The Honey Bus - Meredith May Page 0,36

take care of her, helped me feel a little less bad about the family I had lost. It reassured me that motherhood is a natural part of nature, even among the tiniest of creatures, so maybe there was hope yet that Mom would come back to me. Even though the bees left the hive every day, they always came back. There was never any doubt that a bee had any other purpose than to be with its family. The hive was predictable, and that was reassuring. It was a family that never quit.

6

The Beekeeper

1975—Fall

When Granny took me to the church thrift shop to buy school clothes, I knew that we were going to stay in California for good. I accepted this with a child’s surrender, the feeling of floating down a river on a boat steered by others, watching the turns of my life come into view with a quiet detachment. As was custom in my family, there was no conversation to explain why our visit had become permanent. On the one hand I was thrilled to finally meet kids my age, but I was also sad to forfeit a private hope that one day we’d return to Rhode Island and be a family again.

The thrift shop was in an attic above the church, accessible by a stairway behind the sanctuary. The room was musty, with angles of light from a few small windows at the roofline illuminating the dust motes floating in the air. Granny let me pick out a shirt, and I chose a white button-down, short-sleeved blouse with vertical green stripes. Looking closer, I saw the stripes were actually columns of Girl Scout emblems—little symbols that looked like four-leaf clovers. I couldn’t believe my luck—a real piece of the official Girl Scout uniform. Granny pushed aside the hangers on a crowded circular rack and tugged out an ankle-length padded skirt with a patchwork pattern of gingham and calico squares. It looked very much like she wanted me to wear a quilt to school.

“This is respectable,” she said, holding it aloft.

I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I knew that when Granny made up her mind about something, the proper response was compliance. My shirt and Granny’s skirt together were a train wreck of an outfit—Little House on the Prairie on the bottom and wayward troop leader on top, but this was what I chose for my first day of school, with sneakers.

There was no fanfare on my first day at Tularcitos Elementary. Mom remained in bed, Grandpa left before the sun for a plumbing job down the coast, and Granny whisked Matthew and me out the door with her. Now that the school year had started, she had to leave earlier in the morning to get us to day care at a lady’s house in the village, before she drove to Carmel to ready the day’s lessons before her fifth-graders arrived. I had breakfast with the day care kids, then walked myself to school, using a shortcut through the dirt airport.

It was common in the seventies to see kids walking everywhere by themselves in Carmel Valley. Crime was rare, and the village was so small that everyone knew which kid belonged to whom and kept a collective eye on our whereabouts. Our neighborhood was scarred with footpaths worn through fields and behind homes where kids had created their own transportation networks linking the convenience store to the community pool, the library to the baseball field. So the plan Granny laid out for me was to walk to Tularcitos each morning and back to day care each afternoon, where I’d wait with Matthew until she could retrieve us. I became a latchkey kid without a key.

On the first day of school, I kept to the edge of the road, inhaling the licorice scent of the wild anise bushes and turning to look over my shoulder every now and then to keep a lookout for the occasional car. The street was sleepy and deserted in the early morning; even the neighborhood dogs were still snoozing as the first rays of sun warmed their bellies. I passed a horse corral where two ponies lifted their heads expectantly. Normally, I would have stopped to feed them tufts of green grass through the fence, but this time I hurried along so I wouldn’t be late for my first day of school. I cut through the airport, and finally reached the white ranch house next door to the school with the weathered wagon