“There’s a bottle of Maker’s in the cupboard next to the fridge,” Sugar said, turning from the mirror to face her friends.
“You do look pretty snazzy,” Mrs. Keschl admitted. “Although if I was getting married at your age I would have had a boob job.”
“You can remarry Mr. McNally and get one yourself,” Lola suggested.
“There’s nothing wrong with my boobs,” Mrs. Keschl answered huffily. “And anyway, marrying him once was a bust. And I like being a Keschl again. We’re going to live in sin for a while, see how that works out.”
“You saucy old dame,” said Jay. “I don’t suppose I can interest you in a snifter?”
“If it comes with ice and a decent buzz.”
“You and I are going to be such pals.”
“Here’s mud in your eye,” she toasted him, knocking back her drink.
“Are y’all ready?” Sugar asked, slipping on her gold sandals. “Because I know I am.”
George was waiting outside on the stoop, his doorman’s buttons shining so brightly the sun glinted off them and attracted attention from half a block away.
“Miss Sugar Honey Wallace,” he said, offering her his arm, and together the wedding party walked up the street, around the corner, and into Theo’s building where Mr. McNally, Ethan, Nate and Princess were waiting to escort the bridal party up onto the rooftop.
Once they were inside the apartment and about to step through the door at the top of the stairs leading to the terrace, George instructed her to close her eyes.
Sugar did so, feeling the nip in the air that heralded the arrival of fall. It was a day that hinted at better things to come if ever there was one, and she could not keep from smiling at the extraordinary potential of all the lives with which she was entwined.
She and Elizabeth the Sixth would now be living on Fifth Street with Theo but the hive was raising a new queen, which she was pretty sure would end up with Nate and Ruby back on the Flores Street rooftop. If that wasn’t promising, she wasn’t sure what was.
George stepped with her through the door.
“You can open your eyes now,” said Ruby, from behind.
Sugar was standing at the beginning of a corridor of dark slender trees, each one heavily bejeweled with a million tiny white flowers and standing in its own terra-cotta pot with a white satin bow tied around it.
“How about that,” said George. “Manuka trees from New Zealand.”
It had taken two days and a small fortune, but Theo had created a bee’s perfect haven in which to take Sugar to have and to hold, from that day forward, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. At the end of the manuka corridor he stood, wearing a kilt of the Fitzgerald family tartan, and the smile that rarely left his face. It was all Sugar could do not to run between the bees’ favorite trees and throw herself at him.
Instead she walked calmly down that aisle, Jay at her side, charged with giving this beekeeper to the man of her dreams. No one else’s. Just hers.
It wasn’t till she reached Theo, took his hand, and looked behind him that she saw her beehive already standing in its new spot, its inhabitants making themselves entirely at home, her gardenia bushes standing at attention in front of the Fernando Botero, the magnificent Manhattan skyline rising behind them. “Oh, Theo! Are you sure? Right now? I mean, at our wedding?”
“I’m sure,” he said. “I’ve never been surer.” Then he slowly swung her around so that she was facing in the opposite direction, which was when she saw her brother Ben.
Beside him was his wife, and their girls, and next to them were Troy and his wife and their girls. And then into her line of vision stepped Sugar’s father, grinning from ear to ear, behind him, her mother—stony faced and not even looking her way, but there.
On the biggest day of Sugar’s life: there.
She’d been determined to remain dry-eyed but she just had so much to be happy about and, for the first time in her life, she didn’t have a handkerchief. Lola’s needlework didn’t stretch to pockets. But Nate saw her predicament and stepped into the breach, handing her one she’d long ago given him.
And in the eyes of her true friends and family, Sugar Wallace married Theo Fitzgerald and her bees stayed politely in their hive.
Sugar Wallace and Theo Fitzgerald
Sugar “Honey” Wallace, 36, and Theo Fitzgerald, 40, were married on Saturday on the groom’s rooftop terrace in Alphabet City, New York.
The two met on nearby Avenue B the day Ms. Wallace first arrived in Manhattan with nothing but a hive of bees, a birdbath and the supplies of honey that she sells from Tompkins Square greenmarket each Sunday.
