“If I say you’re not keeping any damn bees, then you’re not keeping any damn bees,” he raged. “You’re not some hillbilly going to grow corn, make moonshine and spend your life smoking a pipe on a porch, CeeLee.”
“I could give honey to the church fair,” she suggested. “Or to our friends at Christmas. It’s not bootleg, Grady, it’s food. And the bees won’t bother you at all, I’ll make sure of it. They’re just bees.”
“You will not bring them anywhere near our house,” Grady said, in an unmistakably threatening tone.
“Or what?” she said as pleasantly as she could manage.
“Jesus, I don’t need this shit from you. I don’t need it from anyone. Let it go or one day when Meredith Burrows calls me begging me to reconsider my future I might just take her up on it.”
“Meredith calls you?”
He looked at her, one eyebrow raised, a curious smile on his face, and her heart sank down to the tips of the high heels that felt like permanent crabs latched on to her toes.
“I’m just saying,” Grady said.
Saying what?
Sugar thought of the queen bee abandoned out at the cabin waiting for her, and she thought of her grandfather, telling her she was strong, and that no one should ever make her feel otherwise, and that he loved her, and she thought she would never miss anybody in her life as much as she missed that man right then.
She looked at Grady, who could flatten the breath out of her with just one smile, who still gave her butterflies in her stomach every time he walked into a room, and who she realized could not fill even a fifth of her granddaddy’s bee suit. Maybe there wasn’t a man alive who could. But still, it shook her to think that about the man she was so in love with, the man she was set to marry, build an entire life with.
She’d happily given up her career, her hairstyle, some of her friends and even the comfort of her feet for him. But her grandfather’s bees? The ones she’d been helping raise since she was knee-high to a grasshopper? It felt like too much.
Grady sensed something then, something that could hurt him, and his anger blew out like a candle in a spring gust. He took her in his arms and held her, told her it would be all right, that he would look after her forever, that she had nothing to worry about, that he loved her and needed her and he was just kidding about Meredith. He’d already told her, Meredith was too bony for him.
The tender side of him made Sugar want to believe every word.
But awake in the night, panic clutching at her stomach, she felt happily-ever-after sliding through her fingers.
“Why, you’re wasting away to nothing, Cherie-Lynn,” Etta told her daughter disapprovingly a few days later.
They were at the dressmaker’s for her final fitting and the sumptuous gown that Charleston’s most sought-after designer had created for her was hanging from her shoulders like a bird net over an apple tree in the winter.
“What happened to the rest of you, child?” asked the dressmaker. “I mean it looks a million dollars but I’m running out of pins trying to take the thing in.”
Sugar looked at herself in the mirror, barely recognizing the face looking back at her. “Just nerves, I guess,” she said.
“You have nothing to be nervous about,” Etta said.
“And you are going to make a beautiful bride,” the dressmaker said with a sigh, standing back and looking at her handiwork. “I just can’t wait to see you walk up that aisle.”
“Let’s hope her expression is a little more cheerful, shall we?” Etta said. “We’re talking about the happiest day of your life, for heaven’s sake, Cherie-Lynn. You’re going to have to cheer up if you want to keep that man of yours happy.”
The weekend before the wedding, they went out for dinner with both sets of parents and Sugar watched with horror as Grady drank more than usual and got that look in his eyes that turned him into a stranger.
“Grady, please, can’t we wait?” she suggested when he stopped his car in the street just up from her house and pushed back the seat, fumbling with his belt.
“And why would I want to do that?” he said.
“I just thought we could make it special,” Sugar insisted. “You know, on our wedding night. At the hotel, with champagne and candles and music. To turn it into something we’ll always remember.”
“Suit yourself,” Grady said, pulling his seat back up. “But just so we’re clear, CeeLee, a man like me shouldn’t rightfully have to wait for anything,” he said. “Or anyone.”
“And I would really prefer it if you didn’t call me that,” she said.
“I’ll call you whatever the hell I want,” Grady said. “Jesus, what’s got into you?”
In her room at home, afterward, she picked up the photo of her grandfather that she kept in a silver frame on her dressing table. She felt so far removed from the girl who spent hours helping him move bees from one hive to another, who mixed honey with lavender oil, who concocted special tinctures to ward off winter chills, that for once she was glad that he wasn’t there because she knew it would break his heart to see her like this.
“You are strong,” she told herself and, saying it out loud, it actually had something of a kick. “You are strong,” she said again, only louder, this time, and louder again until eventually she could look at the woman staring back at her in the mirror and see someone she knew.
The next morning she drove out to her grandfather’s cabin to pick up the beehive he had left her. The place looked overgrown already. In the weeks since her grandfather had died, her brothers had not taken care of it at all. But his pickup was still parked out back as though he’d only just driven up in it, the keys still in the ignition.
The house bees were nearly out of water and antsy with it, although a quick check of the queen revealed she was laying her derriere off in the steady, even patterns her grandfather had talked about.
“Hey, Elizabeth,” she said. “Sorry it’s taken me so long to get out here but there have been complications.”
