left it.
    The moment passed for the nurses and they went on with their chores, but Augusta couldn’t let it go. The grief of the family intensified the pain in her hip, gutted her stomach, dizzied her. Now that the curtains were drawn around the inside of the glass room, Augusta could see herself, Gabe—the whole room—reflected there.
For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face
. She began to sweat and became short of breath. Her heart fluttered. The nurse who had opened the door for her unceremoniously slid a chair next to her and moved on before Augusta could thank her.
    Augusta dropped heavily into the chair and placed her fingers over Gabe’s limp hand. Her face was level with the high bed he slept on. Her feet ached. She wanted more than anything to slip her shoes off and let her swollen feet free, but a nurse had just scolded a very young woman standing by a patient in the next bed for walking around barefoot. “You don’t know what you’ll pick up,” she had said.
    Smelling Gabe’s sweet scent, Augusta closed her eyes and saw him in her mind’s eye in the orchard, mid afternoon, hunched over a bee box. Bees in his hair. Bees on his cheeks. Bees hovering around his head. He smelt of God’s own fruits and flowers and of honey itself. His was the sweetness of angels. Being stung so often, Joy had become an expert on the many cures for bee stings: a slightly moistened sugar cube applied to the welt, or a paste of baking soda, or slices of raw onion, or poultices of summer savory. But the sugar-cube treatment took the pain away immediately. Augusta must have nodded off to sleep then, sitting in the chair, still clasping Gabe’s hand, because suddenly Joy was beside her, removing Gabe’s hand from her grasp and holding it in her own.
    One wouldn’t think a mother-in-law would be so fond of a son-in-law. But there it was. Gabe had lost his parents when he was in his twenties, to a car crash. Maybe that was why he was more of a son than son-in-law to Augusta. He was the one who had visited her every day when she had been hospitalized two years before, not Joy. Joy had only managed the one visit. Augusta was in the hospital because her young doctor had pulled her off her old heart medication too quickly and she had collapsed in the kitchen.When it first started she thought she was having another vision so at first she didn’t call out to Karl. The room became soft, bent all out of shape. Objects she knew were solid were dancing around like drunken sailors. The table leaned so much that she was sure it would give way if she so much as put a teacup there. The only two things she was somewhat sure of were the floor she was standing on and the blue phone on the counter that was miraculously holding its shape. Then the floor began to shift under her feet. She leaned against the counter and called out to Karl but the