Dedication
In praise of
random acts of kindness
good manners
and
guardian angels
Contents
Dedication
Interlude
1ST
2ND
3RD
4TH
5TH
6TH
7TH
8TH
9TH
10TH
11TH
12TH
13TH
14TH
15TH
16TH
17TH
18TH
19TH
20TH
21ST
22ND
23RD
24TH
25TH
26TH
27TH
28TH
29TH
30TH
31ST
32ND
33RD
34TH
35TH
36TH
37TH
38TH
39TH
40TH
41ST
42ND
43RD
44TH
45TH
Acknowledgments
P.S.: Insights, Interviews & More . . .
About the author
About the book
Read on
Also by Sarah-Kate Lynch
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Interlude
Sugar Wallace did not believe in love at first sight, but her bees did, and her bees could not even tell red from green.
They could, however, see forty different shades of purple.
In other words: those bees might not know everything, but in some respects they knew more than Sugar Wallace.
1ST
Sugar’s bees hummed steadily in her lap as she wound down the window and strained to look up at the Flores Street apartment building. It was five stories tall, its perky orange brickwork hiding beneath a robust layer of dust. A fire escape zigzagged down the middle like an exotic scar, and a pink stoop below the red front door gave the impression the building was poking its tongue out, perhaps at the faded bunch of motley balloons tied to the basement’s ivy-covered railing.
“Why, it has such character,” Sugar told her friend Jay, who was drumming his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. “And I’ve never lived around the corner from a knishery before. Plus if I get an accordion and it breaks, I know just where to get it fixed.”
Sugar patted the Styrofoam square that sat on her knee and housed her precious queen and a sleepy fledgling kingdom of worker bees. Despite being little more than a stone’s throw away from Manhattan’s famous overpopulated canyons, Flores Street was surprisingly charming: a leafy cobbled dead-end lane nestled in Alphabet City just south of Tompkins Square Park. Once she had them settled, the bees would love it down here. Far enough away from the chaos of those uptown skyscrapers, they would have a smorgasbord of gardens, parks, street trees and window boxes upon which to feast. There was space, there was sunshine; it was splashing around them now, dancing right down at street level through the new growth on the linden trees.
She breathed in the city air as Jay spotted a parking space ahead: it was a perfect spring day, the sky a radiant blue, the temperature cool but with a change-of-season edge to it that hinted at better things to come. She was hardly the first person to arrive in this part of the city buzzing with excitement for what the future held. A hundred years before, the cobbles would have been all but invisible through the swarming throng of playing children and bustling adults, all new to America from across the oceans and going about the frantic business of carving out a life in their newly chosen city.
“Can’t you just see it filled with little ragamuffin kids and loaded pushcarts?” she asked Jay.
“Yes, I can,” he answered. “And I can smell it too, what with there being no bathrooms in those days and all.”
Sugar allowed him his crankiness. He was still recovering from having the fruit juice scared out of him by the heaving traffic on Franklin Roosevelt Drive and now was having trouble fitting his van into the parking space. The sweat patches under his arms were spreading and Jay was not a sweat-patches-under-his-arms sort of guy.
“I think bathrooms are pretty much a routine fixture nowadays,” she said. “Hey, do you think the accordion is difficult to play? As you may recall, I’m not real musical.”
“The entire eastern seaboard can recall how musical you are not. Really, Sugar, I don’t know what you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking you’re not going to fit in here.”
“I’m not trying to,” Jay said. “I found where I belong years ago and I just wish you would do the same instead of flitting about, leaving behind a trail of worried nutcases wondering how they’ll ever survive once you’re gone. I see it every year when I move you and it worries me half to death.”
“Hold your horses, Jay. They’re not nutcases. They’re my friends. And I was talking about the parking space. You’re not going to fit into the parking space. Let’s give up on this one and drive around the block.”
She wanted to get another look at the Indian spice bazaar and the pickle shop anyway. “A whole shop just for pickles? You don’t find that in every neighborhood.”
“And you also don’t find murderers and rapists and pickpockets and homeless people,” said Jay, driving somewhat unevenly along Flores Street and turning carefully into Avenue B where, as if to prove his point, a homeless man lurched out from the sidewalk, careening right in front of them.
Jay slammed on the brakes and managed to avoid him, but the homeless man continued to stagger across the road, narrowly missing a moving cab, before tripping on the curb and knocking over a tall man in a Hawaiian shirt, who just happened to be standing there talking on his phone.
“Oh, my goodness,” Sugar cried, thrusting her box of bees at Jay, leaping out of the van before he could stop her and crossing the road in front of a honking utility truck.
The man in the Hawaiian shirt, mildly winded, scrabbled on the sidewalk for his cell phone and kept talking into it.
“Are you all right?” Sugar asked him, but he just pointed at the homeless man who was still lying in a crumpled heap and needed more immediate help.
“Can you hear me, sir?” Sugar asked as she pulled a McDonald’s burger wrapper from the arm of the man’s heavy coat. “Are you OK? Are you hurting anywhere? Goodness gracious, that was quite some tumble.”
