just settled down in the den to watch the evening news or whatever we could agree on. Leslie made cheeseburgers and oven fries for us, which was a change from our normal protein, starch, and vegetable fare. To change things even more, we were eating dinner on TV tables that Momma got somewhere years ago. They folded up and hung on a rack. I’d seen all different kinds and these were easily the cheapest and most rickety, but they did the job. We were the kind of family that didn’t replace things that still worked.
So, there we were, watching Jeopardy!, screaming the answers at the television. It was the one show we all liked. Suddenly, there was banging on our door. Not polite knocking. Banging.
I went to answer it, suspecting it was something to do with Sharon.
I opened the door and, what do you know, there stood Sharon, red-faced and stuttering.
“Your goddamn bees!”
“What about them?”
“They shit all over my car. Not Archie’s. Not the golf cart. My car! Mine!”
“I’m sorry, what? How do you know it was my bees?”
“Because I saw them!” She was screaming at me. “I saw them fly over your fence. There must’ve been thousands of them!”
I didn’t like her tone.
“Would you like to stop screaming in my face?”
I had had it with her.
She stepped back and said at a more reasonable volume, “If this happens again, I’ll call the police!”
“Go ahead. Honey bees don’t poop in the hive. They take cleansing flights. I’ve never heard of bees picking out one target. They drop their tiny poops indiscriminately.”
“Then how do you explain this?”
“Maybe you’re just getting special treatment, Sharon. How would I know? Why don’t you ask the bees?”
“I’m taking my car to the car wash and I’m sending you the bill,” she said.
“And I’m going to finish my supper,” I said.
I closed the door in her face. What was I supposed to do? Go wash her car? Oh, Lord. Did my bees sense something about her? Wait! Did they understand the things I told them? I was unsure if I should really believe that or not. Was it possible? Was it possible for bees to step in like that and give the enemy a warning? I leaned against the back of our front door and gave it a few moments of thought. It didn’t matter if it was a coincidence or done in collaboration, it had occurred and that much was fact. Just like the bees had appeared at the wedding, disappeared, and then the seagulls stepped in.
“You won’t believe what just happened,” I said to Momma and Leslie.
“Wait until a commercial, okay?” Momma said. “I’m watching this and I can’t hear with you yakking.”
When I told them, Momma shrugged her shoulders and Leslie looked at me like I had lost large parts of my mind.
“You don’t seriously believe that you told the bees some trash about Sharon and then as a direct result of that conversation . . .”
“A few thousand of them did a little poop on her car. Maybe the bombing was deliberate. I don’t know how the bees understood what I was so upset about, but I’d bet every dollar to my name that they did.”
Well, naturally, the next day I reported Sharon’s reaction to the poopers themselves.
“Look, I don’t know what’s happening here, but if y’all pooped on her car deliberately, I’m gonna plant you so much Culver’s root and goldenrod you won’t believe it!”
Honey bees loved anything with a purple flower. Culver’s root was a spiky plant I’d put in near the edges of our marshy backyard. And goldenrod, native to our area, bloomed in a magnificent shade of yellow. The bees swarmed both species, so I knew they had a high-quality nectar and pollen. Christmas would come early for my girls.
“I just want to make you all happy! Even if you didn’t do this on my behalf, thank you! Thank you!”
After the bombing of Sharon’s car there was a short period of relative peace. I would see the boys a couple of times a week, and sometimes they’d wait at our house for either Archie or Sharon to come home from work. But they had certainly lost a lot of their spark. They were downright sullen.
“Is everything all right at home?” I finally asked.
“It’s okay,” Tyler said. “I’ll be in college in ten years. I’ll survive.”
That wouldn’t do. Maybe my bees needed another cleansing flight.
“Why do they call her the queen bee?” Hunter said.