“You talked to him?” Wyatt asked, setting his basket on the kitchen counter.
“Yeah.” Dad was chopping chicken. “He called me. He’s at the hospital now. Izzy’s getting seen to.”
“Maybe he shouldn’t have bees,” Wyatt said. “Not if they’re dangerous.”
“They’re not dangerous for most people,” Dad pointed out, the blade of his knife hitting the chopping board rapidly. “Justin’s not reckless, but there are risks in any job. Well, in any part of life. When I was a kitchen hand, I once saw a guy sever his thumb when he was cutting potatoes.”
Thock. His knife hit the board again, and Wyatt winced.
“Accidents happen,” Dad said.
Wyatt thought of the way that Izzy had slumped to the ground. He thought of the way that he’d been too scared to touch him, too scared to act. Not like Lou or Sam or Justin. Accidents happened, but how people reacted to them counted as well, and Wyatt hated how he’d hadn’t known what to do. He hated how he’d frozen.
He needed his Ativan.
He slipped away upstairs to the sanctuary of his bedroom. He took an Ativan and lay on his bed for a moment with his laptop open on his stomach. He went through Harper’s Facebook, liking her newest photos, and then, on a whim, looked up Izzy. He didn’t have a Facebook or, if he did, Wyatt couldn’t find it.
Wyatt fell asleep eventually and only woke up a few hours later when Justin got home. Justin and Dad were in the living room when he went downstairs again.
“How’s Izzy?” Wyatt asked.
“He’s fine,” Justin said. “He’s sleeping it off in his trailer right now, and I’ve given him the day off tomorrow while I figure out what the hell to do with him.”
“What to do with him?”
“Yeah, I don’t want him working near the bees,” Justin said. “If he’s stung again, his next reaction might be even more serious. I can keep him away from the tomatoes for a while, I guess, but the plan was to eventually move away from manual pollination entirely, which means more bees.”
Wyatt looked between Justin and Dad worriedly.
“Maybe he can be a driver,” Justin said. “I don’t know. I’ll figure something out.”
“You will,” Dad agreed and squeezed Justin’s hand.
“You know who’s listed as his emergency contact?” Justin asked. “Wanda Rossi, his parole officer. I asked him if he wanted me to call someone else, and he said there’s nobody.”
Wyatt’s chest ached.
Justin pressed his mouth into a thin line and then shook his head. “Meanwhile, Jesus, do you know how much EpiPens cost? It’s ridiculous! It’s worse than insulin. How is anyone supposed to afford to live these days?”
“You can afford it though, right?” Wyatt asked, worry gripping him. “The insulin and the EpiPens?”
Justin’s expression softened. “Of course, Wy. We can afford that stuff. It just makes me angry when so many other people can’t.”
Wyatt couldn’t really remember much about Oregon. He couldn’t really remember going hungry, though he’d been told it had happened, or going cold, or not having shoes that fit. He couldn’t remember ever really wanting for much, and he thought that maybe that was because he’d been so small that he didn’t know any better and that having enough, when it came, had felt like unimaginable riches instead.
He’d been lucky, he knew that.
Once, when Wyatt was about eight, one of the kids in his class had called him a spoiled rich kid, and Wyatt had been embarrassed because he hadn’t known his family was rich just like he hadn’t known, once upon a time, that they’d been poor either.
“Are we rich?” he’d asked Dad that night, his voice small.
“We’re very lucky,” Dad had told him.
It had been enough of an answer, when he’d been eight. Because Wyatt knew now that he hadn’t been spoiled, not exactly, but that he was privileged. He knew other people didn’t live in houses like this one, and didn’t get the same opportunities that he did, and that the world really wasn’t very fair at all. And he knew that Justin had always been acutely aware of that, and that was why he felt so strongly about helping people.
Wyatt couldn’t remember going hungry, but Justin certainly could, and the experience had shaped his life’s work. And seeing how they’d lived back then had shaped Dad’s life’s work as well. He’d come to Oregon to write a fancy fusion cookbook. Instead, he’d written one filled with family recipes, showing people how to cook easy, cheap, and healthy meals.
And Wyatt…well, if Wyatt’s life had been shaped by the deprivation he’d known when he was too small to properly remember it, it hadn’t done him any favors, had it? All it had done was left him still scared, after all these years.
