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

television was on high and he didn’t hear. She grabbed the phone and used the redial button to call Rose. When Rose answered she heard the phone hit the floor.
    The next thing Augusta knew, she was in a white room and everything was fuzzy and moving. Nothing made sense. She tried focusing for a while on the objects around the room: the square box on an arm above her, the skinny stand to one side that she knew she was attached to, by the tube running out of her. Most peculiar of all was the big red shape beside her, moving and changing; it wasn’t one shape, it was many. Jiggling and flowing from one solid into another. She wished it would stay still and become just one thing so she could get a good look at it. She reached out to touch the red shapes, and as her arm took motion it too multiplied, flowed from one shape to another. It was ridiculous—laughable—and frightening at the same time, yet she was drawn to reach out. Because the red shape smelled of honey. The whole room smelled of honey and the red shape was the source. Even as she reached out, she giggled at the red thing’s duplicity. She giggled right out loud. “Augusta,” it said. “Mom.”
    That was her. She was Mom. Of course. All at once the higgledy-piggledy shapes joined into one. There was her arm, one arm, reaching out to touch the red. And the red was Gabe’s shirt, and Gabe was in it, smelling of honeycomb and peaches.
Her
Gabe. He was holding a teddy bear. “Thought you could use a friend.”
    Augusta named that bear Gabe, and slept with him tucked in beside her every night of her hospital stay. Joy didn’t think much of that; she read all kinds of unsettling sexual things into Augusta’s behaviour and gave her heck. “The bear was comforting, that’s all,” Augusta told her. “And Gabe is the most comfortable person I know to be around.”
    Gabe had given her the teacup she drank from now, as she sat with Karl and Rose at the table. He had surprised her with it, in fact. During their last visit, they had all gone into that antique store together. Lovely place. China teacups set out on mirrored glass shelves so the whole place shimmered in the pretty colours of the cups. There was one teacup and saucer there of a pattern Augusta had grown up with—the pattern of a set her mother had owned: a delicate yellow with roses painted around the rim. Augusta admired the teacup but finally put it back on its mirrored shelf. She couldn’t afford it and Karl wouldn’t give her the money to buy it. “What do you need that for?” he said. “You’ve got teacups all over the house.” When they all returned to Augusta and Karl’s apartment that afternoon, Gabe insisted on making the tea, and when he brought the tea to the table she saw why. How had he managed to buy the cup without her seeing? Because it was Gabe’s idea, she saw that clearly, though Joy smiled asthough she were in on the gift. Joy wouldn’t have thought to buy her that cup any more than Karl would have Karl wasn’t much for buying gifts, even for birthdays or anniversaries.
    “You planning anything special for today?” she asked him.
    “Special? What like?”
    “I don’t know.” She glanced over at Rose as she took a seat beside her. “Just thought you might have planned something.”
    “Thought we’d be waiting around for Joy’s call. Didn’t think we’d be going down to the seniors’ centre.”
    “No, of course not.” She examined him as he scratched the scar where his thumb was missing. His ears were a little pink, but not the red they usually bloomed when he was lying or trying to hide something from her. With all that had been going on, she doubted she would have remembered that today was their anniversary herself, if Joy hadn’t reminded her. “You remember when we met?” she asked Karl. “When you came to the farm with that horse dealer?”
    “Ah-huh,” said Karl. His ears blushed. He glanced at her and back at his cup, smiling.
    The stud-horse man