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a clump into the box with all its frames and the comb foundation on which they would store their honey. They sounded crunchy as they fell into the hive, like breakfast cereal poured into a bowl. With his gloved hand Gabe brushed the few that still clung to the fence into the box. Augusta ran her hand over the bees that crawled atop and between the foundation frames. They were warm, familiar.
    Augusta hadn’t realized how ill Gabe had become until that day Rose drove her back from the seniors’ centrebecause she was expecting Joy to arrive for a visit. Karl had stayed behind to finish off a card came. When they got home Joy was waiting in Augusta’s apartment. “You’re late,” she said to Augusta. “Why are you always late? Doesn’t my life matter? Don’t you care that I’ve got things to do? It’s like the whole world revolves around you. Other people have things they’ve got to do.”
    “I’m sorry,” said Augusta. “I didn’t know you were in a hurry today.”
    “That’s not the point. You could be on time, for Christ’s sake.”
    Augusta and Rose both gasped. There was righteous Joy taking the Lord’s name in vain. Joy put her hand to her mouth, then she was crying.
    “Rose, would you mind putting on the kettle?” asked Augusta. She took the Kleenex box over to Joy and sat on the couch next to her.
    “I think he’s nuts,” said Joy. “He’s like Jekyll and Hyde. One minute he’s all sweet and nice and the next he’s yelling at me.”
    “Gabe?”
    “He never used to yell. We hardly ever got into fights, you know? Now he yells at me for no good reason. It’s like he’s some other guy.”
    “Maybe he’s depressed,” said Augusta.
    “We don’t go out any more or visit friends, because he can’t carry on a conversation. I’m not even sure I love him any more.” Joy blew her nose into the tissue Augusta had given her. “Now God’s talking to him.”
God?
thought Augusta. While working on the hives or relaxing in the house, Gabe would get rushes of emotion, a sensation ofexpansion, as if he were ballooning outward, moving into everything that surrounded him. He said the feelings were pregnant with import and there were words attached to them, words he could never get out. He would rush to Joy and say, “I understand.” He’d gesture excitedly with his hands, trying to get the words out. “Everything.”
    “You understand everything?”
    “Yes. Sort of. Oh, shit. It’s gone.”
    “You had an idea? Or what?”
    “No, more than that. Like a light. Like—”
    “God?”
    “Yes, like that.”
    As Gabe described it to Joy later on, the feeling sounded like the times when she couldn’t come up with the name of a person she’d known for ever, a name that was on the tip of her tongue, the fumbling feeling of searching for a missing word. Only for Gabe the inability to find it went on for a long time and was accompanied by washes of transcendence, the effervescent emotions that might attend a visitation by an angel or, for others, a UFO sighting. “Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” he said to Joy.
    “Yes. No.”
    Crazy, yes, Augusta thought. On the other hand, Joy went to see her pastor to find out why God wasn’t talking to
her
. God was talking to Gabe, a non-believer—a man who’d
gone back to the world
, who’d
strayed from faith
, a
backslider
, a
black sheep
—and not to her. Gabe had been pulled into that born-again stuff after his parents died, but he didn’t buy into it any more, though Augusta was unsure of what he did believe. God talked to people in Joy’s church. Any time someone got a good idea, or any idea for thatmatter, thought Augusta, they said, “The Lord spoke to me.” A humble lot, she supposed, if they never believed they had an idea of their own. Augusta went to her own church most Sundays but didn’t much care for Joy’s; more to the point, the things her daughter believed made her laugh. In a fit of exasperation over her mother’s beliefs Joy had