A Recipe for Bees by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

she could guess from his phone calls. He still had an old rotary-dial phone; she could hear the click and spin on her answering machine as he tried redialling in his confusion, after reaching the answering machine. When she first heard that rotary dial she wondered briefly if there hadn’t been some accident in time, if someone from the past was dialling into her present to leave a message on her machine. But that was just a flightof fancy. If Ernest were from the past, why would his name appear on her call display?
    Ernest was ancient; his voice was cracked and faded, and his mind was slipping on him. He was trying to phone someone else when he phoned Augusta, someone named Linda. A daughter, perhaps? Augusta guessed he was living alone, and not in some home, because no one seemed to be there to stop or help him. Occasionally she answered the phone and explained once again that he had the wrong number. More often than not he would call only once, and that was the end of it for a while. But sometimes he’d try over and over, all through the day, until Augusta unplugged the phone. She hoped this wasn’t going to be one of those days. She didn’t like talking to him. He was befuddled and half deaf and she had to go over and over it, explaining the situation until he understood. She hated talking to him because the thought of being caught in her own dreams like that—living like a sleepwalker—scared her to death. She had watched Edna from the seniors’ centre, who was ninety-two and had a daughter who was a senior herself, decline into twilight over the last two years. No one wanted her sitting at their card table. She talked and talked, repeating herself over and over, because she forgot what she had just said. She used to know the games, but now she needed someone to coach her every step of the way. One day Faye Risby yelled at her, “If you don’t know the game, get out!”
    Edna said, “You can’t tell me I’m dumb. I’ve got a right to be here.” Maybe so, but when there was a meeting now everyone tended to sit hurriedly, in long rows of seats that excluded Edna, so she was forced to sit in the front row alone.
    Gabe was walking around the hospital in that kind of confused state for days after the seizure, making it clear he wanted to go home, though it was equally clear he had no idea where he was. He was only dimly aware of the nurses, the hospital bed, and the other patients in the intensive care ward. They all blended and disappeared into the fictions his mind created. That past week he had told Augusta and Joy that the first couple of days in hospital he thought he was sleeping on top of the washer and dryer at home, with his feet through the wall. If Joy went off to get a bite, and wasn’t there to stop him, he would pull out the catheter tube and try to use the washroom, though he wasn’t sure where it was and would go wandering out into the hallway with his gown open at the back. At one point he put the long blue plastic bedside urinal on his foot, thinking it was a shoe (Augusta knew another man, Ralph Fielding from the seniors’ centre, who did the same thing after a stroke. It made her wonder what was going on inside men’s heads that made them equate their penises with their feet).
    Before the seizure Gabe had walked in his sleep now and again, a symptom of his illness. Joy once woke to find him poised and ready to urinate in the closet of their bedroom. She woke him in time, thankfully. Other times she’d wake in the night and find him sleeping in odd places, curled in a corner of the kitchen, or spread out on the floor of Joy’s sewing-room. He never remembered how he’d got there.
    Augusta was a sleepwalker. A couple of months before, she had leapt out of bed in the night convinced the apartment was on fire. She ran into the kitchen, where she could see and smell the smoke and hear the fire alarm blaring inthe hall. Then all she could think of was getting back to Karl to wake him, as he