“Fuck,” Theo said again. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think. Panic had robbed him of all common sense as he stepped inside the apartment. “Sorry. I just, I think . . . I can explain. I need a moment. But not . . . I’m . . . It’ll be . . . I’ll call you.”
Before Sugar could say anything else he was gone. They could all hear his feet thumping down the stairs, two or three at a time, as fast as they could carry him. Then, finally, the faint squeak of the first door and the distant bang of the second out onto the street.
“Well, what a jerk he turned out to be,” Mrs. Keschl said. “I thought we were going to dance.”
“‘I’ll call you’?” Lola repeated, rolling her eyes. “I hope you hadn’t picked out a china pattern.”
Sugar took a deep breath and forced the agony back down deep into the shadows of her heart. She’d opened it so briefly yet still the pain seemed insufferable. “All right now,” she said. “Who wants what? I can make coffee, or I have a dessert wine chilling inside. Any takers?”
Elizabeth the Sixth was bamboozled by the goings-on outside her hive. Bees hated the rain, for a start. A raindrop might be a nuisance on a human head or an irritant on a windshield but for a bee it meant plummeting to a watery grave. Luckily foraging had finished for the day by the time the skies opened so the workers were back in the hive.
And when the rain cleared there had been a brief window—as long as it took to lay sixty-three eggs, to be precise—where it felt to Elizabeth the Sixth as though everything was falling into place.
She could tell the moment Sugar stepped out onto the terrace that Theo was there with her, that happiness was tantalizingly close. But no sooner had the promise of it danced in the rain-scented air than it was snatched away again. As the stars twinkled above her, however, waxing and waning into yesterday, the queen found that far from being discouraged by the night’s ups and downs, she was nothing but exhilarated. She had been right, after all, about the object of Sugar’s desire. And he’d been there, barely ten feet away from her, right in her range long enough for her to sense all she needed to sense, to smell all she needed to smell, to tell her everything she needed to know.
Happily-ever-after was still in the cards for Sugar, she knew it. She issued her instructions to her workers, then set about her business, as usual.
28TH
Sugar’s stand had already become one of Tompkins Square greenmarket’s most popular, with its jars of gold, amber and dark honeys sitting delectably in their fall-hued rows. On one side of the honey jars she kept her salves and lotions, her lip glosses and face creams, and on the other her tinctures, her throat sprays, her tiny tins of precious bee pollen, her ambrosia and her candles.
At either end of the stand she kept delicate flowered bowls filled with honey-roasted pecans for her customers to nibble on as they browsed.
The stallholders on either side, known to her as Mr. Apple and Mrs. Lavender, might have been miffed had they not both fallen a little in love with Sugar as soon as she started at the market. The first day she worked her stand, Mr. Apple had crunched his hand in the door of his truck, and Sugar had closed up and taken over his sales while he had it seen to. Then she’d bought dried flowers from Mrs. Lavender and made lavender honey, half of which she put in tiny clear plastic vials and gave to her to hand out as free gifts with purchase. It was Mrs. Lavender’s best day ever.
The Sunday morning after the dinner party, neither of her market friends would have noticed she was not her usual self because it was such a busy day for all of them. Sugar was glad to be run off her feet. She even welcomed the crackpot who kept up a fast-paced nonsensical rap for the entire morning.
By four she was heading home to lose herself in the soothing aromas of the essential oils and gums and creams that needed mixing up to replace her depleted stock. But when she got to 33 Flores Street, George was standing at the top of the stoop, as usual, with Theo crouched at the bottom. He sprang to his feet as she approached.
“He’s been waiting for hours,” George said, “although I gather from Miss Lola that you might not entirely appreciate another one of his visits. Not that she put it quite so politely.”
“I didn’t go to the market because I knew you wouldn’t want—” Theo began, but Sugar held up a hand to stop him.
