The Wedding Bees (3 page)

 

F
or most bees, life was short and sweet and pretty uncomplicated. There was certainly no debating any mysterious twists and turns, no choices to make, no wondering how it might all end up. It would end up in a puddle, or against a windscreen, or without wings in a brisk northerly after a busy life of about six weeks, most of it spent hunting for nectar.

But a queen was different and Sugar's queen, Elizabeth the Sixth, was more different than most.

She had known the instant she first emerged from her birthweek diet of nothing but the finest royal jelly that there was more to her life than backing her regal rear into a million empty honeycomb cells and making baby bees.

For she had a special purpose: one passed down in her DNA from Elizabeth the Fifth and before her, the Fourth. In fact, it had been in all Sugar's queens, right back to the one raised by her granddaddy fifteen years before beneath the Belle of Georgia peach trees in his leafy backyard in Summerville, South Carolina.

As to the exact nature of that purpose? None of Sugar's queens had ever been entirely clear about that, but they assumed that when the time was right, they would know what to do.

When Sugar met Theo on Avenue B, even from inside her Styrofoam box Elizabeth the Sixth felt something so powerful reverberating in the air that it was as obvious as the odorant receptors on her face that the time was suddenly right.

4
TH

T
heo could not get Sugar off his mind.

Every time there was an empty space in his thinking, there she was filling it, floating in and asking him if he was OK, looking up at him with those wide brown eyes.

It had all happened so quickly: the old man knocking him down; the crucial phone connection nearly lost; and the extraordinary woman coming to their aid.

“Sugar.” He'd said it out loud in a meeting and his secretary had passed him a Sweet'N Low.

What modern woman was even called Sugar? What modern woman would help pick a crumpled old stranger up off the street? Would worry about cursing? Would call it “cursing”? Would suddenly appear in his life just when he was starting to think it was lacking someone exactly like her?

And then there was the crackle of electricity that had run through his body when their hands touched. Theo had never felt anything like that ever before.

She'd gazed at him with those dark eyes in that astonishing face and all of a sudden everything else had just melted away and he'd all but forgotten his own name.

Theodore Lewis Fitzgerald, of Barlanark, Glasgow, Scotland.

Sugar.

She haunted him all morning as he racked his brain trying to remember her surname so he could Google her. The exact line of her jaw he could recall, the curve of the tiny dip in the middle of her top lip—he knew that too.

“Sugar, Sugar, Sugar,” Marlena, his secretary, caught him repeating as she came into his office later in the day carrying a stack of documents.

“What are you? Trying not to swear or diabetic? Sign this.”

The word
ethereal
kept drifting into his thoughts until he looked that up only to find it meant delicate, which wasn't quite right.

She was slim but not insubstantial. Her dress was pink. Her shoes were red. And there was a ribbon in her hair. A ribbon? Could that be right? His niece had grown out of ribbons years before and she was still only ten. Yet Sugar was in her thirties, he figured, and still wearing one and what's more, it suited her. Red. Was it red? Or pink?

He could still see her lovely collarbones, the exquisite dimple at the base of her throat, the gentle pressure of her full breasts rising and falling beneath the fabric of her dress. He could not stop seeing that.

“You are acting very strangely today, Theo,” Marlena said when she got back from her late-afternoon cupcake run. “Are you OK?”

“Never better,” he answered.

“That's what I mean. You're almost chirpy. A bit dreamy. And then chirpy. Did you win the lottery?”

“Would I be sitting here if I had won the lottery?”

“Knowing you,” she said. “Yes.”

“It's not true what they say about Scotsmen being cheap,” he said. “And anyway I'm always chirpy and did I mention you look particularly bonnie today, Marlena?”

“Get your own cupcake,” she said. “I queued ten minutes for mine. And it is true about Scotsmen being cheap and you are not always chirpy.”

Marlena reminded Theo of his mother, Shona, who had passed away ten years before on the opposite side of the Atlantic without Theo even knowing she was sick.

He never went a day without missing her, without wishing she was there on the other end of the phone, dispensing advice, her thick Glaswegian brogue coarsened by a lifetime of smoking forty Silk Cuts a day. She'd loved him unflinchingly but she'd been tough, like all Barlanark mothers, and relentlessly straight to the point. Marlena was like that too. It was why he had hired her, but he was surprised to find out she didn't think he was chirpy.

