on my tongue, and I couldn’t believe I had had no awareness that a pleasure such as this existed. I chewed until the wax turned cold and then mimicked Grandpa, removing the wad from my mouth and tossing it back into the tub and grabbing a new warm piece. Grandpa took a few steps back and then winked at me. Then he spat his wax into the air like he was launching a watermelon seed, landing it in the basin. I took his cue and shot my wax into a big arc just as he had done.
“Two points!” he said, going all the way to the opposite end of the bus for the long shot. He spat and missed, the wax ball landing at my feet. He retrieved it, and as he stood back up, he leaned toward me as if he were going to tell me a secret.
“How’s it going with your mother?”
I shrugged.
“Are you getting along?”
“I guess so,” I said.
“It might take her a while to get better, you know,” he said.
“Yeah.”
Sealed away inside the bus, where he could speak his mind out of Granny’s earshot, Grandpa’s personality changed. He was talking to me as if I was his equal, and it took me a moment to adjust. I could sense he was trying to tell me something important, searching for the right words yet not wanting to upset me or tell me more than I could handle. He turned back to slicing wax, but kept talking to me in this new, grown-up way.
“She can’t help the way she is.”
His words hung in the air. What way was my mother, exactly? I knew that sadness followed her into every room. I knew she had to stay in bed because she had so many headaches, and that she really didn’t like her father. By listening to my classmates, I had figured out by now that other moms went to work, came to school, cooked dinner. Mine slept through Christmas and left my brother and me personal checks, instead of actual gifts, under the tree. Our mother was different. But now Grandpa’s words poked at me. Why was Mom “that way,” and why couldn’t she help it? What was wrong with my mother? Grandpa had admitted something to me, maybe something that I wasn’t supposed to hear.
“She can’t help what?”
Grandpa turned an empty hive box on its short side and sat on it like a stool. He wiped his brow on the back of his arm and faced me. I could tell he was choosing his words carefully.
“Your mother loves you.”
I waited for him to continue. He tried again.
“Sometimes it’s hard for her to show it.”
“Why?”
Grandpa looked up toward a spider spinning a web in one of the oblong windows at the roofline. I could tell that I’d asked one of those questions for which there is no answer. In the silence that stretched between us, a heavy sadness pressed down on my chest, and suddenly I needed to sit down. I pulled an empty hive box near him and made my own stool.
“Have I told you about scout bees?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Scout bees are house hunters. If their home is not right—too crowded, too damp—they go searching for a better one.”
I wasn’t sure why he was telling me this, so I waited for him to continue.
Scout bees are the risk-takers, the ones that convince a hive to swarm, he said. Days before the bees pour out of their hive in a massive cloud, scout bees investigate the neighborhood looking for a better place to live, exploring tree cavities, insides of chimneys, even the walls of houses. They wait for a nice, sunny day and then race through the hive, shivering their wing muscles against other bees to motivate them. Their excitement is infectious as the temperature rises inside the hive and all those flapping wings come together like a drumbeat. The bees get louder, and louder, and when they are at a roar, on some hidden cue the swarm pours forth from the hive entrance, whirling into a horde up to thirty feet across with the queen somewhere in the middle.
I imagined a firework of bees in the sky, tens of thousands of black dots swirling and then coming together as if through an invisible funnel.
“How do they decide where to go?”
“They dance.”
By now I’d learned that Grandpa was never kidding when he talked about bees, no matter how unbelievable his stories seemed. He had me convinced