Just a couple of blocks away, on a tiny slice of East Sixth Street, sandwiched between two apartment buildings, was an uninviting gate hanging half off its hinges in the middle of a rusted fence.
George led her through and, to Sugar’s astonishment, they emerged into a thriving vibrant garden anchored at the rear by a giant oak and crammed with flowering shrubs and teenage trees beneath which nestled an eccentric collection of garden sculptures, chipped gnomes, lurking ceramic toads and moldy cherubs.
“Grace’s Garden,” George said. “Been here since the seventies when the building on this site burned to the ground, and in those days nobody round here was in a hurry to build anything back up again. No one can remember who Grace was but the locals have been keeping the garden going all these years just so the likes of you and me and anyone else who cares to open the gate can come in and check out of the rat race for a while.”
“It’s beautiful,” Sugar said. Brilliant blue hydrangeas posed like frosting on the plump greenery of their bushy bodies, crowding the base of the ivy-covered wall belonging to the apartment building next door. Quirky mismatching tables and chairs were scattered about the small space, as though waiting for an eccentric ladies’ tea party to arrive, but George led her over to a pair of wooden benches hidden in the shrubbery. They looked onto a row of little red-and-white birdhouses perched on a piece of picket fencing planted on its own in the middle of a flower bed.
There they sat, catching a complicated modern dance of sunlight through the leaves of the oak tree and a neighboring willow, as George pulled a wax-paper package out of his bag. He carefully unwrapped it and offered Sugar half of the bagel sitting inside.
“Norwegian smoked salmon with cream cheese, capers and onion from Russ & Daughters on East Houston,” he said. “I’ve been buying my bagels from them since 1969 and they just keep getting better and better, which is just as well because they sure ain’t getting cheaper.”
“I couldn’t, George! That’s your lunch.”
“And have I ever turned down your honey, or your tea, or your ointment for my leg, or that cake you made that I ate four pieces of?”
“No, but—”
“No, but nothing, Miss Sugar.”
“I can’t take your lunch, George. I just can’t.”
George started wrapping it up again. “Well, I’m not sitting here eating it all by myself so either you take half or the birds get the whole thing. That’s the deal.”
“You drive a hard bargain.”
“You’re a tough customer.”
Reluctantly, she accepted half the bagel. “Thank you,” she said, taking a bite. “Oh, this is really good.”
“You see?” George said. “All you had to do was allow me to share it with you.”
Sugar stopped chewing. “I was just worried that you wouldn’t get enough yourself,” she said.
“And here’s me worrying the same thing about you.”
“I eat like a horse, George. You don’t need to worry about me.”
“I’m not talking about food, Miss Sugar.”
“You’re not?”
“I’m not.”
“Oh.” Sugar put the bagel down and wiped delicately at the corners of her mouth. “Then what are you talking about?”
“Since you asked,” George said, “I’m old, and getting older, Miss Sugar, and not much in the mood for wasting time, so if you don’t mind, I’ll just get on with it.”
“Oh!”
“There’s something bothering you, I can see that, and you would probably prefer to keep it to yourself, because that’s your way, but I happen to know that troubles disappear a heck of a lot quicker if you share them with someone who cares about you, which I do.”
“But it’s my bees,” said Sugar. “I have shared that.”
“Your bees might be acting up, Miss Sugar, but I don’t think they’re at the heart of the matter. I think your heart is at the heart of the matter. And matters of the heart happen to be my specialty so if there’s anything I can do to help, I’m sitting here waiting, just hoping I haven’t offended you by being so forward, but like I said, I’m not getting any younger. And keep in mind that when you finally agreed to help me eat that bagel, it worked out pretty well.”
He was right about that: Sugar had already finished her half. But it was just a bagel. She felt sudden palpitations in her chest that didn’t seem entirely bagel related. “Whatever makes you think my heart’s got anything to do with anything, George?”
“Hearts are all that matter in the end, one way or another,” he said. “And you are just about the best-looking young woman in Alphabet City plus you are smart and kind and concerned for your fellow human beings and you seem to have everything a person could possibly wish for—except someone else to share all that with.”
“Well, goodness gracious me, not everybody needs someone to share it with. It’s not a crime to be single! Some of us are just fine on our own, George. It’s a perfectly respectable way to be these days. Better than being stuck in a terrible relationship with someone who doesn’t love you.”