She cleaned up the hive as best she could, putting the supers laden with honey in the trunk of her car, and the brood box containing the queen in the backseat.
Usually the bees traveled on the deck of the old pickup, and they didn’t seem happy about being in Sugar’s Volvo. Grady had bought it for her and it still smelled new and leathery, which she suspected was the problem. They buzzed around the interior of the car in such an agitated fashion, she decided it would be safer to don her grandfather’s bee suit for the drive into the city.
Visibility proved to be something of an issue with the veil casting a muted pall over the world as she drove cautiously away from Summerville. Her grandfather’s oversized gloves had a job keeping hold of the steering wheel, but Sugar liked the feeling of her fingerprints resting just where his had.
In her grandfather’s suit, his familiar scent still mingling with the sweet honey smells of the thousands of bees buzzing behind her, she felt happier than she had in weeks, the outside world little more than a passing blur.
“It feels like flying,” she said out loud, as she sped down Ashley River Road beneath a canopy of live oaks bordering vast plantation gardens on either side, the Spanish moss stirring in the breeze overhead, waving her on.
It felt like freedom.
As she approached the city and the new house on Church Street, however, she felt the rattle of gathering shackles. Grady had made his feelings about the bees perfectly plain and the strength that she’d gathered in bringing them there faltered when she pulled up opposite their new house. But as she sat there in her bee suit wondering what to do next, the landscapers Grady’s mother had employed to create the formal garden at the side of the house climbed in their truck and drove off on their lunch break, which she could only take as a sign to move right on in.
She found the perfect spot for the hive in a corner of the garden between a purple lilac and a collection of azaleas. It faced southeast, which was good for sun, and looked out on the water feature Su
gar’s mother-in-law-to-be had modeled on the much bigger one in her own vast grounds over on East Battery. Sugar had never liked it until then—even the smaller version seemed showy—but its shallow outer ledge would provide the bees with all the water they needed, plus a magnolia on the opposite side of it meant the hive was not visible from the house itself.
By the time Grady realized it was there, she would have proved the bees were not a nuisance.
But the bees had other plans.
Just days later, Grady turned up to pay the contractors and got stung, right on the neck, after which all hell broke loose. When Sugar arrived to pick him up and take him to their rehearsal dinner, he was in a rage, storming around the yard, kicking the ground, holding his neck where the sting was swelling under his fingers.
“You must have done something to rile them,” she said. “They don’t just sting for no reason.”
“Fuck that! I told you I didn’t want you messing around with any goddamn bees,” he raged. “I told you that and you went and got them anyway.”
“My granddaddy left them to me, Grady. It’s not right to leave them to die out at the cabin. It’s disrespectful. And worse than that, it’s cruel.”
“I’ll tell you what’s right and what’s not,” he said. “I’ll tell you what’s disrespectful.”
“But having them here will make me happy. Don’t you want me to be happy?”
“A fucking bee is not going to make you happy, CeeLee. I am going to. And I will do it my way, right here, in my house, without those fucking pests. Do you hear me?”
She wanted to tell him that it wasn’t his house, it was their house, that they weren’t pests, that he was behaving rudely and he wore too much aftershave. The bees hated aftershave.
But her strength had faded.
“Come here and let me have a look at that,” she said instead, reaching to pry his hand away from his bee sting, but he slapped her arm away with such force she twisted an ankle, tripped over a spade and fell backward onto the ground.
There was a moment—just a split second—when she looked up at his face and thought he was going to kick her. There was some sort of rage bubbling beneath his surface: she could almost see his skin stretch over it to contain it. But then he seemed to register what had happened and scrambled to help her up.
“I’m sorry, darlin’, I didn’t mean to . . . Oh, shit. Are you OK? I didn’t mean anything by that; I just didn’t want you poking at me. Are you all right, honey?”
“I’m fine,” she said, dusting herself down. “I just need to go inside and sponge this dirt off the back of my dress.”
“Baby, I’m sorry. You know that, right? I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
The way he looked then took her back to the Grady she had first fallen for. She felt the exquisite warmth where his hand touched hers, the thump of her heart beating more quickly under his gaze.
But she also felt something else now that was neither warm nor thrilling. She felt fear.
“I’ll find a good home for the bees, I promise,” he said. “I’ll get the landscapers to take care of it. I’m not a monster, CeeLee, and I don’t mean to be disrespectful. I’m goddamn crazy about you. You know that, right?”
“Of course,” she said, forcing a smile. “We’re getting married tomorrow, aren’t we?”
It was far too late to even think about doing otherwise.
21ST
The bluebird flew off into the backyards of East Sixth Street as Sugar stood up and offered George a helping hand.
“That’s enough for one day,” she said. “Lord knows it’s more than I’ve said about it in fifteen years.”
“You feel any better for it?” George asked.
“I feel like I’ve woken up in the middle of a busy street wearing my nightdress and no makeup,” she answered.
“Well, at least you’ve woken up.”
“Thank you, George,” she said, because although she didn’t entirely agree with him, she knew that his heart was in the right place.
“No trouble at all, Miss Sugar. No trouble at all.”
