There was a hard, dull ache underneath my rib cage, where my heart had gotten so chock-full of sadness and worry that it had grown a case around it, sharp and flinty.
Suddenly a spot on my arm burned needle-sharp, bad enough that I jumped and shouted, not even remembering to stay quiet so I didn’t wake up Arden’s whole family inside the house. I clapped my hand to the sore place. It was already turning red. A fuzzy black-and-gold shape looped away from me, toward Miss Amanda’s front garden.
“You stupid old bee!” I called after it, loud as I dared. “I hope you’re the kind that’s gonna go somewhere and die for what you did to me!”
I bit my lip hard, rubbing at the bee sting and wishing more than I had maybe in my whole life that my mama was there, and healthy, and able to wrap me up in her arms just the way Miss Amanda had done last night.
I tried, Mama, I thought, watching the place the bee had disappeared. I tried so hard to make you better.
I blinked again. I’d tried everything I knew—all except the one thing I’d been too scared to try.
I’d been so fixed on healing Mama’s brain, I’d never been willing to go at things any other way. I’d been too afraid of the idea that Mama’s sickness might be a part of our lives forever, too afraid that Miss Tabitha was right and that my stubborn heart was the thing that needed fixing, not Mama’s brain.
Inside my chest, my heart in its hard shell thumped once, hard.
The bee. I kept rubbing at my arm, but the pain was quieter now, dissolving into the background of the idea that was taking hold of me like a summer thunderstorm.
There was something I needed to do before I saw Mama and Daddy again.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I kept glancing back at Arden’s house as I walked down the driveway, but I couldn’t see anybody stirring. The sun was still only just creeping up into the sky and flooding the road with silvery cloud-filtered light—and while people in Maryville got up early, I figured I had at least a few minutes to get out of sight. I hoped Arden would sleep in a bit, so that nobody had a chance to realize I was missing until I’d already made it where I needed to go.
I walked in the dry ditch bed beside the road, hardly noticing how the long weeds tickled at my bare shins. The heat was already rising up, radiating from the asphalt down over me, until I found myself wondering how on earth I still had water left to sweat out.
I’d only been to Miss Tabitha Quigley’s house a few times, and not once since Grandpa and Grandma had moved out last year. With only three of us to manage a whole farm, there wasn’t time for me to ride along with Mama when she went on easy errands like buying honey.
Still, I knew where it was just like I know where everything in Maryville is: not hard to do when there’s not even enough people in town to fill up an elementary school. The Bee Lady’s place was a mile or two north of us, a little white house tucked in between two farms with a shimmering view of the Albemarle Sound behind and a beehive sign that advertised Honey and Other Products for sale.
I judged I was about halfway there when my legs started threatening to fold up underneath me. It felt like days since I’d had a good sleep, days since I’d drunk enough water to replace all the sweat I was losing, days since I’d done anything that didn’t leave me dizzy and tired. The rhythm of my steps pounded in my brain: one-two-one-two-one-two.
It almost sounded like Mama, Mama, Mama.
I was shaking when I finally came into sight of the little white house with the beehive sign out front. My arms trembled and my legs might have belonged to somebody else—they just kept going and going and going while the rest of me was begging them to stop.
But I couldn’t stop. Not this close—not before I saw what Miss Tabitha thought she could offer me.
It was still pretty early, I guessed maybe almost breakfast time. Still, the door was unlocked, with a little sign that read Come In in cursive with a little bee on the end, like the bee had written the words out herself. When I opened the door, a bell above it jingled, tink-tink.
The room I stood in was filled with light, even on this gray cloud-lined morning, and had shelves on every wall filled with jars and jars of honey in every color from pale yellow to dark amber. On the floor below the shelves were huge two-gallon buckets with labels stamped on them: COASTAL WILDFLOWER HONEY, COTTON BLOSSOM HONEY, BLACKBERRY HONEY, and lots of others I couldn’t read from where I stood.