“I hate to be rude—I really do, I’m not just saying that—so that should give you an idea of how much I mean it when I tell you that whatever you have to say to me, I am sorry, but I do not wish to hear it. Not one tiny little itty-bitty whisper. Not a word. Nothing. So I’m going up to my apartment and I would very much like you not to be here when I come back out, or indeed ever again.”
“Please, Sugar, you have to let me explain,” Theo pleaded.
“No, Theo, I don’t believe I do. I don’t believe that at all. I believe I have already listened to all the explaining I need to from you and whatever kind of game it is that you are playing, I am not playing it with you.”
“Oh God, I’m so sorry. I—”
“I’m sure you are sorry, but you can go and be sorry someplace else because I need you to leave me alone.”
“You don’t understand—”
“I’m asking you politely, Theo. George, could you please get the door for me?”
“Of course, Miss Sugar. Speak quicker, Theo,” George said.
“I’m allergic!” Theo cried. “I’m allergic to bees! Not just a little bit allergic but as allergic as you can get. I nearly died when I was a kid. Twice! I have a bracelet! I’m terrified of them. I panicked when I saw your hive. I didn’t have my antidote with me. I know that’s pathetic. I am pathetic, but only when it comes to bees. You never mentioned the bees. It threw me. It doesn’t mean I’m not certain about you, or us, or any of that. It just means I’m really scared of bees. That’s all.”
Sugar’s heart, already as low as she thought it could get, sank to the bottom of her shoes. “That’s all?”
She moved swiftly in through the door George was holding open for her and climbed the stairs, thinking about Elizabeth the Sixth, about her Puget Sound wildflower blend, about her rosemary oil, about the chai tea she’d just had with the smiley man at the Punjabi deli around the corner, about the sweet peas she was trying to train up between the clematis and the moonflower . . . about anything but Theo Fitzgerald.
She was done thinking about him.
But the next morning the tiny hall outside her apartment was covered in a sea of red roses. There must have been two dozen bunches of them stretching from her doorway to Nate’s. She kneeled down and opened the card on the nearest bouquet. I’m sorry, it read, as did the next and the next, and every one of them.
She took a pair of scissors and snipped off all the cards before sweeping up as many bunches as she could hold into her arms and dropping one outside Mr. McNally’s door, then doing the same outside Mrs. Keschl’s, Lola’s and Ruby’s. She gave two to the smiley Punjabi man, and the rest to the girls in the Tibetan handicraft store. Not one single petal made it inside her apartment.
“I tried to get the delivery company to take them back,” George told her. “But Theo must have paid them off.”
His flowers did nothing to soften Sugar’s heart, which was set firmly back in protective mode.
But his money wasn’t entirely wasted.
Ruby thought that Nate had sent her the roses and, although she didn’t even know him, or particularly like him, or want to, not really, she put the roses in a crystal vase her mother had given her for a birthday (the lamest twenty-first birthday present anyone could imagine) and sat them in her front window. She also made plans to walk up to Kalustyan’s to buy some pistachio nuts to give to Nate for homemade baklava if she bumped into him.
Lola couldn’t work out who the flowers had come from. She just didn’t know the sort of people who sent flowers. Unless it was the guy she’d met on the Internet and had one far from enthralling date with before she gave up on any hopes of having a halfway decent social life. She
couldn’t even remember his name but he had admired the garden of wildflowers that she had tattooed up her arm and had not seemed too disgusted when she told him about Ethan. Most men ran a mile when they found out she had a kid but he said he was one of seven himself so children never bothered him. And now she came to think of it, he hadn’t disappeared to the restroom to do lines, or stiffed her on the check, or got drunk or creepy or anything. He’d seemed . . . polite. She’d thought it was boring at the time but now she wondered if she might find his number and send him a text in case he wanted to go for a drink.
Mr. McNally checked his roses carefully to see if they had been sprayed with poison or peed on by a dog, only to find they hadn’t so he came to his own conclusion about who they had come from.
Actually, it made his day, and it had been a long time since a day of his had been made. He put his roses in a water jug and sat them next to the flat screen. Well, I’ll be jiggered, he thought, every time he looked at them. I’ll be jiggered.