“Or the same, if it’s just fear that’s stopping you from moving on. Either way you’re stuck.”
Sugar was stunned. “That is quite forward,” she said.
“I know, and I’m sorry. But it could be that what you’re refusing is every bit as bad for the soul as refusing food is for poor little Miss Ruby. And I know you’re doing everything you can to help her so now I am going to do everything I can to help you.”
“But why would you, George?”
“Because everybody needs an angel some time or other, Miss Sugar. You were mine and I guess I might be yours.”
A bluebird flew over the wooden fence from the backyard next door and perched on the platform outside one of the birdhouses, fixing Sugar with its gaze. She opened her mouth to protest, to politely fob George off, to laugh away the ridiculousness of his concerns but nothing came out. Instead she felt a peculiar sense of something approaching calm spread slowly through her, like syrup on a hotcake, starting from the top of her head and traveling south, chasing away her palpitations.
George was right. Of course he was right. Not about being an angel but about her heart.
It wasn’t just Elizabeth the Sixth.
It was Theo.
He had shaken up something inside her that had long been buried and did not seem to want to stay that way, no matter how deep a hole she kept trying to dig for it. She was stuck. She was stuck because she was still running away from the sins of her past, scared of making the same mistake again. She didn’t move towns every year because she was brave or adventurous or because her queen bee told her to. She moved because she was afraid of feeling about someone the way she currently felt about Theo.
“His name was Grady,” she said. “Grady Parkes.”
19TH
They’d met at the Carolina Yacht Club when she was twenty. Sugar did not sail herself, but her mother, Etta, had sent her down to the club to deliver a message to her brother Troy. She found him sitting up in the clubhouse that overlooked the sparkling water of the Cooper River, having a beer with a law school friend: Grady Parkes.
She knew of Grady. Every woman in Charleston knew of Grady.
A few years older than the other young men Sugar mixed with at the time, he was beyond handsome, with blond hair, gray eyes, a sportsman’s tan and an electrifying charisma that pulled every man, woman and child in his direction as though he were a magnet and they just poor hapless lead shavings.
Grady looked her in the eye, smiled his ridiculous smile and insisted she sit down and that she stay sitting down when Troy left half an hour later.
Things like that, people like him, didn’t usually happen to her. Indeed, she’d assumed the Grady Parkeses of this world were made for more sophisticated souls than hers. But within minutes of having his attention all to herself he had her feeling like she was as sophisticated a soul as he had ever met. Within an hour she thought—as she loo
ked in those clever gray eyes, the river twinkling behind him—that if he didn’t ask her out, she would die, she would just die.
She’d heard other girls say such things in the past and privately thought they seemed hysterical. But that’s what wanting Grady felt like: hysteria.
He took her breath away, literally. Her heart, she felt, was beating in her cheeks.
And she could tell from the expression on Etta’s face when she found them still chatting together under an umbrella some time later that this was something of which her mother thoroughly approved. She didn’t know then that the whole thing was a setup, although she should have guessed because she was supposed to be going with her mother to the Garden Club that afternoon. Etta was very particular about her club commitments, and about Sugar’s too, but when Sugar started to excuse herself her mother suddenly would not hear of it.
“Y’all just look so cute, the two of you, sitting there like that,” she said. “You never mind about the Garden Club, Cherie-Lynn. I can take care of that myself. Just relax and enjoy yourself. Go on! So nice to see you, Grady. And make sure to say hello to that handsome devil of a daddy of yours now, won’t you?” And she was gone in a swirl of primrose and mauve, her hips swinging as she walked away from them, knowing Grady’s eyes would be on her.
Seeing her mama wiggle and swagger like that always reminded Sugar of her own shortcomings in this department. She knew the sort of daughter Etta wished she had—another wiggler and swaggerer—but that flirtatious behavior just didn’t come naturally to Sugar. She wasn’t a tomboy, exactly. Her mother would have shot her rather than let that happen, but Sugar didn’t particularly like parties or shopping trips or lengthy visits to the beauty parlor, all of which her mother adored.
