The Probable Future by Alice Hoffman Page A

now she was trying her best to get it back. The cake she was holding smelled like spring, a heady mix of pollen and honey, lilacs and brandy. Dozens of bees had begun to follow Elinor across the lawn. Perhaps there was a cure for some things: what was ruined, what was lost, what was all but thrown away.
    “Please come into my garden.”
    Elinor pushed open the gate and the bees followed her inside, but Jenny stood where she was, stubborn, unforgiving.
    “Come with me,” Elinor said to her daughter.
    By then, hundreds of bees were flying over Lockhart Avenue, skimming over the thorn bushes on Dead Horse Lane, buzzing through the forsythia and the laurel.
    Jenny was hot from her fever and cold from the chill of the day. She realized that her mother hadn’t thought to recommend that she put on shoes; Elinor wasn’t that sort of mother, no matter what she might pretend. Jenny’s toes had a tingling feeling, the sign of sure disaster. But which way was adversity? She could walk forward or could take a step back, or she could stay exactly where shewas, unmoving, which is what she did on that day of a hundred bees. She did not make a move.
    Despite Elinor’s failed attempt to reconnect with her daughter, Elinor then began to turn more often to Brock Stewart for advice. If a decision needed to be made, she telephoned for his opinion, not that she’d necessarily follow his suggestions. Why, she could spend hours arguing with him, debating an issue, worrying a point. It got so Dr. Stewart’s family, his wife, Adele, who was one of the Hapgood cousins, and his son, David, knew when the phone rang at odd hours it probably wasn’t a patient or the hospital over in Hamilton. It was Elinor Sparrow. Why the doctor wasn’t more put out by her nattering away at him no one understood for certain.
    The way Elinor saw it, at least there was one place she could turn for a truthful answer. At least there was one honest man in town. All these years later, with Adele gone, and poor David’s young wife gone as well, Brock Stewart was still the only company Elinor could tolerate, except for her dog, Argus. Tim Early, the vet in town, was amazed the wolfhound had made it into his twentieth year, unheard-of for the breed. Dr. Early insisted that Argus was simply refusing to die as long as his mistress was alive. He was that loyal, Dr. Early joked, faithful to the end.
    If Elinor had been a more forthcoming person, she might have laughed and said, Well, then, that means the poor boy doesn’t have long , but instead she merely shot back, I assume you’re still charging as much as you always have , intimidating Tim Early the way she always did, so that he threw in a bottle of Pet Tab vitamins for Argus, on the house.
    In fact, Elinor had become ill just when the rose she’d last grafted seemed to be thriving. She had taken one of Rebecca’s old roses, a variety found only in Unity that was said to wither if gazed upon by human eyes, and crossed it with a magenta climbing hybrid she had been developing for several years. At present, the new rose didn’t look like much. Should any thief wander into her garden, he would surely bypass the scraggly shrub near the stone wall, protected fromstorms and scorching heat, in favor of what were clearly the showier specimens, so carefully pruned, so worthless to Elinor. Whether or not Elinor would last to see this crossbreed, she had no idea. Brock had refused to give her odds, even when she pressed him for statistics.
    A tree could fall on us right now , he had said. Lightning could strike us, then what would happen to all of those careful statistics?
    Elinor often thought of Will’s mother, Catherine, how very quickly she went after her cancer was detected. Elinor hadn’t cared much for the Averys, but wished them no harm. She certainly had never placed a rope with black feathers under Catherine Avery’s mattress to curse the family when Will and Jenny ran off, despite what some gossips might have