The homeless man turned awkwardly and looked up at her with dark, clear eyes, focusing on her as if she was exactly who he expected to see.
“No, ma’am, I am not hurting,” he said, in a far from feeble voice. “At least not in the way I imagine you mean it.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Sugar said.
The man in the Hawaiian shirt snapped his phone closed and got to his feet.
“Sorry about that,” he said, in a singsong accent that sounded to Sugar a little like creek water roiling over hot pebbles on a sunny day.
A shiver ran up her spine.
He had floppy brown hair and a nice nose in a handsome face, although thanks to the extreme loudness of his Hawaiian shirt he clashed horribly with the Mexican mural behind him. His eyes, on the other hand, were an intense shade of blue that exactly matched the street painting’s vivid background. “Can I give you a hand?” he asked.
She couldn’t quite place his accent. Couldn’t quite operate her tongue.
“Perhaps to get this gentleman back on his feet,” he suggested.
Irish, she thought, perhaps, although why she was thinking about his origins at all escaped her.
“Yes,” she said, retrieving her wits. “To his feet. Right away. Good plan. We can’t have him sitting there in the gutter another moment. It’s just not a dignified place to rest.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” said the old man. “And I like dignified.”
Sugar and the man in the Hawaiian shirt stepped forward and pulled him up.
But as they stepped away again, the backs of their hands brushed—it was just the lightest touch, for the briefest of moments, almost nothing more than hair upon hair, yet Sugar felt it like a blowtorch on crème brûlée.
She sprang away and they looked at each other for a split second, then his phone started to ring again and she turned quickly to the old man, who had stopped teetering and come to a solid standstill.
“I can’t thank you enough for your help,” he said. “Lord knows I don’t like heights but some places are just too close to the ground and the sidewalk is one of them. George Wainwright. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
“Sugar Wallace,” Sugar said, shaking his hand, noticing his clean, clipped fingernails. “And it’s a pleasure to make yours too. But are you sure you’re feeling all right?”
“I’m good, Miss Sugar, just sorry to make such a spectacle of myself, and embarrassed on account of knocking over this unsuspecting young man in such a fashion.”
“He seems OK,” Sugar said. “Leastways it has not interrupted his ability to be glued to his cell phone.”
“Cell phones! I don’t know what it is about the world at the moment,” George said, shaking his head, “but I just can’t seem to get a fix on it.”
“You’re not alone there; it’s a slippery place,” Sugar assured him, flapping a little at his coat, which she could see was not as tattered as she had first thought. It had epaulettes on the shoulders and buttons that looked as though they had been recently shined. “I mean, I’m still trying to get a handle on the microwave oven.”
George looked at her with those clear dark eyes. “I hope you don’t mind me saying so,” he said. “But I don’t get to meet many people like you these days. You new in town?”
“Just blew in this minute.”
“What in the hell, Sugar?” Jay interrupted, appearing at her elbow, his armpit circles now halfway down to his waist. “I had to drive right around the Square and park half a mile away. I stood in dog poop, goddamnit!”
“You mind your language, young man,” George said. “Miss Sugar here was only showing a little old-fashioned concern for a fellow human.”
“You see, Jay,” said Sugar. “I am not the only person in the world who doesn’t appreciate cursing.”
“You can keep your eyes off the cooler,” Jay snapped at George, regardless, shifting the box of bees from under one arm to the other. “You’ll get a buzz from what’s in here but I assure you it won’t be the one you’re looking for.”
“Jay, it’s OK,” Sugar said. “You’ve got it all wrong. This here is George, and he’s not interested in the cooler, no matter what’s in it. Anyway, you can let me take those now.”
She reached for the box of bees just as the Hawaiian-shirt wearer snapped his cell phone closed again.
“And who might you be?” Jay asked.
“I’m just the guy who was standing here making sure this gentleman had a nice soft landing when he fell,” he answered with a smile that revealed a single dimple in his left cheek and one front tooth that crossed slightly over the other one.
The smile was directed at Sugar. “I’m Theo Fitzgerald,” he said.
For a moment she thought she felt her bees vibrate in a different rhythm against her chest, their tiny wings beating at twice the normal speed, agitating the air in the cooler at a crazy manic pace, but almost by the time she had noticed it they were back to their regular pattern again.
“I’m Sugar Wallace and this is my friend Jay,” she said. “And he might not seem like it but he is one of the world’s kindest individuals. He came up from Virginia to Rhode Island just to drive me to my new apartment right around—”
“Don’t go telling everyone where you live,” Jay interjected. “Sugar, you are not going to last ten minutes in this town.”
“You’re right, he does not seem like it,” said George.
“I’m not Amish, Jay,” Sugar said. “I’ve watched Sex and the City almost as much as you have. You can quit fussing any time you like.”
“It’s funny you should say that about not being Amish, because neither am I,” said Theo. “Amish, that is. I’m Scottish, which is completely different. No relation whatsoever.”
