Truly (New York Trilogy #1) (32 page)

“Why didn’t you
warn
me?”

“I tried! That’s why I’m here! It took you forever to come to the door.”

May whirled around and ran into Ben’s chest. She made a strangled sort of
aaaah
noise and tried not to notice that even in the midst of panic, she sort of wanted to bite him. In the sexy way.

“Your mother, I presume?”

“Get dressed, okay? This is going to be …”

What?

She actually had no idea. But it would definitely go better if Ben had a shirt on.

“Interesting,” Allie said, pushing past them both into the house and dropping the little dog onto the carpet. She whipped the throw blanket off the back of May’s couch and arranged it in a long, rumpled pile on the cushions. “Get a pillow from the bedroom,” she said to May. “Now.”

As May rushed from the room, the dog began to bark, and she heard Allie repeat, “This is going to be
so
interesting.”

“Why?” May called. “What did you do?”

Because Allie’s “interesting” was, so often, May’s doom.

“You know how you said I had to think of something to tell Mom?”

“I didn’t say that.” May took a pillow from the bed into the hallway and yanked the door closed behind her. The dog darted between her ankles, nearly tripping her.

“More or less, you did,” Allie said. “You didn’t want me to tell Mom you were staying with some guy you picked up at a bar.”

“Not in exactly those words, no, but—”

“So I told her that you were staying with Dan’s agent’s PA.”

“Andy doesn’t have a personal assistant.”

“Yeah, but Mom doesn’t know that.”

The doorbell rang, and the little dog went absolutely apeshit, yipping crazily and jumping three feet off the floor, over and over again.

“He hates doorbells,” Allie said. She scooped up the dog, making shushing sounds, and May looked at Ben.

He scratched his chest, on which no shirt had yet materialized. Chest hair. God, Mom was going to see Ben’s chest hair. It wasn’t right. His eyebrows were all worried.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said.

“Lie to your mom?”

“Um, yes. Any of it. I mean, if you want to take off, I guess—”

Allie interrupted her. “Do you have dog treats?”

“I think you left some. They’d be in the cabinet.”

“Good. He can’t take off. It’s too late. He can take off later. Right now, he’s a PA. Right?”

“So that’s a secretary? I’m a sports agent’s secretary?”

On a scale of one to ten, with three being his normal level of jadedness and ten being a full-scale Ben meltdown, he sounded like he was around a five. Maybe a six.

“Apparently.” May wanted to groan. Or die. “Please?”

Allie had a mad glint in her eyes. Ben had chevron eyebrows. He was going to get all yell-ish again, and then she’d have to explain, and—

He nodded decisively at Allie. “Okay. If that’s what May needs me to be, that’s what I am.”

“I like him already,” Allie said.

“This wasn’t my idea,” May clarified.

The doorbell rang again, and she wove past her sister, bracing herself for disaster.

Ben had never seen a mother and daughter as alike as Allie and Nancy Fredericks. They were both tiny, with brown hair and bright blue eyes. They both talked with their hands and tilted their heads like birds, moving with an abrupt, hopping intensity.

They both wore dark green, May’s mother in a Packers sweatshirt, her sister in a jersey like May’s, but tailored to fit and worn over jeans with a brown leather belt.

After Nancy Fredericks glanced at the couch—where May and Allie had tossed the pillow at the last possible second, creating a tableau that made it appear as though Ben had slept in the living room—she tilted her head and turned her attention on him.

Ben felt like a worm about to get eaten.

“So you’re Ben!” she said. “It’s good to meet you.” She reached out a hand, and Ben shook it, wishing he were wearing a shirt. “I didn’t think I would get to, which would have been a shame, because then I couldn’t thank you for taking such good care of May.”

Ben tried to look humble and deserving as she pumped his arm up and down.

“You have to come over for lunch. It’s the least we can do before you get back on the road.”

He attempted to catch May’s eyes, but she was looking at the carpet and chewing on her lip. He was on his own.

