The Secret Life of Bees Read Online Free

floor for it to eat and she didn’t raise a word of protest.
    The chick left dollops of violet-streaked droppings all over the place, due, I suppose, to the dye soaking into its fragile system. We had just started to clean them up when T. Ray burst in, threatening to boil the chick for dinner and fire Rosaleen for being an imbecile. He started to swoop at the biddy with his tractor-grease hands, but Rosaleen planted herself in front of him. “There is worse things in the house than chicken shit,” she said and looked him up one side and down the other. “You ain’t touching that chick.”
    His boots whispered uncle all the way down the hall. I thought, She loves me, and it was the first time such a far-fetched idea had occurred to me.
    Her age was a mystery, since she didn’t possess a birth certificate. She would tell me she was born in 1909 or 1919, depending on how old she felt at the moment. She was sure about the place: McClellanville, South Carolina, where her mama had woven sweet-grass baskets and sold them on the roadside.
    â€œLike me selling peaches,” I’d said to her.
    â€œNot one thing like you selling peaches,” she’d said back. “You ain’t got seven children you gotta feed from it.”
    â€œYou’ve got six brothers and sisters?” I’d thought of her as alone in the world except for me.
    â€œI did have, but I don’t know where a one of them is.”
    She’d thrown her husband out three years after they married, for carousing. “You put his brain in a bird, the bird would fly backward,” she liked to say. I often wondered what that bird would do with Rosaleen’s brain. I decided half the time it would drop shit on your head and the other half it would sit on abandoned nests with its wings spread wide.
    I used to have daydreams in which she was white and married T. Ray, and became my real mother. Other times I was a Negro orphan she found in a cornfield and adopted. Once in a while I had us living in a foreign country like New York, where she could adopt me and we could both stay our natural color.
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    My mother’s name was Deborah. I thought that was the prettiest name I’d ever heard, even though T. Ray refused to speak it. If I said it, he acted like he might go straight to the kitchen and stab something. Once when I asked him when her birthday was and what cake icing she preferred, he told me to shut up, and when I asked him a second time, he picked up a jar of blackberry jelly and threw it against the kitchen cabinet. We have blue stains to this day.
    I did manage to get a few scraps of information from him, though, such as my mother was buried in Virginia where her people came from. I got worked up at that, thinking I’d found a grandmother. No, he tells me, my mother was an only child whose mother died ages ago. Naturally. Once when he stepped on a roach in the kitchen, he told me my mother had spent hours luring roaches out of the house with bits of marshmallow and trails of graham-cracker crumbs, that she was a lunatic when it came to saving bugs.
    The oddest things caused me to miss her. Like training bras. Who was I going to ask about that? And who but my mother could’ve understood the magnitude of driving me to junior cheerleader tryouts? I can tell you for certain T. Ray didn’t grasp it. But you know when I missed her the most? The day I was twelve and woke up with the rose-petal stain on my panties. I was so proud of that flower and didn’t have a soul to show it to except Rosaleen.
    Not long after that I found a paper bag in the attic stapled at the top. Inside it I found the last traces of my mother.
    There was a photograph of a woman smirking in front of an old car, wearing a light-colored dress with padded shoulders. Her expression said, “Don’t you dare take this picture,” but she wanted it taken, you could see that. You could not believe the stories I saw in