There were other things on the shelves, too—fancy-shaped yellow bricks of beeswax, little displays of stacked-up lip balm containers, those plastic straws filled with honey that Grandma and Grandpa Kelly were always convinced counted as a real treat.
The house was quiet, the kind of quiet a house gets when you’re the only living soul inside it, but through the window to the backyard I could see Miss Tabitha. She was standing by one of the white beehive boxes, a sheet of honeycomb in her hands. A cloud of bees swirled around her, so many bees that the ends of her blond hair lifted in the wind they made. She wasn’t wearing one of those white space suits beekeepers are supposed to put on to protect themselves from stings—but she didn’t look afraid, not one bit. She looked more at home there, in that storm of bees, than she’d ever seemed in church or at the bank or the Duck-Thru Food Store.
I didn’t tap on the window or even move, but after half a second she looked up and saw me, just like the bees had whispered to her that she had a guest. With a smile, she slid the honeycomb back into the bee box and walked toward the house. The bees parted for her like the ocean had parted for Moses in the Bible.
I swallowed hard.
“Why, Della Kelly,” she said as she came through the back door. When I looked down at her white feet, they were bare, even though she had a pearl necklace strung around her neck and wore a long, flowing purple skirt. “You’re here awful early. Most folks want Monday morning to drag on as late as possible. What can I get for you?”
The honey-lined shelves around me gave a little twist and spin, and I blinked hard. The Bee Lady moved forward, one hand reaching up toward me like she thought I was gonna fall right down on her waxed wood floor.
“Hold that thought. You can tell me what you’ve come for in a minute. You come on into my kitchen and sit yourself down before you collapse, shug. You look dog tired.”
I nodded and followed her through a doorway and into the kitchen. It was like being inside a honeycomb: golden-yellow walls, that same wood floor that shone like honey, even a pale yellow refrigerator that looked old enough to have been in the Garden of Eden.
Miss Tabitha pulled a chair out from the table and waved at me to sit down, then scurried around the kitchen, pouring me a glass of lemonade and spreading butter and honey over a thick slice of bread.
“You eat and drink, now,” she said, settling into the chair beside me with a glass of lemonade of her own, “and when you’re feeling better, you can tell me what I can do for you. Sakes, child, where’s your daddy? You’re half-dead on your feet.”
I sipped the lemonade—it was cool and tangy and tasted like the best thing that had ever hit my tongue—and tried to figure out how to answer. She didn’t ask where Mama was, which meant she knew all about the ambulance coming yesterday, and the hospital. I expected most people did by now. News traveled fast in Maryville, and an ambulance was definitely news.
“My daddy had to stop by the church,” I lied. “He, uh . . . wanted to get some notes from yesterday’s sermon. To share with Mama. I just walked on over from there.” It was less than a mile down the highway from the Bee Lady’s house to the church. “I’m gonna meet him again when I’m done.”
Miss Tabitha looked at me like she was trying to see down into my soul, her bright blue eyes sharp as lasers. I ate my bread and tried to act natural. I was pretty sure I remembered the hospital having its own Sunday sermon, last time Mama had been in there, but hopefully Miss Tabitha wouldn’t know that.
Finally, she seemed to decide I was telling the truth, because she relaxed back into her chair and
took a long drink of her own lemonade.
“My lands, it’s hot out there this morning,” she said, though she didn’t seem to have a drop of sweat on her. I didn’t answer, just shoveled in the rest of my bread. I was still hungry, but I didn’t feel anymore like I was going to keel over right there in the Bee Lady’s honey-colored kitchen.
I took a deep breath. “Miss Tabitha, you remember I asked you two weeks ago if you had any honey that could heal my mama?” The Bee Lady nodded, eyes piercing again. “You said you didn’t, but you said . . . you told me . . .”
I looked down, tracing a finger along the whorls of the wooden kitchen table.
“I told you I had something that could heal you, if you wanted it.”
“Yeah. That.”
“You think you’re ready to give it a try, child?”
I nodded, one quick up-down of my chin, not trusting myself to say anything.