Similarly, when Mrs. Keschl found her red roses, her heart skipped a beat, and not in her usual arrhythmia. She picked up the flowers, and in so doing dislodged a card that Sugar had missed. She opened it with gnarled fingers. “I’m sorry,” she read out loud.
She lifted the plump blooms to her nose. Actually, she didn’t smell too well these days but she could still imagine. She started looking for a vase and was surprised to find that she did not own one. She’d lost half her furniture in the divorce and had never replaced anything so she only had two armchairs (he took the couch), two chairs for the Formica table (he took the other two and the coffee table) and just one nightstand in her room although she had kept the bed.
She still slept on the same side too. And although she had bought a new television a few years before, it sat on top of the old Zenith Console in the living room. She had fought hard for that TV and she liked looking at it and remembering her victory.
Searching for something else she could use for a vase, Mrs. Keschl caught sight of her reflection in the hallstand mirror (hers; the dresser in the bedroom, his).
She had been a beauty in her day, everyone had said so, with high cheekbones, big dark blue eyes and thick beautiful chestnut hair that had been the envy of all her friends. Her cheekbones were certainly not high now, and her hair was thin and gray. Between the loss of her looks and that failed marriage still sticking in her throat like a chicken bone it was no wonder she had been in a bad mood since the eighties.
But there was something about the red of the roses that picked at a corner of her memory. She’d been seventeen, it came to her, he not much older, and he’d brought her a single red rose and taken her dancing. She’d completely forgotten! She hadn’t thought about that rose for years, or that night. Coney Island, the music, the dancing, the kiss. The kiss? She had believed in it then: the joy of living, love, family, companionship. And seeing those fat flowers sitting there now, the red like a slash of lipstick on a pretty girl’s lips, just for a moment she felt like the slender head-turner of her youth.
They were married just a month after the Coney Island kiss and had moved in to this very apartment where for at least five minutes she thought that life would be a bowl of cherries and she the ripest of them sitting smack-dab in the middle to be admired for eternity.
Well, that hadn’t happened. She’d been there on her own for almost three decades and didn’t even own a vase. Flowers were for sentimental sissies, she’d always thought, but now she had some, she realized that this wasn’t true—she didn’t have a sentimental sissy bone in what was left of her crumpled old body, yet the roses had given her back a taste of something wonderful from her youth.
She looked in the mirror again and tried to raise her cheekbones and widen her eyes. God knew her eyesight was kaput, but even squinting or closing one eye at a time she still looked like a silly old woman. Nonetheless, she thought she might put rollers in her hair and maybe even change into a different dress before going over to the pierogi shop on First Avenue.
Out in the hallway, she bumped right into Mr. McNally but before she could gather her wits to think of an insult, he said, “I like your hair all poufed up like that.”
“What?”
“I said I like your hair. Jaysus, can you not even take a compliment?”
“I can’t remember what they sound like, especially coming from you. Are you drunk?”
“I haven’t touched the stuff since June ’87, you know that.”
“So now he has a sense of humor.”
“Would it kill you to believe a single word I ever said?”
“Would it kill you to tell the truth?”
Lola emerged from her apartment and hissed at the two of them to shut up or they’d wake Ethan and if they weren’t careful she’d make them babysit him.
“I’ll babysit the brat anyway,” Mrs. Keschl hissed back.
“No, I’ll babysit the brat anyway,” Mr. McNally argued.
“Well, I’d like to go out for a couple of hours while he’s asleep so what about you both come down and babysit him?”
Mrs. Keschl and Mr. McNally stared at each other, neither of them wanting to be the first to commit, or refuse.
“So?” Lola asked.
“So, it’s all right with me if it’s all right with her,” Mr. McNally said.
“Of course it’s all right with me, I suggested it!”
“Then get down here,” snapped Lola. “Come on, I can’t wait all week.”
The next morning, George sent the deliveryman up to Sugar’s apartment to tell her himself that he had been paid to bring roses to her door every morning for a week.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Sugar said politely, “but if I ever see you again I’m going to have to take out a restraining order.”
