The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd Page A

now. So if you could tell him to get over here right away…’ Part of me was saying these actual words, and part of me was listening to myself say them, thinking how I belonged in a reform school or a juvenile delinquent home for girls, and would probably soon be in one. She repeated it all back to me, making sure she had it straight. Her sigh passed over the receiver.
    ‘I’ll tell him.’
    She’ll tell him. I couldn’t believe it. I crept back to the colored side and hunched over the water fountain as the girl in white relayed all this to him, using a lot of hand gestures. I watched as the policeman put on his hat and walked down the corridor and out the door. When Rosaleen and I stepped from her room, I looked left, then right. We had to go past the nurses’ desk to get to the door, but the girl in white seemed preoccupied, sitting with her head down, writing something.
    ‘Walk like a visitor,’ I told Rosaleen. Halfway to the desk, the girl stopped writing and stood up.
    ‘Shitbucket,’ I said. I grabbed Rosaleen’s arm and pulled her into a patient’s room. A tiny woman was perched in the bed, old and birdlike, with a blackberry face. Her mouth opened when she saw us, and her tongue curled out like a misplaced comma.
    ‘I need a little water,’ she said. Rosaleen went over and poured some from a pitcher and gave the woman the glass, while I held my duffel bag at my chest and peeped out the door. I watched the girl disappear into a room a few doors down car- rying some sort of glass bottle.
    ‘Come on,’ I said to Rosaleen.
    ‘Y’all leaving already?’ said the tiny woman.
    ‘Yeah, but I’ll probably be back before the day’s out,’ said Rosa- leen, more for my benefit than the woman’s. This time we didn’t walk like visitors, we tore out of there. Outside, I took Rosaleen’s hand and tugged her down the sidewalk.
    ‘Since you got everything else figured out, I guess you know where we’re going,’ she said, and there was a tone in her voice.
    ‘We’re going to Highway Forty and thumb a ride to Tiburon, South Carolina. At least we’re gonna try.’
    I took us the back way, cutting through the city park, down a little alley to Lancaster Street, then three blocks over to May Pond Road, where we slipped into the vacant lot behind Glenn’s Grocery. We waded through Queen Anne’s lace and thick-stalked purple flowers, into dragonflies and the smell of Carolina jasmine so thick I could almost see it circling in the air like golden smoke. She didn’t ask me why we were going to Tiburon, and I didn’t tell her. What she did ask was ‘When did you start saying ‘shit bucket’?’
    I’d never resorted to bad language, though I’d heard my share of it from T. Ray or else read it in public restrooms.
    ‘I’m fourteen now. I guess I can say it if I want to.’
    And I wanted to, right that minute.
    ‘Shitbucket,’ I said.
    ‘Shitbucket, hellfire, damnation, and son of a mother bitch,’ said Rosaleen, laying into each word like it was sweet potatoes on her tongue. We stood on the side of Highway 4[-] in a patch of shade provided by a faded billboard for Lucky Strike cigarettes. I stuck out my thumb while every car on the highway sped up the second they saw us. A colored man driving a beat-up Chevy truck full of cantaloupes had mercy on us. I climbed in first and kept having to scoot over as Rosaleen settled herself by the window. The man said he was on his way to visit his sister in Columbia, that he was taking the cantaloupes to the state farmers’ market. I told him I was going to Tiburon to visit my aunt and Rosaleen was coming to do housework for her. It sounded lame, but he accepted it.
    ‘I can drop you three miles from Tiburon,’ he said. Sunset is the saddest light there is. We rode a long time in the glow of it, everything silent except for the crickets and the frogs who were revving up for twilight. I stared through the windshield as the burned lights took over the sky. The