This time Sugar was sure she felt the bees change their vibration, for just a moment, to match her quickened heartbeat. It was those Mexican-mural-blue eyes of his: they seemed to look right into her, as though he could tell what she was thinking, even though she didn’t quite know herself.
“Come on,” Jay said, reaching for Sugar’s arm. “We have things to do. Can’t stand out here all day chitchatting.”
Sugar felt a slow blush crawl up her neck and blossom in her cheeks as Theo’s eyes stayed fixed on her. “If you’re sure you’re steady on your feet,” she said to George, “Jay’s right, we truly best be going.”
“I’m steady,” said George. “Steady as I’ve been in a long while. Best get going myself. But sure is nice to have you in the neighborhood, Sugar. I’ll be looking out for you, just see if I don’t.”
He turned around and shuffled off, favoring his right leg, although moving swiftly enough all the same.
“Hardly here a minute and already the pond scum is muscling in,” Jay grumbled.
“Actually, I’m not pond scum either,” Theo said. “You know, as well as not being Amish.”
“Yes, thank you, have a nice day,” Jay said, pulling Sugar away with him.
“Pleased to meet you, Theo,” she said, over her shoulder. “And he means it about having a nice day.”
Theo watched her walk down the street and turn in toward the park.
She was tall and slender with long dark hair that swung in a shiny ponytail from one shoulder to the other, her dress swirling beneath her cinched waist.
He thought suddenly of watermelon. It was hard to come by back in Scotland but even before he’d ever tasted one in the flesh it had reminded him of summer (which was also hard to come by back in Scotland).
He knew what watermelon tasted like now; it was one of his favorite things. He could almost feel it in his mouth as he stood there, that cold sweet powerful explosion of almost nothing.
He needed to find a slice as soon as possible.
His phone rang and jolted him back to life, but it didn’t seem like the same old one.
“You have been away from home too long, Jay,” Sugar said, as they walked back to find the van. “There’s never any need to be rude, remember? Plus I don’t think George is pond scum. He had such nice manners—better than yours, some might say—and he smelled of Old Spice. Should pond scum smell of Old Spice?”
“Nothing should smell of Old Spice. Oh, look at that, Sugar. I just stepped in the same dog poop again!”
Why couldn’t Sugar have stayed in Weetamoo Woods? Jay berated her as they drove jerkily back to Flores Street. “Or go back someplace small like Mendocino or that cute little redneck town in Colorado? Or come to Virginia and be closer to me. New York’s too big. And it floods. Plus it’s filthy. You’ll never be able to wear white. I hope you can live with that.”
“Jay, honey, I tend to steer clear of white as a rule anyway.”
“Oh, shit, I mean shoot. I’m sorry, Sugar. I just worry about you, is all. Every year moving someplace new, starting from scratch.”
“I’ve got my bees, Jay. That’s not starting from scratch. That’s more than most people have. Look, there’s a space right outside my building. A big one. You could fit three of these old jalopies in there. Come on, you can do it.”
In Sugar’s book, moving someplace new was infinitely preferable to going back someplace she h
ad been before. “New York,” she said to the bees on her knees. “New York!”
2ND
Ruby Portman nibbled on an eighth of a rice cracker as she watched the guy in the white florist’s van park it awkwardly outside her apartment. She’d seen him lose his shit earlier on, when he couldn’t fit into a space across the road and had bunny-hopped to the end of Flores Street. But now he was back and the woman in the passenger seat was looking up at the building again, smiling.
She looks sort of like a nurse, Ruby thought. Or a nun, but a movie star nun, not a real one, and an old-fashioned rescuing-the-orphans sort of movie star nun, not the comedy sort. It was her face. It was open and fresh and happy and she had shiny dark hair pulled back in a ponytail.
Ruby watched as the woman got out of the van. She was wearing a pink sundress and flat, red lace-up brogues and she had a red ribbon tied around the ponytail. Nuns probably don’t wear ribbons and red shoes and have long, slim bare legs, she thought.
She pulled back from the window and looked down at her own legs. She was wearing an expensive pair of jeans and a sweater her mother had bought her and neither fit her very well. Even her ballet flats looked funny on her feet.
Ruby bit her lip and scraped her fine blond hair up, piling it on the top of her head with a clasp. Her whole body was a joke, actually. A complete joke.
She put the sliver of cracker carefully back on the plate next to the other slivers so that it formed almost an entire cracker again. She no longer wanted the sliver. It was distracting her. Besides, if she didn’t eat it then, she could look forward to having it later. Or later still.
She dragged her chair closer to the window, tucking herself behind the burgundy velvet drapes with their gold fringe. Ruby couldn’t stand those drapes. She couldn’t stand any of the overpriced furniture in her apartment, all chosen by her mom: the rolled-arm sofa with matching armchairs, the writing desk, the dining table with its six chairs. Six chairs! Not one of them had ever been sat on.
The pictures on the wall were not to her taste either. She didn’t even want pictures on the wall. She would have all white walls with nothing on them if it was up to her, not these dark reds and greens and uptown library hues.
The Wedding Bees Page 1