Mr. Fitzgerald, a lawyer for a nonprofit company housing the homeless, said he had a feeling about Ms. Wallace from the moment he saw her but there was a major stumbling block in their relationship. “She’s crazy about bees,” he said. “And I’m allergic to them.”
Ms. Wallace’s close friend, Ruby Portman, said it was obvious to everyone who knew the couple that they were meant for each other but fate alone looked unlikely to put them together. “We had to more or less blackmail her into giving him a second chance after he sort of freaked out when he discovered her hive,” Ms. Portman said. “Because a bee sting would not just hurt or be annoying. It could actually kill him.”
“I knew if we could get over my allergies I could have her heart forever and beyond,” said Mr. Fitzgerald. “And we did, so I have, and she has mine. She is gorgeous, kind, smart, funny and I hope I live to one hundred and forty just so I can have the pleasure of looking into her beautiful face every day for the next hundred years.”
Asked if she ever worried about her husband’s potentially lethal allergy, given how she makes her living and their constant proximity to bees, Ms. Wallace said:
“My bees have had plenty of opportunity to attack Theo and they have chosen not to. In fact, they seemed to know he was the right man for me long before I did. Sounds crazy, I know, but it’s true.”
Acknowledgments
So many people have helped me research this book that I apologize right up front for the ones that I’ve forgotten. I’m just of that age. Remembering where I put my glasses can take half a day and this book has been a long time coming so in the interests of getting it to you any time soon, here goes.
Jim (at least I think that was his name) in Seatoun took me to my very first beehive and introduced me to his bees looking out over Wellington Harbor. I knew then that beekeepers were going to be a great bunch of people to get to know and, indeed, almost without exception they proved to be kind, helpful and generous with their honey. Thanks also to Sylvain in Ngaio, Sarah in Wadestown and the lovely Denise and her husband at Muriwai Beach.
Julie Chadwick at Comvita in the Bay of Plenty was an amazingly hospitable honey of a woman. Thanks to her I spent the day with honey experts Dr. Ralf Schlothauer and Jonathan Stephens and have called on her often for follow-up questions. I’m crazy about Comvita 15+ manuka honey, as it happens. Not only does it taste delicious but it wards off colds and the flu and should be in every cupboard. I’ve even posted some to my sick cousin in Italy. Yes, she got better. Although to be honest it took two months for the honey to reach her.
The bees of the world are having a hard time at the moment, but the good news is we can do something about it—become beekeepers ourselves. For more information on the plight of the pollinators, I heartily recommend Hannah Nordhaus’s wonderful nonfiction book, The Beekeeper’s Lament.
Thank you to fellow members of the New York City Beekeepers Association, in particular to Jimmy Johnson for our afternoon at the Narrows Botanical Gardens in Brooklyn. And to my gorgeous friend Naomi Sarna; what a glorious thing it was that we met! Thanks so much for the time on your Eighteenth Street rooftop garden and, in fact, for all your time. Your company is a delight.
To Manhattan landscaper Karen Fausch, thank you for the lowdown on the Northern Hemisphere city planting cycles. Sugar’s rooftop would have been nought but a c
ollection of half-dead rubber plants without it. Jan Werner welcomed me with open arms (inside a beekeeper’s suit) at the Green Oasis Garden in the East Village, as did Adam at Bridge Café. I hope these bees are now back in business after the whupping they got from Hurrican Sandy.
To my dear friends in New York, a great big kiss to Richard Ruben for the apartment in Chelsea and another for introducing me to the greenmarket all those years ago; to my favorite reindeer Rick Guidotti for taking my rooftop photo (check out his charity at www.positiveexposure.org); to Roger for improving me in too many ways to count, and to Toby because I just really like Toby. Thanks also to Nicki and Luisa at Domus for their fabulous hospitality and enduring friendship, and to Jen and Donald for sheltering me, literally, in the storm.
