Free Stolen Honey by Nancy Means Wright Page A

I’m crying!” Leroy didn’t understand. He couldn’t understand it was the boy’s father comforting the mother that brought on the tears. And then that mean-spirited Alyce, telling her she’d have to live with the guilt. Leroy couldn’t understand all that.
    “You should have minded your own business, Leroy. You had no right to come out that night and peer at us. Like we were ...” She couldn’t find the right words.
    “Like you were gettin’ laid,” he said hoarsely, running a nervous hand through his rusty hair. “That’s why I came out. You were yellin’, you don’t remember that? I’m supposed to sit by, let that son of a bee attack you? What else could I do but—but stop him?”
    She felt her heart go slack. “Stop him—how?” she asked. “Did you drag him into the nightshade? Did you hit him with something?” She was awed at her own words. Horrified. Her breath came in ragged gasps.
    He didn’t answer. Not right away. Finally, leaning his elbows on the table, the whites of his eyes brilliant, he said, “Maybe. Maybe I did. For you. Donna. Anything I did, it was for you.”
    “Don’t come near me. Ever again,” she said, and kicked his leg, hard, as she left the table.
    * * * *
    Leroy stomped into the kitchen late that afternoon. He needed to borrow the truck, he told Gwen; he didn’t say why. “If I had my own car, I wouldn’t have to borrow yours.”
    “Save up for one,” she said brightly.
    “Save what? What you pay me? I need to make more money. I need a car to get around. I got a friend looking for a better job for me. He finds one, I’ll take it.”
    “What? Why, this is our busiest season, Leroy, you can’t leave now! Maybe next year I can pay more, I’ll try. It’s been hard, with Donna in college.”
    “I need my own car,” he repeated through stubborn lips, and turned on his heel. A minute later she heard the truck screeching off down the road. He’s punishing us, she thought. Punishing Donna for ignoring him, punishing me for not being able to pay a better wage.
    She dropped to her knees to scrub the kitchen floor.
     

Chapter Six
     
    Mert LeBlanc was surprised to see a taxi pull up in front of the house and his grandson climb out, dragging his green book bag. Then when Mert reached in his pocket for a few bucks the taxi drove off and Brownie said the school nurse had paid and he could bring her the money the next day. He was throwing up “all over the place,” he said, and she was afraid he had a bug. A couple of throw-up bugs, Brownie explained, were still going around, and he didn’t want to spread them.
    “So you’re bringin’ ’em all home to us, thanks a lot,” said Mert, and laughed when his grandson frowned, taking him literally. “Better go right to bed, then, son.”
    Mert went back to the pack basket he was making for the local craft center exhibition. He’d made egg baskets, apron baskets, thimble baskets, laundry and pack baskets, even a large cradle with a canopy over its woven bottom. He was pleased with those baskets. It beat putting auto parts together the way he’d done the first thirty-five years of his adult life.
    He was part of five or more generations of basketmakers on Abenaki and French sides of the family. The baskets had kept both sides alive through depressions and oppressions, like the time a woman with a fancy WASP name had come knocking on the door to take his Aunt Maxine to the hospital for “a little procedure,” as she called it— Sign here, please— to keep her from having more babies. The woman had looked hard at him, too, but Mert managed to run out the door and only his father and aunt were visited by the simpering social worker. Aunt Maxine had blasphemed the woman to her dying day. It was something Mert would never forget.
    He was tightening down the ash strips when his grandson walked back in with a peanut butter and honey sandwich. “You must be feeling better now,” he told the boy. “You’d think you