The Wedding Bees (8 page)

“This is not turning out the way I imagined,” Theo said. “I've scared you.”

“I'm not scared. I'm—well, I don't know what I am but I met a man once before in a Walmart parking lot who wanted to take me to Norway. Of course, it was easier to tell he was crazy because he had shopping bags on his feet and was wearing a crown.”

“I don't even own a hat, if that makes a difference.”

Sugar stood up. “No, it doesn't. You shouldn't joke and you shouldn't go around telling perfect strangers you're going to end up with them!”

“You're right, of course, I can see that now. I'm so, so sorry, Sugar.”

“I'm sorry too, Theo, but I think I really do prefer iced tea in the morning, so please excuse me. Thank you for the drink, for the drinks, and you take care. Oh, and I don't know if you were thinking of following me but I seriously hope you don't because that officially would give me the creeps.”

She turned and picked her way around the bar tables, disappearing out through the saloon doors, the sunlight blinding Theo as he watched her dissolve into the street, his heart sinking into the sawdust beneath his feet as he fought the urge to do exactly what she had just asked him not to. How had he gotten it so horribly wrong?

Outside, Sugar's heart felt like it was pumping the blood of a thousand nations through her body.

Something deep and dark and complicated was battling to emerge. It had to do with the blowtorch on crème brûlée, with the butterflies, with the heat, the inexplicable pull she felt when she looked into Theo's eyes—and it was most unwelcome.

The gall of the man, talking about being married, of all things, and hand-holding and forty years together after he'd known her for all of twenty minutes!

She would not cry, she told herself, she absolutely would not. She would go home and maybe work on the syrup she was developing for Ethan and a cream for Mr. McNally's psoriasis.

She would not cry.

But if she did, she could not honestly deny as she fled home to Flores Street, it wouldn't be because a deranged stranger had talked about wanting to hold her hand in forty years' time.

If she did cry it would be because despite everything—and there was a lot of everything—in the split second before she decided Theo Fitzgerald was out of his mind, she too had seen them hobbling down East Seventh Street in their dotage, holding hands. Together.

 

E
lizabeth the Sixth was graciously basking in reports from her foragers of a particularly fragrant wisteria vine climbing up a back garden wall not half a block away when she felt Sugar's approach.

She stopped what she was doing—which was backing her rear end into a cell to lay her 1,327th egg for the day—and alerted all her senses. She could not hear—she did not have ears—but she used her sight, her smell, her touch and 150 million years of evolution to keep her antennae on the pulse of the world around her, in particular Sugar's world.

In Elizabeth the Sixth's eyes (all five of them), Sugar had been changing color with each passing day since she first spoke Theo's name out loud, appearing extra-vibrant when she had dreamed of him at night, and even more so when she thought of him during the day.

This energy emanating from her keeper gave the queen considerable oomph, and she had been building hive numbers up with alacrity, proving a popular ruler whose house bees were keen to look after her and whose workers were desperate to feed her and get the honey stores going.

But when Sugar came home from McSorley's she radiated a powerful energy that the queen could not recall from her genetic memory file.

It wasn't just ale, this new influence. It was strong and unhappy.

Bamboozled by such complicated pheromonal activity, Elizabeth the Sixth started throwing in an extra waggle of her tush with every egg she laid, somewhat hindering her progress.

To begin with her handmaidens were ruffled, but as their queen didn't seem annoyed or sickly, they soon followed her lead and quickly adapted to the new, slower rhythm.

15
TH

N
ate opened the
New York Times,
no mean feat considering he lived in the smallest apartment in Manhattan. Opening the
Times
meant he had to close something else, or move it.

Apartment 5A might have had a spectacular view across the window boxes to the Alphabet City skyline and beyond but inside there was room for little more than a single bed, a table for one—which he used for bench space—a stove, a sink and a small refrigerator.

There was no pantry so he kept his herbs and spices in his tiny closet, his olive oils in the bathroom cabinet and his vegetables in a crate on the bed.

He sat beside them, his heart sinking as he read the Dining Section's latest restaurant review. Roland Morant's Upper West Side restaurant, Citroen, had been awarded three stars by the
Times
's critic, which was the worst news Nate could ever hope for.

His boss, a bellowing bully who insisted on being called “Chef” even though that didn't go anywhere near describing what he did for a living, hated Morant with a vengeance. They'd worked together back in the Dark Ages but Morant had gone on to stardom working with kitchen gods Danny Meyer, Alfred Portale and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, while Chef had spent the last decade slinging burgers at his father-in-law's Tribeca diner.

“That talentless back-stabbing bastard never had an original idea in his head,” Chef had been known to thunder of his archenemy. “Asshole couldn't slice a carrot unless someone marked it with a pencil first and sharpened his knife for him while they were at it.”

He'd been beyond furious when Citroen opened the year before, insisting that Morant's rightful place was at the bottom of the scrap heap with last week's chicken livers, not up on West Eighty-Fourth Street with all the numb-nuts who were stupid enough to throw away their money just for the pleasure of getting food poisoning.

