The Secret Life of Bees Read Online Free Page B

studying her face, I told her if she was my customer, I would give her a French twist that would do wonders for her, and she said—and I quote—“Please, Lily, you are insulting your fine intelligence. Do you have any idea how smart you are? You could be a professor or a writer with actual books to your credit. Beauty school. Please. ”
    It took me a month to get over the shock of having life possibilities. You know how adults love to ask, “So…what are you going to be when you grow up?” I can’t tell you how much I’d hated that question, but suddenly I was going around volunteering to people, people who didn’t even want to know, that I planned to be a professor and a writer of actual books.
    I kept a collection of my writings. For a while everything I wrote had a horse in it. After we read Ralph Waldo Emerson in class, I wrote “My Philosophy of Life,” which I intended for the start of a book but could get only three pages out of it. Mrs. Henry said I needed to live past fourteen years old before I would have a philosophy.
    She said a scholarship was my only hope for a future and lent me her private books for the summer. Whenever I opened one, T. Ray said, “Who do you think you are, Julius Shakespeare?” The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare’s first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ignorant about the art of survival. He also referred to me as Miss Brown-Nose-in-a-Book and occasionally as Miss Emily-Big-Head- Diction. He meant Dickinson, but again, there are things you let go by.
    Without books in the peach stand, I often passed the time making up poems, but that slow afternoon I didn’t have the patience for rhyming words. I just sat out there and thought about how much I hated the peach stand, how completely and absolutely I hated it.
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    The day before I’d gone to first grade, T. Ray had found me in the peach stand sticking a nail into one of his peaches.
    He walked toward me with his thumbs jammed into his pockets and his eyes squinted half shut from the glare. I watched his shadow slide over the dirt and weeds and thought he had come to punish me for stabbing a peach. I didn’t even know why I was doing it.
    Instead he said, “Lily, you’re starting school tomorrow, so there are things you need to know. About your mother.”
    For a moment everything got still and quiet, as if the wind had died and the birds had stopped flying. When he squatted down in front of me, I felt caught in a hot dark I could not break free of.
    â€œIt’s time you knew what happened to her, and I want you to hear it from me. Not from people out there talking.”
    We had never spoken of this, and I felt a shiver pass over me. The memory of that day would come back to me at odd moments. The stuck window. The smell of her. The clink of hangers. The suitcase. The way they’d fought and shouted. Most of all the gun on the floor, the heaviness when I’d lifted it.
    I knew that the explosion I’d heard that day had killed her. The sound still sneaked into my head once in a while and surprised me. Sometimes it seemed that when I’d held the gun there hadn’t been any noise at all, that it had come later, but other times, sitting alone on the back steps, bored and wishing for something to do, or pent up in my room on a rainy day, I felt I had caused it, that when I’d lifted the gun, the sound had torn through the room and gouged out our hearts.
    It was a secret knowledge that would slip up and overwhelm me, and I would take off running—even if it was raining out, I ran—straight down the hill to my special place in the peach orchard. I’d lie right down on the ground and it would calm me.
    Now, T. Ray scooped up a handful of dirt and let it fall out of his hands. “The day she died, she was cleaning out the closet,” he said. I could not account for the strange tone of his