“Not even a wee bit of chirp?”

“No,” she said. “Not usually. Until today. Did something happen?”

“Yes, actually,” he said. “It did. I met someone.”

Marlena put her cupcake down, midbite. “Well, it's about time,” she said. “Do you think she is the one?”

Theo's mother had also believed in “the one.” “You'll know her when you find her,” Shona had told him, time and time again. “Without a shadow of a doubt.”

“She's definitely something,” Theo told Marlena. “But how do I know if she's the one?”

“You just know, I guess.” She shrugged. “Let's start with her name.”

“Sugar.”

“Sounds fabulous,” said Marlena. “You should marry her.”

He was never quite sure when Marlena was joking, another quirk she shared with his mother.

“I'm not even sure I'll ever see her again,” he said. “I just met her on the street and now I can't remember her last name so I can't find her on Facebook or LinkedIn and I didn't think to get her number.”

“You're always telling me what a smart guy you are, Theo. You'll figure it out. Which street did you meet her on?”

“Avenue B.”

“Well, that's a start, isn't it?” said Marlena. “And it's just around the corner.”

5
TH

S
ugar woke after the first night in her new apartment, looked out at the jagged peaks of downtown Manhattan wavering behind the floating muslin curtains over the French doors, and wondered why she had dreamed of Theo Fitzgerald.

True, she'd been unnerved by the shock of his touch, by her body's physical reaction to him, but she'd quickly swept that under the rug of her past where she'd long stashed all romantic notions.

She had certainly not expected to think of him again, especially not in a way that continued to chase a shiver up her spine.

Sugar did not want a boyfriend, no matter what Jay thought, no matter what anyone thought. Not all romances were fairy tales; she knew that. She'd long ago decided handsome princes did not always mean happy endings, and she
was
happy—she made it her business to be.

She might no longer have a lot of what she started out with—her family for one—but she refused to mourn that. And her clock was not tick-tocking, despite her being thirty-six. Or if it was, she could not hear it.

Besides, she had her bees. And they were not confused critters at all. What Jay did not know was that Sugar's whim and fancy had nothing to do with where she ended up each year: it was her queen who chose.

At the end of every winter, when the sap started rising in the trees and the flowers and plants began to think about blooming, Sugar would coax a sleepy Elizabeth out of the hive where she'd been huddled for the winter. She'd place her carefully on an old map of her granddaddy's, let her crawl all over it, and wherever she finally stopped was their next destination.

Actually, it wasn't entirely true that she let her crawl all over. Sugar put up barricades, usually made with drinking straws, to steer the queen away from places she didn't want to go back to, which was anywhere she'd already been or the middle of the ocean.

The very first time she'd done it, after she'd fled South Carolina all those years ago, she'd deliberately set up the straws so they led out of the South like a trumpet, nudging Elizabeth the First north of the Mason-Dixon and away from the Atlantic.

That first year, her queen took her to Half Moon Bay in California, clear across the country. The following year she moved inland to the Napa Valley, then back to the coast and Mendocino (one of her favorite stops).

A new queen, Elizabeth the Second, had taken her to Truckee near Lake Tahoe next, then up to Jacksonville, and her successor, the Third, another gentle soul but a little dizzy, led them to Puget Sound, then north Idaho and back down to Santa Fe, while the Fourth chose Colorado and Pennsylvania, before the cantankerous but geographically unadventurous Fifth crawled to Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and finally Rhode Island before slipping off to queen-bee heaven: five years being a particularly good innings for a queen.

Privately, Sugar had hoped the Sixth might take them elsewhere in California, where the weather suited her own circulation a little better. But if there was any proof that her queens had minds of their own and could not be pushed around like an upturned glass on a high school Ouija board, that confident new queen crawling purposefully toward the tiny overpopulated island of Manhattan was it.

And now here they were.

Sugar got up, drew back the curtains, and stepped out onto her terrace. The bees were parked, for the moment, still in the Styrofoam cooler but in front of the hive, which was currently sitting a few yards out from the exterior wall of neighboring 5A, an apartment that seemed from the outside only marginally bigger than a walk-in closet. It had no direct access to the rooftop as her 5B did, but rather two deep windows that faced out onto it, each one planted with the most exquisite window boxes. One was thick with parsley, sage, chives and coriander and the other with mint, lemon balm, chervil and a miniature pepper.