“That would be nice,” he said tentatively, “but—”

“That’s settled, then,” Nancy replied. “Do you have coffee on, May? I need caffeine to get through the rest of this day.” She started walking toward the kitchen, and May trailed behind her as if connected by an invisible rope. “I had no idea we’d left so many last-minute wedding things to do until I got my list out this morning and realized that most of the tasks involved about a hundred little subtasks, and when I wrote all of
those
out, oh my goodness. I’m so glad you’re home to help. And you need to tell me what you’ve been up to, because I know Allie said it wasn’t your fault that you couldn’t make it, and of course there’s no phone service at the cabin, but I’ve been going crazy not hearing from you!”

“I know,” May said sheepishly. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Nancy said. “Just tell me there’s coffee.”

“In the freezer,” she answered. Ben heard the freezer door open.

Allie grabbed his arm and tugged him toward the bedroom. “Where’s your shirt?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” he whispered back.

She rolled her eyes and ducked into the bedroom, then the bathroom. She emerged with a wrinkled blob that looked familiar. “Put it on.”

“I thought I’d take a shower.” Anything to absent himself from this family drama.

“I need you in the kitchen.”

He tugged the shirt over his head. “What is my role here, exactly?”

“I guess we’re about to find out.”

Then she led him to the kitchen table, pushed him down into a chair, and left him alone with Nancy while she “helped” May make the coffee. The sisters bent their heads over the machine, exchanging fierce whispers and behaving for all the world as though coffee-making were a complex activity that required the full attention of two grown women.

Nancy folded her arms on the table and leaned forward with an expectant smile on her face.

Her hair was impressively large. She wore a black headband to smooth it back from her forehead, but behind the band it kind of went crazy, a fluffy hair explosion that was almost as wide as her narrow shoulders and ended just beneath her chin.

Her eyes were nearly as startling—a bright, too vivid blue that would have looked Photoshopped if he’d seen it in a magazine—and they combined with the sharpness of her long, narrow nose and the tilting thing she did with her head to give him the impression of a heron.

A heron clothed in a Packers sweatshirt and black dress pants.

“Did you have a nice drive?”

“Not bad,” he said slowly. He tried to think of something else to say about it. Something normal and inoffensive. “We got through Chicago without hitting any traffic.”

“That’s good. Did you drive straight through?”

“We stopped overnight.”
And shared a hotel room. And a bed
.

Man, he really needed to escape this kitchen. He stood. “Hey, May, you need me to run out for cream, or—”

Allie lifted a container of powdered creamer from the counter. “We’ve got it covered,
Ace.”

May made a helpless face.

He sat back down.

“That’s a long drive for you,” Nancy said. “And you must be missing work today.”

“It’s kind of a mobile job, actually,” Ben improvised. “I can take his calls anywhere, answer email, schedule appointments. These days, it’s all in the cloud.”

Nancy smiled uncertainly. “So were you and May friendly before, or …”

“Sure, we’ve been friends for a while.”

Six days was a while.

“But she’s only been in New York a few weeks.”

“A month and a half, Mom,” May said.

Nancy tilted her head. “That long?”

“That long,” May affirmed.

“I’d met her a bunch of times before,” Ben said, “when she came to visit Thor. Dan. I mean, we all hang out. Dan and … and …” Shit, what was the agent’s name? Something with a
y
on the end. Slinky? Alfie? “Skippy and me and May.”

“Andy?” Nancy asked.

“Yeah, Andy. We call him Skippy. It riles him up. We go out for wings at this restaurant near the stadium all the time, the four of us.” Allie shot him a quelling look, but he ignored her. “And I’ve been shopping with May a few times at the antiques places to help her find furniture for her and Dan’s place.”

“Oh, you like to go antiquing?”

“Absolutely.” Ben tried to think of something else to say about the imaginary antiquing he’d been doing with May. “She’s got a great eye for accent pieces, but she’s no good at haggling. I’m in charge of arguing.”

“She’s lucky to have you to help her.” Nancy looked past him to her daughters in the kitchen. “I was worried about her after that business with Dan.”

“I’ll bet.”

“But now that I see her, I think it will be okay. She’s always been the sensible one. I’m sure as soon as she sees Dan again, she’ll come around.”

“You think?”

“I’ll admit, that proposal did throw me for a bit of a loop. Why couldn’t the boy have written the words down on cards or something, if he was going to botch it so badly? But we all know Dan and May are meant for each other. She’s always seemed so
settled
with him, you know?”