“You stay right here a quick minute while I go grab it.” Miss Tabitha rose and swished back into the shop room, purple skirt swirling around her bare feet.
I finished up my lemonade, even crunching the ice cubes with my teeth and swallowing them down, their frozen coolness better than jumping into a swimming pool after my long, hot morning.
“Ah! Found it.” A moment later Miss Tabitha popped back into view, a tiny yellow canning jar in her hand. She set it down on the table beside me. I reached a tentative finger out, touching the warm glass like a feather’s kiss, almost afraid to breathe.
“This particular honey is a kind my bees have never made before,” Miss Tabitha went on. “And they didn’t make much before they moved on to other flowers, back in the springtime. But while they were making it, they were single-minded, only ever visiting those blossoms. I figured if my bees felt it was important enough to make, it was important enough for me to keep separate from everything else—and when you stopped me at church that Sunday and asked for help, I just knew this was for you.”
“What kind of honey is it?”
“Watermelon blossom. They paid lots of visits to your daddy’s farm, and Mr. Hawthorne’s, too.”
My head shot up so fast my ponytail made a little breeze above my neck. The Bee Lady was quiet, her expression unreadable.
“And there’s one other thing, Della. You have to understand that I don’t always know the effects my honeys are gonna have. You see, their magic is that they bring out the strength a thing—or a person—has already got inside. Your grandpa’s leg would’ve healed one way or another—my grandma’s honey just sped that process up. All those other stories you’ve heard, all those Quigley honey miracles, they all came about because there was strength deep down inside those people, all along. It just took the honey to find it.”
She tapped the lid of the honey jar with one white finger. “I think this honey will help you, Della, I really do. But it might take some time, and it might not be just in the way you expect it to. Sometimes, it takes patience to see what the honey’s showing.”
I nodded, only just now realizing I didn’t have anything to pay her with. I knew the Bee Lady sold her honey cheaper to locals than the tourists who saw her sign and stopped on their way down to Plymouth, but cheap still wasn’t the same as free.
“How much does it . . . um . . .”
“No cost this time, shug. Just think of it as me and the bees looking out for you.”
I swallowed, picking the honey jar up in my hand. It was heavier than it looked; as I turned it, the honey slid slowly away from the side, almost seeming to glow in the kitchen light.
“Thanks, Miss Tabitha.”
“You are most welcome, Della. I hope it gives you what you need.”
I stood up and pushed my chair in toward the table. “I better get going to meet my daddy. Thanks for the snack, too.”
“You take care of yourself, child. It’s hot as sin out there today. I wish that rain would come on and put us all out of our misery.” As if to punctuate her words, a thunderclap rattled the windows and made us both jump. Miss Tabitha laughed. “Maybe I oughta give you a ride down to the church, just in case it starts.”
“No, ma’am,” I said real fast. “I’ll be okay. Besides, if it hasn’t rained on us all summer, why would it start now?”
Miss Tabitha sighed. “Fair point, Della. Go quick and stay safe, then.”
The shop bell tinkled again as I left, clicking the door shut behind me, the honey jar held tight in my hand.
The sky outside was darker than it had been when I’d gotten there, and the thunder was coming more often. The air was staticky, so that I almost expected my hair to stand up around my head the way it did when I jumped on Arden’s trampoline. I shivered and started back down the highway.
I’d only been walking for a few minutes, the white siding of the Bee Lady’s house just barely disappeared from view around a bend in the road, when a clap of thunder maybe louder than any I’d ever heard shook the ground below me and split the sky wide open.
A second later, the rain began.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I was wet as a drowned dog before I’d even had a chance to realize that it was finally, finally raining. The water sluiced down from the sky like God was pouring it from giant-size buckets, filling the ditch beside me so fast the water was higher every time I blinked. If it kept up this way, I’d only have ten or fifteen minutes before I’d have to hop right up onto the highway or be up to my ankles in brown running ditch water.
Had Arden and her mama and daddy noticed I was missing yet? Were they out there somewhere looking for me?
