“So you are your brother’s keeper?”
“There’s no place else for him to live.”
That rain could make you dizzy, it really could. Matt recalled that in Anton Hathaway’s diary, sent to his mother after the boy fell in battle, Anton had noted that the thing the men in his troop dreaded most was rain. That’s when they were most homesick; there were those who had bravely faced down blood and bullets who would call out their mothers’ names when the thunder began and torrents of rain began to fall.
“I paid the rent.” Jenny was livid. She sent Matt’s order for rye toast and eggs, over easy, to the kitchen with the new fellow Liza had hired to wash dishes and take out the trash. “I don’t understand. I sent a check long before the first of the month.”
“You sent it, but Will cashed it. Apparently, the model house isn’t the only thing he’s managed to lose. The rent money’s what he’s been living on. I went over there to collect some belongings. Mrs. Ehrland said to say hello.”
“Oh, great. Lovely.”
Jenny poured herself a cup of coffee. The Harmon brothers, Joe and Dennis, came in, waving, stomping the mud off their boots. Jenny had been in class with Joe Harmon all through elementary school. She could not believe that she had been at the tea house long enough to know both men’s breakfast orders by heart: one bagel, one rye toast, two cheese omelets, cooked through.
“Did Stella seem a little odd to you today?” Jenny asked as she put in the Harmons’ order.
“Maybe she has a test. High school’s got its pressures.”
Every time Matt was in Jenny’s presence he had the feeling that he was dreaming, still asleep in his bed, far from the customary emptiness of his waking life. Jenny, on the other hand, so accustomed to dreaming other people’s dreams, had begun to have her own dreams as well. Just last night there was a maze of green hedges that went on endlessly, so that she’d had to run, breathless, ready to fall.
Matt had begun to talk about his day—he had to drive into Boston to collect Will’s belongings, now stored in Mrs. Ehrland’s cellar. Hopefully, he would get back to work on the old tree by the end of the week. If it wasn’t rain that had slowed him down, it was errands, other jobs, and then, of course, there was a hive of bees inside the trunk, honeybees drunk on the pollen of spring from the field of red clover behind Lockhart Avenue. By then Jenny was staring at Matt. In last night’s dream there had been bees in the hedges, on every single leaf.
“Are you okay?” Matt said when he saw her expression.
“Oh, yeah.” Jenny got his breakfast and watched him eat. The food disappeared. He was almost through and she was still curious about something.
“The other evening when Will came back, you were standing on the porch. A bee settled on you, but you waved it away. You weren’t the least bit worried.”
“Bees don’t usually sting you if you’re polite to them. On the other hand, if you curse at them, they’ll come after you. I’ve seen it happen.”
Jenny laughed. “I cursed them once. To keep them out of my mother’s garden. It worked till she got wise to what I’d done. She concocted some brandy cake and they all came flying back. Double what I’d sent away.”
Matt loved the sound of her laughter; it reminded him of that day on the lawn, when everything was green and he fell in love with her. He wanted to give her something, but the only thing he had was his knowledge of the town. He turned to local history, searching for a tidbit Jenny might appreciate. “If you have a wedding, you’re supposed to offer the bees some cake as well, for luck. Elisabeth Sparrow did it on her wedding day, and she stayed married for sixty years.”
“Now you tell me,” Jenny said. “After my marriage is over.”
They stared at each other. The candle had burned down, past the pin, past the point of returning to the way things had been.
“Maybe that was luck.”
He was becoming a compulsive talker, like that foolish Farmer Hathaway, who blamed himself for what happened to Rebecca. Charles Hathaway could never stop talking about his mistakes, so that in time everyone in town who kept a journal took note of how they’d come to avoid him. Matt gulped the last of his coffee and put on his jacket. The one thing he didn’t want to do on a murky April day when the roads were sure to be flooded was to drive his brother into Boston and back again.
“I think I’ve just worked in so many gardens in this town that the bees know me,” he told Jenny as he set out to leave. “That’s why I’ve never been stung.” It was Will who had the fear of bees, who’d been prey to allergic reactions, Will who all the same had gotten everything he’d ever wanted. But in this one circumstance, Matt had been the lucky one, and standing there at the counter, watching him duck into the rain, Jenny couldn’t help but wonder why she hadn’t seen it was him all along.