Back at number 33 Flores Street they were just in time to catch a tall skinny man dressed in black slinking out of the balloon shop.
“You’re cool,” the guy said to Lola over his shoulder as he left. “Rollo was right. And cheap too.”
Lola shut the door, failing to see Sugar’s hopeful face at the top of the stairs. There was no point in keeping the store open. Nobody would come.
She looked around the tiny space and sighed. The walls were lined with boxes of different colored uninflated balloons, arranged in blocks like a Rubik’s cube. Crowded behind the counter was an eclectic family including Donald Duck, a giant strawberry, the Empire State Building, an elephant and even a human-sized cucumber. The elephant’s trunk had gone soft. It had been faulty to begin with but Ethan could reach it and liked to tug on it so she had just left it there.
Her little boy was asleep in his stroller to the side of the counter, his dark eyelashes fluttering on his cheeks, his fat fists still holding the apple she had peeled for him, a little bubble blowing in and out of his mouth.
After nearly two years she still couldn’t believe that a high school dropout and runaway like herself, famous for making bad choices, had created such a miracle. Ethan was the biggest mistake Lola had ever made—and she’d made some doozies—but he was also her savior.
She’d been wasted a lot back in the days when she fell pregnant, topless dancing for a living, doing whatever with whomever, not giving a shit either way. But Ethan was the result of a relatively sober two-night stand with a guitar player she met in a bar farther down on the Lower East Side. She didn’t remember his name, but she remembered his sad brown eyes and his tender hands. He was Italian, she thought. Or Spanish. They shared two hot nights together and then she pretty much forgot about him until one of the other dancers asked if she’d been picking at the greasy fries in the slimy club where they were working because she was putting on weight.
The weight turned out to be Ethan.
The surprise was that she was so happy about it.
She fell in love with her son the first time she saw him. In fact, she felt like he’d somehow always been there, wafting in the air above her as a distant possibility, just waiting all those years to come along and give her something other than messing up to be good at.
And she was a good mom, she knew that. She got tired, and it was hard looking after him on her own, but she never resented him, or got angry with him, or lost patience with him. She’d given up dancing straightaway. She wanted Ethan to grow up to be proud of her, which was why she had moved out of the apartment she shared with a rotating collection of girls from the club and found the place on Flores Street.
There’d been a psychic in the basement storefront when she first moved in upstairs—an overweight blonde who wept loudly in between customers—but one day she disappeared and the store was empty. Around then, Ethan smiled for the first time when someone standing outside a new bar opening on the square handed her a balloon, which she tied to his pram. He was a colicky baby, his little body often racked with pain, and he cried a lot, so to see him smile was Lola’s best moment ever.
Suddenly all the mistakes of her past melted away and she was still over the moon about being there to see that smile, chatting to him and smiling to herself, when she got back to 33 Flores Street and looked at the empty basement store.
What about a balloon shop? That was what she said to herself. If one balloon can make one little boy happy, imagine what a whole store full of balloons can do? It was a surefire hit.
That was her business plan.
Thanks to the recession the rent was dirt cheap, and she had been a good dancer: she’d saved enough money to buy stock and set the store up. For the first month she had sat down there playing with Ethan, blowing up the pandas and the Winnie-the-Poohs and the Mickey Mouses and the Guggenheims waiting for the customers. They came in trickles, often without
opening their pocketbooks, and often not staying because, although Ethan was the love of her life, his bellow was nothing short of deafening.
She soon stopped going down every day and started hating balloons.
Then she got a job waitressing at a vegan café on Second Avenue. It paid the rent, but only just, plus she was allowed to keep her top on, but she was running out of friends to look after Ethan and sick of asking them to.
She needed money and Rollo had found a way for her to make it and had just sent his buddy to her for more of the same. She was scared, she had to admit to herself, as she bent down to kiss Ethan. But she was good at what Rollo and his buddy wanted, too.
“Mama!” Ethan cooed, as if surprised to find her there, her lips hovering over his downy little head. He smiled at her then reached for the elephant’s droopy trunk. Whatever was in Sugar’s syrup was working.
She flipped the CLOSED sign on the door to OPEN. But Sugar had already gone.
22ND
Mr. McNally heard Sugar coming up the stairs and opened his door to catch her as she passed. “Your woman on the first floor,” he said. “The little stick? She was only in a dead faint in the lobby when I went down to check the mail.”
It took a good few minutes before Ruby answered Sugar’s persistent knocking and, when she did, her eyes were dull, her skin was gray, and she was even thinner than the last time Sugar had seen her, which she would not have thought possible.
“Oh, honey,” was all she said, at which Ruby burst into tears.
“Don’t say anything,” she wept. “I’ve heard it all before. And I never end up liking the people who say those things, so don’t you say them.”
“OK then, I won’t,” Sugar said, stepping inside and taking Ruby’s delicate frame in her arms, holding her as gently as she could, her thin shoulders quivering beneath her touch. She reminded Sugar of one of those dried leaf skeletons where nothing but the exquisite shape of the original leaf remained, just an intricate whisper of what once had been. Beautiful to look at, but too fragile to hold.
The Wedding Bees Page 12
