The Secret Life of Bees Read Online Free PDF Page B

lay in bed listening to the flicks and twitters and thrums inside the bee jar, waiting till it was late enough so I could slip out to the orchard and dig up the tin box that held my mother’s things. I wanted to lie down in the orchard and let it hold me.
    When the darkness had pulled the moon to the top of the sky, I got out of bed, put on my shorts and sleeveless blouse, and glided past T. Ray’s room in silence, sliding my arms and legs like a skater on ice. I didn’t see his boots, how he’d parked them in the middle of the hall. When I fell, the clatter startled the air so badly T. Ray’s snore changed rhythm. At first it ceased altogether, but then the snore started back with three piglet snorts.
    I crept down the stairs, through the kitchen. When the night hit my face, I felt like laughing. The moon was a perfect circle, so full of light that all the edges of things had an amber cast. The cicadas rose up, and I ran with bare feet across the grass.
    To reach my spot I had to go to the eighth row left of the tractor shed, then walk along it, counting trees till I got to thirty-two. The tin box was buried in the soft dirt beneath the tree, shallow enough that I could dig it up with my hands.
    When I brushed the dirt from the lid and opened it, I saw first the whiteness of her gloves, then the photograph wrapped in waxed paper, just as I’d left it. And finally the funny wooden picture of Mary with the dark face. I took everything out, and, stretching out among the fallen peaches, I rested them across my abdomen.
    When I looked up through the web of trees, the night fell over me, and for a moment I lost my boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin and the moon was my heart beating up there in the dark. Lightning came, not jagged but in soft, golden licks across the sky. I undid the buttons on my shirt and opened it wide, just wanting the night to settle on my skin, and that’s how I fell asleep, lying there with my mother’s things, with the air making moisture on my chest and the sky puckering with light.
    I woke to the sound of someone thrashing through the trees. T. Ray! I sat up, panicked, buttoning my shirt. I heard his footsteps, the fast, heavy pant of his breathing. Looking down, I saw my mother’s gloves and the two pictures. I stopped buttoning and grabbed them up, fumbling with them, unable to think what to do, how to hide them. I had dropped the tin box back in its hole, too far away to reach.
    â€œLileeee!” he shouted, and I saw his shadow plunge toward me across the ground.
    I jammed the gloves and pictures under the waistband of my shorts, then reached for the rest of the buttons with shaking fingers.
    Before I could fasten them, light poured down on me and there he was without a shirt, holding a flashlight. The beam swept and zagged, blinding me when it swung across my eyes.
    â€œWho were you out here with?” he shouted, aiming the light on my half-buttoned top.
    â€œN-no one,” I said, gathering my knees in my arms, startled by what he was thinking. I couldn’t look long at his face, how large and blazing it was, like the face of God.
    He flung the beam of light into the darkness. “Who’s out there?” he yelled.
    â€œPlease, T. Ray, no one was here but me.”
    â€œGet up from there,” he yelled.
    I followed him back to the house. His feet struck the ground so hard I felt sorry for the black earth. He didn’t speak till we reached the kitchen and he pulled the Martha White grits from the pantry. “I expect this out of boys, Lily—you can’t blame them—but I expect more out of you. You act no better than a slut.”
    He poured a mound of grits the size of an anthill onto the pine floor. “Get over here and kneel down.”
    I’d been kneeling on grits since I was six, but still I never got used to that powdered-glass feeling beneath my skin. I walked toward them with those tiny feather