Bees

They arrived in late April.

According to the beekeeper we’d brought out to the house, they’d found a way into our laundry room wall and had been building a hive in there for some time. Our laundry room is attached to our garage—it’s a separate outdoor structure, removed from the main house by about twenty yards—and that’s where they’d decided to build their home.

My wife, Alexis, was the one who first noticed them, circling in a small cloud near the back fence of our yard, right next to the laundry room window. When she got stung a few days later, taking a small basket of hand towels and dishcloths out to the laundry room, we called up the beekeeper and had him come out and take a look. Apparently, there are a lot of people out there who will remove your bees for free, bee enthusiasts, I guess—or maybe bee conservationists is a better term—but Alexis didn’t want to take any chances. She wanted a professional, or a team of professionals, if need be.

As it turned out, the guy we hired was able to remove the bees in a fairly humane way—taking out a part of the drywall, then using this vacuum device to suck the bees into a large wood box, which he then transported to another part of the county, some part of the Hill Country outside of San Antonio, where, he assured us, the bees would prosper.

Before he left, he reminded us that we’d want to have the honeycomb removed from the inside of the wall within the next few months—bees have an excellent sense of smell, he said, and a new swarm would very likely return next spring if we didn’t have the honeycomb removed. He also suggested having the insides of the walls thoroughly cleaned and scrubbed down, filled with insulation, then carefully sealed up. The cost of doing that would be expensive, he said, but it was a necessary precaution.

As I followed him out to his truck, parked in front of our house, I thanked him again and told him we’d be in touch in a couple months about the other stuff.

“We’d do it now,” I said, handing him the check, “only it’s not the best time.”

“Sure,” he said, without looking at me, as if he’d somehow intuited what I was referring to. “Just let us know.”

The reason it wasn’t the best time was that we had just begun what Alexis was now referring to as our trial separation. She’d moved into an apartment downtown, closer to her job, and during the week she sometimes slept there in the evenings. For the time being, our daughter, Rhea, was staying with me. We’d told Rhea, who is five, that sometimes her mother had to stay downtown for work—that she sometimes had to sleep there when it got too late to come home—and so far Rhea, who is a very bright and perceptive child, hadn’t questioned it.

In the evenings, whenever Alexis was home, we carried on in much the same way as we had before. We ate dinner together, watched tv, spent the late evenings talking about Rhea’s schedule, planning her playdates, covering our credit card bills. The only real difference was that sometimes Alexis would leave at the end of the evening, after Rhea had gone to sleep, or other times never show up at all. Personally, I didn’t really know what this separation meant. Alexis had assured me that she had no intention of divorcing me. She said that she was doing this to strengthen our marriage, to strengthen herself. She’d fallen into a pretty dark place lately, she said, and now she was trying her best to get out of it. This time alone—whatever she did downtown in the evenings—was somehow helping.

I’d known about Alexis’s dark places before we ever married. She’d been prone to depression even in college, when we’d met, twelve years...