The perfect spot for her bees, in terms of sun and shelter, was right between those window boxes, but it was rude to put them there without asking whoever lived in 5A. And whoever lived in 5A had been mulching the garden boxes overnight but had not so far pulled back the curtains. However, one of the windows was open a smidge and Sugar could smell something delightfully spicy and buttery wafting from it.

She could not wait to meet such a dab hand in the baking department but people could be a little iffy about living next to bees, she had learned. And a person who gardened at night and blocked the world out during the day was likely more iffy than most.

She'd play that one by ear.

In the meantime, the hive, painted in rainbow stripes by a neighbor's six-year-old twins in some long-ago backyard, was sitting in the middle of the terrace with two gardenias acting as scented sentry guards on either side.

Sugar lugged the gardenias with her wherever she went to help guide the bees back to their new home while they were getting used to their surroundings.

She lugged an electric blue mosaic birdbath too, so they always knew where their drinking water was.

The hive and its accoutrements certainly added a little extra color to her terrace, which, for all its staggering backdrop of Manhattan's downtown alps, was otherwise empty but for a weathered teak table, a matching bench and a couple of slatted foldaway chairs.

“The things we can do here,” Sugar said, crouching down close to the handful of bees buzzing around the cooler. “Then there's the park just around the corner, and the East River Park about three blocks that way plus there's Washington Square Park to the west and, not that much farther, Union Square. I mean, can you believe it, Elizabeth? Union Square!”

She always talked to her bees but it was more important than ever when they were in a new home because they needed to know that the air might smell different but Sugar was there, same as the gardenias, same as the birdbath, same as always.

She lifted the top two empty boxes off the beehive, leaving just the bottom brood box containing ten empty honeycomb frames hanging like files in a cabinet drawer.

This is where Elizabeth the Sixth would start laying her new kingdom.

“Sorry, girls, I know this isn't your favorite part,” she said, taking the miniature frames the bees were clinging to out of the cooler and gently shaking them down into the larger honeycomb files.

“You go, Betty. Tell them it's business as usual. Just a little higher off the ground is all.”

She replaced the top stacks, which held more empty frames waiting for the season's honey deposits, and put the lid back on. Then she swiped a leaf from the gardenia and wedged it carefully in front of the hive's opening on the bottom level, so that the bees could still get in and out but would have to think twice about it, giving them more time to get their bearings.

“Theo Fitzgerald,” she said, still trying to shake off the night's uninvited visitor. “I mean, really!” The shake turned into yet another shiver, the sort usually inspired by a particularly wicked mouthful of very rich, supersmooth, utterly sinful ice cream.

6
TH

T
he next day there was still no sign of Sugar's 5A neighbor, although the window boxes had been rearranged overnight, the mint harvested and Thai basil planted in its place. Again, the window was open and the heavenly scent of something deliciously cakelike was swirling around the rooftop.

“Sure smells good out here this morning,” Sugar said louder than strictly necessary.

It was making her hungry. And the bees too, by the look of things. They'd eaten all the sugar syrup she'd put in their hive-top feeder the day before to give them some get-up-and-go while their numbers were building up.

And now she was out of sugar.

There was a big glossy market only a few blocks away, and a smaller convenience store closer by, but Sugar had made a lifetime of friends by
not
going to glossy markets or nearby convenience stores. She still got letters from them every single day.

And she might be in New York now, but that was no excuse not to do the exact same thing she would do if she were in Pittston or Truckee: knock on a door and ask for a cup of something.

She knew 5A must have sugar because of the tantalizing baking smells emanating from within, and she thought she heard someone shuffling on the other side of the door when she knocked, but no one answered.

Iffy, she thought again. Definitely iffy.

The door of Apartment 4 was painted bright green and was opened by a stocky little man of around seventy bearing an alarming shock of dyed orange hair.

“Whatever you're selling I won't be buying any,” he said, “so you can feck right off.”

“Good morning to you too, sir, I'm not selling a single thing,” Sugar said, unfazed. “My name is Sugar Wallace and I've just moved in upstairs. I know it's an imposition but I wonder if you could spare a cup of sugar?”

The stocky little man peered at her, a deep suspicion rippling across his wrinkled face. “Did she put you up to this, that poxy feckin' she-devil? Did she?”

