Free The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd Page A

go,’ I said.
    ‘And two Coca-Colas, please.’
    While I waited for our lunch, I wandered along the store aisles, stocking up for supper. Packages of salted peanuts, buttermilk cookies, two pimiento-cheese sandwiches in plastic, sour balls, and a can of Red Rose snuff. I piled it on the counter. When he returned with the plates and drink bottles, he shook his head.
    ‘I’m sorry, but it’s Sunday. I can’t sell anything from the store, just the restaurant. Your grandma ought to know that. What’s her name anyway?’
    ‘Rose,’ I said, reading it off the snuff can.
    ‘Rose Campbell?’
    ‘Yes, sir. Rose Campbell.’
    ‘I thought she only had grandboys.’
    ‘No, sir, she’s got me, too.’
    He touched the bag of sour balls.
    ‘Just leave it all here. I’ll put it back.’
    The cash register pinged, and the drawer banged out. I rummaged in my bag for the money and paid him.
    ‘Could you open the Coke bottles for me?’ I asked, and while he walked back toward the kitchen, I dropped the Red Rose snuff in my bag and zipped it up. Rosaleen had been beaten up, gone without food, slept on the hard ground, and who could say how long before she’d be back in jail or even killed? She deserved her snuff. I was speculating how one day, years from now, I would send the store a dollar in an envelope to cover it, spelling out how guilt had dominated every moment of my life, when I found myself looking at a picture of the black Mary. I do not mean a picture of just any black Mary. I mean the identical, very same, exact one as my mother’s. She stared at me from the labels of a dozen jars of honey. BLACK MADONNA HONEY, they said. The door opened, and a family came in fresh from church, the mother and daughter dressed alike in navy with white Peter Pan collars. Light streamed in the door, hazy, warped, blurred with drizzles of yellow. The little girl sneezed, and her mother said, ‘Come here, let’s wipe your nose.’
    I looked again at the honey jars, at the amber lights swimming inside them, and made myself breathe slowly. I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don’t even know it. I thought about the bees that had come to my room at night, how they’d been part of it all. And the voice I’d heard the day before, saying, Lily Melissa Owens, your jar is open, speaking as plain and clear as the woman in navy speaking to her daughter.
    ‘Here’s your Coca-Colas,’ the bow-tied man was saying. I pointed to the honey jars.
    ‘Where did you get those?’
    He thought the tone of shock in my voice was really consternation.
    ‘I know what you mean. A lot of folks won’t buy it ‘cause it’s got the Virgin Mary pictured as a colored woman, but see, that’s because the woman who makes the honey is colored herself.’
    ‘What’s her name?’
    ‘August Boatwright,’ he said.
    ‘She keeps bees all over the county.’
    Keep breathing, keep breathing.
    ‘Do you know where she lives?’
    ‘Oh, sure, it’s the darndest house you ever saw. Painted like Pepto-Bismol. Your grandmother surely’s seen it—you go through town on Main Street till it turns into the highway to Florence.’
    I walked to the door.
    ‘Thanks.’
    ‘You tell your grandma hello for me,’ he said. Rosaleen’s snores were making the bench slats tremble. I gave her a shake.
    ‘Wake up. Here’s your snuff, but put it in your pocket, ‘cause I didn’t exactly pay for it.’
    ‘You stole it?’ she said.
    ‘I had to, ‘cause they don’t sell items from the store on Sunday.’
    ‘Your life has gone straight to hell,’ she said. I spread our lunch out like a picnic on the bench but couldn’t eat a bite of it till I told her about the black Mary on the honey jar and the beekeeper named August Boatwright.
    ‘Don’t you think my mother must’ve known her?’ I said.
    ‘It couldn’t be just a