To Stephanie Cabot at the Gernert Company, thank you for being the person who is always waving my flag. A girl only needs one, and you never give up. I think you’re amazing. Thanks to Anna and Rebecca and Will for all their hard work, too.
To Rachel Kahan and the enthusiastic team at William Morrow, thanks for having faith.
And to all the readers who answered my rather sad little cry for help at the end of Dolci di Love and e-mailed me—I LOVE YOU. You make my day. Keep ’em coming.
But I guess most of all I want to thank the big, beautiful city of New York. The things you can fling at that place and STILL it remains the most glittering of diamonds on the eternity ring of our planet. I’ve resisted buying the T-shirt but I really, really, really do heart this town. The parks, the food, the theater, the nail bars, the sales, the people and the humor just keep me coming back time and time again for more.
For The Wedding Bees I was lucky enough to spend almost three months in NYC researching, or “researching” as my so-called friends are inclined to put it, the part of the city where the book is set. I did this with the help of Nick Capodice whom I met at the amazing Tenement Museum (www.tenement.org) and who took us on a private food tour of the Lower East Side (seriously, the bagels from Russ & Daughters are sensational as are the pancakes from Vanessa’s on Eldridge Street); and also Rob Hollander who gave me a walking tour of Alphabet City (leshp.org/walking-tours/alphabet-city).
By the way, my understanding is that everything below Tompkins Square Park used to be called the Lower East Side but gradually became known as the East Village. It’s a gray area, unlike the actual area itself, which is very green. There are more community garden spaces in this part of Manhattan than anywhere else, thanks, I believe, to the fact that many buildings were burned down in the bad old days and no one wanted to build them again so the spaces became gardens. Since I was there in 2011, a public school in Sugar’s real-life neighborhood on the corner of East Fifth Street and Avenue B has even opened a rooftop farm. Walking around this part of the city on a sunny day is like being Alice in Wonderland; and if you find the Creative Little Garden on East Sixth Street, please go in, unwrap your lunch, sit down and thank God that such places exist.
Readers often ask how I come up with the ideas for my books and I can’t always remember (see earlier reference to reading glasses) or it’s complicated, but with The Wedding Bees I can remember and it’s simple. In 2009, my dear husband, Mark Robins, and I embarked on a wonderful trip in the United States. We started in Sandpoint, Idaho (Yoo-hoo Dan and Allison and my Scottish sister Lesley), then headed for New York, my favorite city in all the world. After that we flew to Durham, North Carolina, and drove down the East Coast to Charleston, South Carolina, a ridiculously pretty city that you should get to straightaway if you haven’t already been. I could have stayed forever chatting with Martha on the porch of our bed-and-breakfast at 15 Church Street, south of Broad. We just never ran out of things to talk about. Turns out everything they say about southern hospitality is true and we got more than our fair share of it as we traveled on to Savannah, Georgia, then to Kentucky (thanks for my little bourbon habit, Kentucky), on to Nashville and Memphis in Tennessee and, finally, to New Orleans in Louisiana. These precious weeks were filled with fine food, nonstop music, laughter and newfound friends.
At the end of this incredible trip I thought about what really mattered to me in my life at that particular point and I came up with six things: love, friendship, manners, New York City, the South and honey.
The Wedding Bees is the result. For the reason that it represents a snapshot of a particularly happy period in my life (all my “research” periods are happy ones), this book holds a special place in my heart and I hope you enjoy it in that same spirit.
Appreciating what I have is another thing I seem to have trouble remembering so let this be a reminder. That’s me talking to me, by the way. I do that now. Along with the forgetting.
The only downside of writing The Wedding Bees has been the development of an enormous honey addiction. The aforementioned Mark Robins, who continues to cook and clean and reassure his sensitive artiste wife that she does know what she is doing, has caught me many a time over the past couple of years with my paw in the honey jar. To this day he still calls me BoLBy, short for Bear of Little Brain, after my all-time favorite literary hero and fellow honey addict, Winnie-the-Pooh.
I played Winnie-the-Pooh in a high school drama production once, by the way. When I was fifteen. So not sexy. But cuddly and kindhearted still counts for something, right?