“Whatever you say,” the deliveryman said. “These stairs are a killer anyhow.”
“She’s a tough nut to crack in 5B,” he said to George on his way past. “Most chicks would kill for all these flowers.”
But Sugar was not most chicks, and George did not think she was a tough nut to crack, either. He thought she was a very soft nut.
“The cheek of him, sending unwanted extravagant floral arrangements,” she said later in the morning on her way out to the Union Square greenmarket, ostensibly to check out the honey sellers up there but also because she couldn’t stand her own thoughts alone in her apartment.
“I don’t think Theo means to be cheeky, Miss Sugar. I think he means to apologize—and before you get snappy with me, just remember I’m only an honorary doorman so you can’t fire me because I’m not hired in the first place.”
“I would never get snappy with you, George, and I would never fire you either, even if I could. But please don’t entertain Theo on my account. The kind thing would be to let him know he is wasting his time and money on me because I am not interested. I do not want to see him again. No matter what you think about him, or me, or matters of the heart, you can’t let him up. I can’t take it. I need your help and I need to trust that you will give it to me.”
“Of course I will, Miss Sugar. A doorman you can’t trust is worse than no doorman at all.”
But Theo was crushed when George passed on her decree. “If I can’t go to the greenmarket or see her here, how can I fix this?”
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” counseled George. “Although you could try toning down those shirts for a start. Are you color blind? Anyway, you can’t go asking me to help. I promised Sugar I would keep you out of the building and I intend to keep that promise. But goes without saying you can do whatever you see fit outside the building. That’s none of my business. None at all. Not a bit.”
“Perhaps I should scale it,” Theo suggested, looking up at the fire escape.
“I think as far as Miss Sugar is concerned, being on the building is the same as being in it,” said George. “If not worse.”
The next day, Sugar was in the kitchen making beeswax candles for Mr. McNally, whom
she felt could do with a little ylang-ylang scent in his life, when there was a loud knocking on her door. It was Lola, Nate and Ruby and they were all holding helium-filled balloons that bobbed above them in a variety of colors and shapes.
“What in heaven’s name?”
“We need to come in and get in the right order,” said Lola, pushing past her. “Out on the rooftop, you guys.”
Nate slunk past, embarrassed, but Ruby—holding just one giant inflated red heart—looked delighted.
“Am I the only person in New York not allowed in your store?” Sugar asked Lola.
“Be quiet,” she snapped. “And turn your back. Ruby, you stand there in the middle and Nate, you need to separate yours—they’re tangled, dude—and if I can just get these to stay in line . . . OK, we’re ready. You can look now.”
Sugar turned around to see Lola holding the number one in her right hand, and a “c”, an “a” and an “n.”
Ruby had her enormous heart and Nate had a collection of about a dozen “b”s and “B”s, all in different colors.
“One can heart ‘b’s?” Sugar asked.
“Yeah, I fucked up with the one,” Lola said.
“She doesn’t like that,” Ruby said.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Lola grumbled. “It’s supposed to be an ‘I.’”
“What is?”
“The ‘one.’ It’s supposed to be an ‘I’ as in ‘he.’”
“An eye as in he? Have you been drinking?”
“A ‘he’ as in Theo,” Ruby said. “Theo can.”
“Theo can what?”
“Theo can heart bees, Sugar! The balloons are from Theo. He’s saying he can heart your bees!”
Lola pulled a piece of paper from her pocket. “Actually, he wanted to say ‘I AM SO SORRY’ but I had no ‘S’s so we tried it with ‘5’s but that was too weird so we decided on this.”
“‘I CAN HEART BEES,’” Sugar said, shaking her head.
“It’s pretty cute, don’t you think?” asked Lola.
“I’m not sure what to think, to be perfectly honest. Now, does anyone want a slice of honey pie? I just made one. With extra nutmeg. It smells divine.”
The Wedding Bees Page 16
