Cover

Dedication

For Peters

Epigraph

I eat my peas with honey

I’ve done it all my life

It makes the peas taste funny

But it keeps them on the knife!

—ANONYMOUS

Prologue

Of all the stories I’ve ever told you, this is the one that you’re going to remember. This is the one. Hopefully large parts of this will entertain you, because sometimes life goes right off the rails somewhere between hilarity and the absurd and somehow it always happens in my orbit. But there is another story within these pages that might bother you. I know this because this story haunts me. It’s the one I can’t forget.

I told myself that I should’ve done something to intervene earlier. But it wasn’t my place. I tried polite conversation, I tried impolite conversation. No one would hear me. It bothers me that there was a part of me that didn’t want to see, didn’t want to get involved. Was there that part of me? Does that make me complicit? Heaven knows that people in general can rationalize the most egregious behavior in the name of religion, love, the alleged greater good of mankind, or just because whatever it is they’re lobbying for is good for them.

For all you know about me, even those I’ve met in passing, you know I’m not a troublemaker or someone who exaggerates the truth. Okay, maybe I’ll embellish a little. But generally, you don’t have to make things bigger or more fantastic than they are. Reality has so many surprises and unbelievable situations, it’s okay to just lay down the bones.

Maybe I want to tell you this story as a kind of cautionary tale. At the end of the day, you must live with who you’ve allowed yourself to become. But before you close your eyes for the last time, there will be a day of reckoning, even if it’s not the kind we’ve been taught to expect.

It has taken me a long time to piece together the real truth of what happened, to rationalize that perhaps I didn’t have a hand in all of it. But then, I did. Actually, I think you could easily lay half of what happened at my feet. But I digress.

This is a magical tale of love and redemption, of how to heal broken spirits, and most of all, why it’s all right to hope for and believe in miracles. It’s not just a Lowcountry thing. If this could happen to me, it could surely happen to you.

Chapter 1: Meet Me, Holly McNee Jensen

I said, “People been thinking about and fascinated by bees since forever.”

“Yeah?” the boys said. “Like who?”