I clutched the jar of watermelon honey tighter and started walking again, hardly even able to see the road, my feet slip-sliding around on the wet rubber of my flip-flops. The rain was loud all around me, and lightning flashed again and again, followed quickly by thunder that boomed right through to my bones. You couldn’t be a Carolina kid without learning to love summertime thunderstorms, and plenty of times Arden and I would run outside and dance around or jump in puddles, loving the feel of that warm rain on our skin.
This thunderstorm, though, was the kind we definitely wouldn’t have been allowed out in. I bit my lip and walked faster, my head bent against the driving rain as thunder clapped again. Between sneaking out and getting caught in the kind of storm that put people into the newspaper with headlines like “Girl Struck by Lightning on Country Highway,” I’d be in a world of hurt trying to explain myself to Miss Amanda when I got back to her place.
A blue car swooshed by me on the road, tires throwing up such a sheet of water I could feel it splatter against me even in the downpour. A second later the back lights blinked on, and before I knew it the car was turning around—not the easiest thing to do on a skinny highway like the kind we’ve got—and heading back toward me, slower now. My fingers gripped the honey jar so hard I thought it might break in my hand.
The car slowed to a stop and the driver’s window hummed its way down.
“Good heavens, child, what on earth are you doing out here in this storm?”
It was Miss Lorena Bradley, her sunshine smile so kind and friendly that before I knew it something big and rough had broken loose inside me and my chin was trembling hard, just one breath away from tears.
“Never mind you telling me that,” Miss Lorena said, waving me closer. “You just get on in here with me and we’ll figure out what to do with you, all right?” She reached for a button, and I heard the doors unlock.
“I’ll get your seats all wet.”
“Seats dry lots easier than little girls.”
Taking a deep breath, I climbed in next to her.
“I been looking for you everywhere,” Miss Lorena said, glancing over at me. “Driving up and down this highway the last half hour. Mr. Hawthorne’s doing the same thing, down south. Only reason I knew to come this way again was because Amanda Hawthorne got a call from your daddy up in Alberta, who’d gotten a call from Tabitha Quigley, all in a panic about how she’d let you walk out of her pl
ace just before the rain started, and you’d been gone before she could catch up with you to tell you to come on back inside.”
I twisted guiltily in the seat. “Didn’t mean to make anyone worry.” Least of all the whole bee-stung town.
“I know, sugar. I’ll get you back to their house right quick, and everything will be just fine.”
“I can’t go back there,” I said before I could stop myself. The wind-and-thunder feeling of last night’s fight with Arden was thick around me, and I wasn’t sure if it would be harder showing my face to her or to Miss Amanda after running away this morning.
Miss Lorena was silent for a minute, the only sound the whoosh of the car’s tires on the wet road and the rain coming down all around us.
“I’ll tell you what,” she said finally. “I’m going to send Arden’s mama a text to say I got you. I need to make a quick stop by my own house so Thomas has got the study book he left in here, and then you can fill me in on what’s going on and we’ll figure out what to do with you.”
“Okay,” I whispered, trying to keep the tears back.
We rode without talking, Miss Lorena humming a hymn under her breath until we pulled into the long cement driveway that wound behind the gas station and out to Mr. Anton’s house. Mr. Anton waved as we passed by the gas station; he was outside changing the buckets of soapy water he kept by the pumps for drivers to wash off their windshields.
“Sit tight and I won’t be a minute,” Miss Lorena said, popping out of the car and closing the door behind her. The rain was finally starting to ease up, coming down in something more like a whisper than a roar as she hurried down the driveway toward the house.
I looked back down at the honey jar, warm in my hands, almost glowing in the gloom of the storm. Biting my lip, I unscrewed the jar and dipped my finger in, bringing the honey up to my mouth and licking it off.
Please, God, let this fix everything, I thought.
The honey was an explosion of sweet on my tongue, thick and full of sunlight and fruit and something else wild and strange that wasn’t like any honey I’d ever tasted before. I closed my eyes, sucking it all off my finger, my heart singing, Let it work, let it work, let it work.
Where the Watermelons Grow Page 13