And now Citroen had been awarded three stars.

Chef hated everyone, but particularly Nate, on a good day.

Today he would have his guts for garters.

Nate looked at his watch. He would just have enough time to get up to the Poseidon Bakery on Ninth Avenue for some finikias—soft madeleine-shaped cookies made of ground almonds and walnuts, moist with thick, sweet syrup. He'd been trying to make them himself but he was missing something and needed to work out what that was.

It was going to be a difficult day and he needed to start it with something really sweet.

Outside he saw the shadow of Sugar checking her hive and moving quietly around the terrace inspecting her growing garden. She'd done wonders with the place since she moved in and, if he hadn't felt so sick, he would have drawn back the curtains and told her.

16
TH

S
ugar had grown up in Charleston, South Carolina: possibly the most luscious of the world's garden cities. Behind every wrought-iron gate or exposed-brick wall in the picturesque peninsula blooming between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers lay a sweet-scented treasure trove of camellias, roses, gardenias, magnolias, tea olives, azaleas and jasmine, everywhere, jasmine.

With its lush greenery, opulent vines, sumptuous hedgerows and candy-colored window boxes, it was no wonder the city's native sons and daughters believed it to be the most beautiful place on earth.

In her first years of exile Sugar had tried to cultivate a reminder of the luxuriant garden delights she had left behind, struggling in sometimes hostile elements to train reluctant honeysuckle and sulky sweet potato vines or nurture creeping jenny and autumn stonecrop.

In the Napa Valley she'd had jasmine growing like a weed and her bees loved it, and so, she thought, did she. But a faint foreign cloud of regret seemed to lurk above her when the vine flowers started to bloom and, once she realized the beautiful sweet scent from her childhood was making her homesick, she pulled it out and never planted it again.

From that point on, she stuck to growing things that kept her looking on the bright side and made the most of her natural surroundings.

In Santa Fe her whole yard had been crowded with differentsized terra-cotta pots, out of which she grew everything from rosemary and lavender to ornamental pear and plum trees and even peppers, although they were not particularly popular with the bees.

In Colorado she'd created a fertile oasis out of old gas cans and cut-off oil drums. Her neighbors had been skeptical to begin with but once her creepers grew up and her flowers draped down and her shrubs fluffed out, the junkyard ugly duckling was transformed into the proverbial backyard swan.

For Flores Street, George had found some discarded cast-iron half-pipes on an East River building site and arranged for Ralph, a young friend of his great-nephew, and two of his buddies to help haul them up to 5B.

Sugar had tried to foist some money on Ralph for payment but he would not hear of it.

“Any friend of Mr. Wainwright is a friend of ours,” he said. “My mom always says he saved her bacon when we were kids. I don't know how but I think it had something to do with my dad moving back home. Whatever, he's a pretty cool dude. And he really likes your door.”

“And it likes him,” Sugar said, sending him away with two jars of North Idaho clover.

Perched up on salvaged bricks, the half-pipes made perfect planters with an industrial edge that oddly complemented Sugar's pretty favorites: pansies, lantana, verbena and heliotrope.

She laid two of them by the long wall of the taller building next door and planted a clematis vine at one end and a moonflower vine at the other: the clematis because the variety she picked had the prettiest purple bloom and the moonflower because it opened in the early evening and emanated a heavenly scent just when a person most felt like smelling one.

She made gingham covers in different colors for her eclectic collection of patio furniture and bought Chinese lanterns and a strand of bistro lights at the Hester Street flea market, then a couple of oversized outdoor candle holders with matching cracks from a closing-down sale on Essex Street. She even found a jardiniere for sale on a Chinatown corner for twenty dollars plus two jars of propolis. She planted a miniature magnolia tree that did not remind her of the ones in the garden at home at all because her mama took great pride in her magnolias being the biggest in the street and this little specimen was as petite as could be.

It took a few weeks, but with all her hard work and the city providing its own staggering backdrop, her rooftop garden was taking shape.

In the days after she slugged back her half-pints of dark and light ales at McSorley's, she had worked even harder. There was nothing like lugging twenty-pound bags of potting mix up four flights of stairs to keep a person's mind off anything so vexing as having a perfect stranger . . . Well, she wasn't sure what Theo had done, but it was wrong.

Still, she dreamed of him. Some mornings she could almost taste him, a sensation that seemed exquisite in her half-sleepy state, excruciating when fully awake. He was salty, with intense caramel notes that echoed in her taste buds well past breakfast.

“I need to get Theo Fitzgerald out of my head,” she told Elizabeth the Sixth one morning, patting mulch around the base of the mini-magnolia to keep the moisture in. “He has no place there. Or anywhere else in my life for that matter.”

Her gardening was interrupted by a knock on the door: it was Ruby, pale and tired-looking, clutching her scrapbook.

