“You won’t believe what just happened,” I said to Momma and Leslie.

“Wait until a commercial, okay?” Momma said. “I’m watching this and I can’t hear with you yakking.”

When I told them, Momma shrugged her shoulders and Leslie looked at me like I had lost large parts of my mind.

“You don’t seriously believe that you told the bees some trash about Sharon and then as a direct result of that conversation . . .”

“A few thousand of them did a little poop on her car. Maybe the bombing was deliberate. I don’t know how the bees understood what I was so upset about, but I’d bet every dollar to my name that they did.”

Well, naturally, the next day I reported Sharon’s reaction to the poopers themselves.

“Look, I don’t know what’s happening here, but if y’all pooped on her car deliberately, I’m gonna plant you so much Culver’s root and goldenrod you won’t believe it!”

Honey bees loved anything with a purple flower. Culver’s root was a spiky plant I’d put in near the edges of our marshy backyard. And goldenrod, native to our area, bloomed in a magnificent shade of yellow. The bees swarmed both species, so I knew they had a high-quality nectar and pollen. Christmas would come early for my girls.

“I just want to make you all happy! Even if you didn’t do this on my behalf, thank you! Thank you!”

After the bombing of Sharon’s car there was a short period of relative peace. I would see the boys a couple of times a week, and sometimes they’d wait at our house for either Archie or Sharon to come home from work. But they had certainly lost a lot of their spark. They were downright sullen.

“Is everything all right at home?” I finally asked.

“It’s okay,” Tyler said. “I’ll be in college in ten years. I’ll survive.”

That wouldn’t do. Maybe my bees needed another cleansing flight.

“Why do they call her the queen bee?” Hunter said.

“Well, I think it might be because she’s everybody’s mother,” I said.

Chapter Eighteen

Expanding Horizons