The Professional Lover
Helen was first to arrive.
At the front door, I told her she looked beautiful as always, though she had aged as I had aged since we first met. Too polite to correct me, her red lips parted as she smiled, exposing crooked teeth. The rest of her face was hidden beneath the wide brim of her hat, pinned in place atop her wine-colored curls. She held a casserole dish between hands sheathed in elbow-length black gloves. Her dress flared around her knees; her iridescent pantyhose were two shades darker than her bare but fuzzy upper arms; her high-heeled shoes and belt looked like spit-polished patent leather. “I have come to pay my respects to Aster Grande. After, I am at your service.”
I wanted Helen to hug me. I wanted to feel swaddled in her strong arms, but she held the casserole between us like a wall until I moved aside to let her in.
#
Lovers invaded the house. Helen issued orders, told them the house must be cleaned—floors scrubbed, walls washed, gutters cleared, bees apprehended if they dared to reappear. The men left to find birds of prey that would eat the bees, but Aster was dead and of no use to them anymore. Grande’s Groves honey will never taste the same.
Mama Lox-Bleu had led us to believe that this was good business, that to perform these acts of love eased the burdens of the grieving, but I was the grieving and I was one of them and I knew the drill, and I wanted them to go away. Instead, I grabbed a basket and went out into the groves. I performed my daily routine of picking oranges and blossoms I would normally spend the rest of the day transforming into oil, marmalade, and tea. The perfumery bought the oil by the ounce, and what wasn’t used was sold to aromatherapists. The petals I dried and packed into teabags. Fresh petals were picked up every afternoon by the Turkish restaurateur whose daughters made them into a citrus-scented version of rosewater. The marmalade I made myself, as Aster had for decades before my arrival, before she undertook her project charting the groves, sketching diagrams of the bees, their hives, the process of pollination, the flowers from which they drew nectar. I remembered spending hours in the groves, attending my duties, while Aster sat in the shade and sketched, unveiled, occasionally swatting bees.
I slipped everything into my basket, selected a small twig heavy with orange blossoms, and returned to the kitchen where I picked several oranges from the bunch and peeled them, ignoring the lovers. I tossed the rinds into the bucket we put aside for the boy from Lazy J’s Ranch who collected them for animal feed and organic pesticides. Aster disliked pulp, so I smashed and strained oranges one last time into a glass just for her. I added ice cubes with marigolds and dandelions frozen inside them, and when a few splatters landed on the silver tray I wiped them with the heel of my palm. When the oats were ready, I garnished them with red delicious sliced transparently thin. Helen watched, never saying a word. I placed the twig of orange blossoms in a vase, completing the tray. I took it into Aster’s room, and when I saw what two lovers were doing to her face, I said, “She’ll be wearing the veil. Wash that smut off.”
They ignored me and did what they said was necessary, not what was thought to be desired. I hurled the tray against the wall. The lovers stared. Another lover stopped sweeping the remains of the bees and began cleaning the mess. I backtracked into the kitchen and retrieved the veil from the pantry and gave it to Helen, who left me at the sink to prepare Aster herself.
She joined me a few minutes later, holding one of Aster’s notebooks, the one with stargazer lilies pressed between its pages. “I want to tell you something,” she whispered. “My mother, before she died, she left a note.”
I turned on the water and let it run over the dishes from Aster’s last meal, her bedtime snack of half a peanut butter, sliced apple, and honey sandwich. “Aster never knew about any note.”
She smiled a closed-lipped, tight-mouthed, sad-eyed smile. “Why would she?”
“What did it say?”
“That the bees were a plague, sent by God to punish them for their wicked ways.”