“No, sir, no one put me up to anything. I'm just after a cup of sugar is all. Simple as that.”

“Sugar asking for sugar? You must think
I'm
simple. Damn the both of you!” He stepped back into his apartment and slammed the door shut so hard it rattled in its frame.

Had he been her only neighbor, Sugar might have been put out, but there were three more floors to go, so down she went to the next level where the faded green-red-and-white-striped door of Apartment 3 opened before she even had a chance to knock, and a similarly irritated woman emerged.

“He giving you trouble? Old McNally?” She looked older than the man upstairs, and her flowery smock looked older still, but a pair of delicate ruby earrings echoed some distant glamour from her past. “He gives you trouble,” she said, “and I'll kill him.”

“I'm not looking for trouble,” Sugar said. “Just a cup of sugar if you have any to spare.”

“Did McNally give you sugar?” the old woman asked.

“Maybe he didn't have any,” Sugar said, shaking her head. “Anyway, I'm new to the building, just settling in up on the fifth floor and found myself short so—I'm sorry, look at me, standing here rambling on and I didn't even catch your name.”

“I didn't throw it,” the old woman said. “But it's Mrs. Keschl. You say McNally didn't give you sugar? I say I would give you sugar, if I had any, only I don't.” She shrugged again and shut the door, not as strenuously as her upstairs neighbor but vigorously enough all the same.

Sugar dropped down another flight of stairs.

Apartment 2's door was beautiful: it had been painted in bright colors with a Polynesian dancer in the middle and tiny landscape vignettes at the sides like speech bubbles.

A pretty woman with tired eyes, long blue dreadlocks and a crying toddler on her hip opened it. “What do you want?”

“Why, I love your skirt,” Sugar said. It was bright orange leather and blindingly short.

The compliment took the wearer of the skirt by surprise. “What?”

“Your skirt, I love it. You have the perfect legs for it.” Indeed, her legs were long and slim and encased in holey fishnet pantyhose, which disappeared into tattered biker boots. It was not a look Sugar herself would go for but she appreciated that someone else could pull it off so well.

“Yeah, well, whatever.”

“Hey, little man,” Sugar said to the toddler, who started sucking his thumb and hiccuping instead of crying. “What's your name?”

“This is Ethan,” said his mom. “And I'm Lola, OK? What do you want?”

“It's a pleasure to meet you Ethan and Lola. Are you Lola of Lola's Balloons?”

“Don't talk to me about those fucking balloons!” Lola's scowl deepened, snatching the prettiness from her face.

“Oh, I'm sorry, I was just admiring the store and—”

“Yeah, well, I don't want people to admire it, or stand here and talk to me about it, I want them to come in and buy the fucking balloons.”

Sugar suddenly understood how a deflated balloon might feel. But she also knew that if a balloon had a choice, it would rather be full of air.

“Why, I would love to buy some balloons!” she said. “Just tell me what your opening hours are. And in the meantime, I was wondering if you have a cup of sugar I could borrow?”

Lola looked at her as if she was out of her mind. “What are you, like, a Walton?”

“A Wallace,” Sugar answered. “We hand out cups of sugar left, right and center where I come from although I guess it doesn't happen so much here.”

“Here in the twenty-first century? No,” said Lola. Ethan took his thumb out of his mouth and started to cry again. “Look, I have agave syrup, but it's for him. No sugar. I'm running late. I have to go.” And yet another door briskly closed in Sugar's face.

Still not put off, she descended the last flight of stairs and knocked politely, but for a good length of time, on the last apartment door, the dark gray one with five locks, each of which she eventually heard being slowly released.

The door was then opened by just about the thinnest girl Sugar had ever seen. She was wearing jeans that hung off her childlike hips, and two sweaters whose necklines revealed bones so close to the skin Sugar was amazed they hadn't broken through. She had blond hair that was tied up in a knot on her head, and lovely pale green eyes fringed with dark lashes.

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

“Why, I'm looking at you,” Sugar replied.

“Well, don't,” the girl said, but she didn't close the door.

“Please excuse my rudeness,” Sugar said, reaching out her hand. “I'm Sugar Wallace.”

“Sugar? What a stupid name,” said the girl, looking at her hand for a moment before her eyes rolled back in her head and she fainted, dropping like a silk scarf onto the floor.