Sugar had been keeping an eye on her frail downstairs neighbor, dropping in on her every few days since the brunch, and while Ruby never slammed the door in her face the way Mr. McNally still liked to do, or threw her the stink eye the way Mrs. Keschl did, or pushed past her in the stairs like Lola, her reception was often closer to frosty than anything else. She generally thawed out soon enough but Sugar always felt like she was starting their friendship back at square one, so she was tickled that she'd taken it upon herself to drop by.

“I've got some new ones,” Ruby said, holding up the scrapbook in her spindly arms. “Real creepy.”

Weddings were the last thing on Sugar's mind. “I was just about to check my queen,” she said, by way of a diversion. “Would you care to join me?”

Ruby screwed up her face. “What?”

“Excuse me?”

“I said ‘What?'”

Sugar decided she'd work her gentle magic on Ruby's manners another day. “I was just about to look in on Elizabeth the Sixth,” she said. “If you come on over here I'll introduce you.”

Ruby moved closer and watched suspiciously as Sugar took the lid off the hive. “Aren't you supposed to wear a suit and smoke them all out or something?”

“I do have a suit inside if you'd like to wear it, but these bees are pretty tame,” Sugar explained. “The smoking is just to calm them down but they're a pretty relaxed crowd to begin with so I don't bother. It can't be nice having your house all filled with smoke is what I think. If it happens to us we call the Fire Department. But you can stand inside and watch from there if you'd rather.”

“I'm not scared of bees,” Ruby said as Sugar pulled out a frame crawling with the insects.

“See they've covered all these little cubbyholes with wax,” Sugar pointed out. “There's a little baby bee in each one.”

“Where's the honey?”

“Well, they haven't made a whole lot yet. They're just getting up and running. When Elizabeth the Sixth, or Betty as I sometimes call her, has laid a few more eggs and they've all hatched and grown up, they'll start to fill the cubbyholes on the next floor up with nectar. Then they dry it out by beating their wings and, next thing you know, you have honey!”

But Ruby was not really interested in honey; she was checking out Nate's window boxes. “So, do you know him: the gingerhaired guy who's always red in the face?”

“He just blushes because he's shy, is all.”

Ruby shrugged. “What's he got growing in these little garden things?”

“He's got just about everything,” Sugar said. “And as soon as it's ready, he picks it and makes something delicious with it. He made this Moroccan lamb stew the other night—oh my goodness, just the smell of it drove me so crazy I had to knock on the window and find out what it was. He cooked it in the cutest little dish with a funnel that came up out of the middle, served it with couscous, and was kind enough to share it with me. I had to go and look Morocco up on the map afterward just so I could be sure where such a heavenly thing came from.”

“Are you, like, dating him or something?” Ruby asked.

“Heavens, no! He's too young for me. And I've only just met him.”

“You don't have to know someone for long for them to be a boyfriend. Sometimes it's instant. It happens all the time in my scrapbook.”

Sugar cleared her throat. “Well, I can hardly be considered an expert in that field because boyfriends and I don't traditionally work out real well.”

Ruby looked at her. “Boyfriends and I don't traditionally work out real well either,” she said. Indeed, she'd never had one. Not even come close.

“I've found bees to be far less complicated,” said Sugar. “Now, where's my queen?” She pulled out another frame, this one laden with even more bees, and carefully turned it around in her hands, looking for Elizabeth the Sixth.

“How can you tell her from the other ones?”

“She's bigger than them, and she has an extra touch of class, just like a real queen. I usually have no trouble spotting her anyway but—oh, look, here she is.” She pointed out Elizabeth the Sixth, who was perched half in and half out of a brood cell. “See, she's longer than the rest although it's hard to tell because of where she's sitting.” She waited for Betty to lay her egg and move to the next cell, but Betty did not.

“Hm, that's strange,” said Sugar. “She's taking a while on this one. Best I stop disturbing her, I suppose.”

She slid the frame back into the hive and put the lid back on.

Ruby perched herself on one of the gingham cushions, holding her scrapbook in her arms, a sad but hopeful look on her face, like she wished she didn't want what she wanted. Bees were obviously not the tonic for her that they were for Sugar, and if Ruby needed anything, Sugar thought, it was a tonic. In the interests of being helpful, she was going to have to suck up some more marital bliss.

“Now what say I make us an iced tea,” she suggested, “and you read me some of those stories of yours?”

“What's in iced tea?”

“Just tea and lemon, there's probably not even half a calorie in a whole jug.”

“OK,” Ruby said.

“Just OK?”

“What else would there be?”

“Sometimes it's nice to add a little sweetener.”

“I'm not interested in sweetening anything,” said Ruby.

Sugar left it at that, but when she made the tea, she put half a teaspoon of Jacksonville ocher in it because if Ruby needed anything it was sweetening. The honey was subtle yet slightly tart and Sugar knew the tannin from the tea and the spike of the lemon would camouflage its taste.

She was sure she saw Ruby's cheeks pick up a bit of color as she drank. It was like watching a wilted flower start to straighten and bloom after a summer rain shower.