Settled
. The last thing May needed was
settled
. Her house looked like it had been decorated by a committee of people who hated one another.

Oh, you want the blue couch?

Fuck that
.

Fine, then how about brown? Nobody objects to brown
.

Only if I can have carpeting the color of misery
.

If that was how May expressed herself when she was feeling settled, she needed a hell of a lot more excitement in her life.

Nancy seemed to take his silence for agreement. “So tell me about you, Ben. You’re a—what did they call it?”

“A PA,” he said smoothly. “But that’s just to pay the rent. You want to know what my real interest is?”

“What’s that?”

“I keep bees.”

Ceramic clattered against the linoleum floor. May was kneeling, reaching for a plate she must have fumbled. She poured dry dog treats onto it from a box, her expression stricken. Was he not supposed to be a beekeeper? Who did she want him to be?

Maybe he wasn’t supposed to be here at all. He was supposed to have conveniently disappeared.

Nancy opened her mouth to say something, but Allie got there first. “A beekeeper!” She said it with so much enthusiasm, he might have told her he was president. “I’ve never met a beekeeper before. I wouldn’t have thought … Where do you put them in New York?”

“All over,” he said. “Rooftops, backyards.”

“Is there any money in that?” Allie came around the counter and set an enormous mug of coffee in front of her mother, its contents so light, they were nearly white. Half coffee, half creamer.

“Sugar?” Nancy asked.

May carried in a sugar bowl with a spoon.

“Not much money, no,” Ben said.

“He sells the honey for thirty-five dollars a jar at the farmer’s market in Union Square,” May said.

She took the seat on his left, opposite her mother, and Allie sat down across the table from him with her own mug of coffee. The dog’s claws clicked against the kitchen floor. It made low growling noises in its throat as it devoured the pile of dry treats.

“Thirty-five dollars!” Nancy made May’s whip-mouth—an eerie duplication. “Who would pay thirty-five dollars for honey?”

“It’s really good honey,” May replied.

“You’ve never had it,” Ben said.

“I have, too,” she insisted. “You gave me some at Figs.”

“Oh, that’s right. But that doesn’t count. You had it on cheese.”

She met his eyes. “It was amazing.”

“I can do better.”

“I’m sure you can.”

Allie cleared her throat, and Ben snapped out of it. Not the time to be not-talking-about-honey with May. Not with her mom around.

Allie jumped in with another question. “How do you make people pay that much? Is it organic?”

“Nah. You can’t do organic honey in New York, because you can’t control where bees get their nectar. No, it’s expensive because of the way I produce it.”

“Which is …?”

“Any honey you buy in the store is from a whole bunch of hives mixed together. Homogenized—like milk, right? And it’s usually pasteurized and filtered until it’s barely honey anymore. But the bees in a single hive, they’ll go to the same place for nectar over and over again. There might be another hive right next to theirs, and all the bees in
that
hive go some whole other direction and get their nectar a different place. It’s different honey, even if the boxes are two feet apart.”

“You’re saying honey tastes different depending on what the bees eat?” Allie asked.

“Sure,” Nancy said. “You know that. There’s clover honey and buckwheat honey. Orange
blossom honey.”

“Yeah,” Ben said, “but that kind of honey—that’s not coming from one hive. That’s coming from a big operation where the farmer trucks the hives to a field of clover, and there’s clover for miles around, so that’s where the bees get their nectar.”

“You’re running more of a boutique operation,” Allie said, with dawning understanding.

May turned to face him. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“You didn’t ask. Every batch of honey has its own flavor. The way I harvest it, crank the extractor by hand, put it through a filter that leaves in the pollen and all the other good stuff—it takes a lot of work, but it lets each batch keep its individual flavor profile.”

“You make it sound like wine,” Allie said.

“It is like wine, a little bit. Plus, the honey’s different at different times of the season, depending on what’s growing. Spring honey is different from summer honey, which is different from fall honey. Bed-Stuy honey is different from Park Slope honey is different from Hell’s Kitchen honey. I don’t mix them. Every batch gets bottled separately. And I don’t use any chemicals to treat the bees—keep away mites, kill off fungus, that kind of thing—so I lose a lot of hives. Maybe a third die off every year. It’s unpredictable, expensive. But what you get is amazing.”