P.S.
Insights, Interviews & More . . .
About the author
Meet Sarah-Kate Lynch
SARAH-KATE LYNCH was a journalist for many years before realizing that all stories could have happy endings—if she made them up herself. Since then she has written eight novels, a job she combines with her regular travel writing. She spends her time in New Zealand, Australia, Fiji, Hawaii, China, Singapore, India, France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States. But her favorite city in all the world is New York, New York. You can read more about her at www.sarah-katelynch.com.
About the book
Saying Yes to Love and Honey
From Sarah-Kate Lynch to Readers
CURIOUS READERS often ask if my novels are at all autobiographical and usually the answer falls somewhere between “perhaps, a little bit” and “no, not really.”
But Sugar Wallace and I are joined in two vital places: at the taste buds and at the feet.
I’ve always loved honey and ever since I was a little girl I could be found hiding in the pantry, eating it by the spoonful. (As my husband will attest, this has not changed!) I shared this love with Sugar, which she rather cleverly turned into a career, and I also shared my itchy feet.
Just like Sugar, I love nothing more than hitting the road; the difference between us being that Sugar is running away—from her past, from her feelings, from her true potential—so in some ways she’s chasing rainbows. Still, she’s having a good time doing it. “A change is as good as a rest,” as my mother used to say, because around every corner lie new experiences, new friends, new opportunities, new tastes and sights and sounds.
It’s the newness of being in a different place that I like; the surprise, whether it be a crocodile coming around the bend in a Serengeti river scattering a herd of silly zebras or a particularly crisp sheet in a particularly bland airport hotel.
I’ve always been this way—hankering after the next place while barely having left the last—but this thirst to see more and go farther has only grown as the years have tumbled by. Unlike Sugar, I’m not running away. But just like her I have managed to turn my love into a career—as a travel writer. When I’m not writing novels I’m trotting the globe, happy as a clam, so excited about going somewhere new that I can even overlook the heinous hellhole that is the modern-day airport (although Aitutaki Airport in the Cook Islands is a charmer).
Some days—despite the odd whiff of loneliness or extreme hair frizz from too much airplane air-conditioning or panic at missing a deadline—I can’t believe how lucky I am. Then I am reminded that like all good things, life takes time.
I was
flying back from Paris recently (she says, to make her point) when the immigration officer at Los Angeles International Airport asked me what I did for a job. “Travel writer,” I said, as it’s a very good thing to say at border control, particularly if it happens to be true.
“Wow, how do you get to be one of those?” he asked, flicking through my passport and looking at the stamps and visas.
“I waited a long time,” I said. “And I’m old.”
He turned back to the first page of the passport and looked at my date of birth.
“Oh yeah,” he agreed. “Good for you!”
Actually, I would have settled for
“What? You can’t be a day over forty!” Except that I really did wait. I waited to find out what it was I really, truly, absolutely, just-for-me wanted to do, and it took much longer than I ever would have imagined.
But it was worth it.
Don’t get me wrong, I love writing—show me a novelist who doesn’t: you have to like it because it takes so much time and it’s harder than it looks. But when my feet aren’t planted beneath my desk they itch to be traveling the globe as I soak up the myriad of spicy pockets our great big beautiful world has to offer.
In just the past year I have been lucky enough to get to the Cook Islands, Sydney and Melbourne, New York City, San Francisco, Mumbai, Delhi and the Taj Mahal, Kauai and Oahu, Paris, London, Phuket, Singapore, and Bali, plus I’ve traveled the length and breadth of New Zealand.
I’ve snorkeled and skied and wined and dined and tramped through slums and over rolling mountains and swum in oceans and rivers and fancy resort pools.
And do you know why?
Because when I turned fifty I decided I would say yes to every sparkling opportunity that came my way.
It’s harder to say yes than most of us realize—we have commitments, responsibilities, we have fears and hang-ups and a thousand reasons why no often seems to make more sense. But deciding to say yes has been the single most liberating decision of my life.
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