She preferred helping her grandfather with his bees on his orchard farther up the Ashley River; she always had. She liked reading books on her own or walking the family dog, Miss Pickles. Worse, she couldn’t manage high heels no matter how hard she tried, which was an utter disgrace to her southern roots. The pretty only daughter of a well-known beauty married to one of the city’s wealthier sons should by rights follow directly in her mother’s footsteps: in nothing less than three-inch stilettos, as far as Etta was concerned.
But she and Sugar were cut from different cloth.
“The girl just doesn’t have your spunk, Etta,” Sugar once overheard her father, Blake, saying. “But that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with her. Heaven knows you have enough spunk for the whole goddamned family. She just takes after your daddy, is all. That’s what riles you.”
Until that point, Sugar hadn’t known that she riled her mother but it certainly explained the undercurrent she often felt herself caught in, or swimming against.
“You’re such an odd girl,” Etta once said, looking at her as though she was something the cat had just dragged in. “Why I couldn’t have a daughter like Treena Murray or Melissa Knowles, I’ll never know. Melissa and her mama are having golf lessons together, she told me at church on Sunday, and they have a spa weekend planned on Kiawah Island.”
Melissa Knowles was a fashionable socialite who would not give Sugar the time of day if her life depended on it. And Sugar was no good at golf. Or tennis. She wasn’t sporty at all, or musical, or particularly academic, or remotely interested in spa weekends on Kiawah Island.
But she didn’t want to seem odd, and she certainly didn’t want to keep upsetting her mama, so she tried to do the right thing. She spent time on her hair, her nails, her skin and her looks in general, even though she could just have easily spent every day inside a beekeeper’s suit, which Etta knew, and which drove her crazy.
“Did Mama help you with the bees when she was my age?” Sugar once asked Grampa Boone when she was in high school and struggling to feign interest in cheerleading tryouts and horse-riding lessons.
“Your mama never had much time for bees at any age, Sugar Honey,” he answered. “Not interested in much outside her own hive. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Just a different way of looking at the world, is all. She came out that way—always wanting to be somewhere else, be something else. You, Sugar child, on the other hand, take after me, and your grandmother. We got all the time in the world when it comes to bees.”
“And honey,” added Sugar.
“Well, you particularly take after your grandmother in that regard,” he said. “She fixed more people than any doctor you could find around here, that’s for sure. Couldn’t cross the street without stopping to help someone.”
Sugar had inherited this do-gooder spirit, as her mama called it. Even back then she would make up lotions and potions using her grandmother’s supply of precious oils mixed with her grandfather’s honey and use them on Miss Pickles, or her music teacher or the man outside the Piggly Wiggly who was always begging for change.
“It’s polite to help people out once in a while, Cherie-Lynn,” Etta said. “But do you have to make such an honest-to-goodness career out of it?”
Indeed Sugar did want to make an honest-to-goodness career out of it. After vocational counseling during her senior year of high school, she decided she wanted to become a nurse, but her parents would not hear of it.
“Wallaces don’t clean up other people’s mess,” her father said. “It’s not what we do. You don’t need to be a nurse, honey. You don’t need to be anything. There’s no shame in getting married and starting a family when you’re still young. That’s what your mama did and look how happy she is.”
There was absolutely no doubt in Sugar’s mind that Etta was happy. She envied her mother’s ability to derive such pleasure from flower arranging or upholstery or lunching with her friends but she couldn’t quite manage it herself. She enrolled at the College of Charleston majoring in biology, which felt like nursing once or twice removed. She even glimpsed something of a future where biology and honey could combine and take her somewhere.
She did want a husband, a man like her grandfather, who adored his wife, took care of his family and kept bees, of course, but until Grady it was more of a distant dream than a distinct possibility. Watching an afternoon regatta over lemonade on the clubhouse deck, it all suddenly got a lot more distinct. Biology took her somewhere that day all right.
Grady’s cool fingers on her arm, his lips firm on her cheek, his strong, salty scent wafting in the air as they parted that first afternoon woke a fire in her belly—and beyond—that she didn’t know could burn.
“Bethany Towers says girls your age line up just to be ignored by Grady Parkes,” Etta told her daughter after their third date. “Play your cards right with this one, Cherie-Lynn, because I’m telling you, Grady is as good as it gets.”
Sugar didn’t need to be told that. She was just as much of a lead shaving as the next pretty southern belle waiting for a handsome man with acceptable genes and blinding prospects to sweep her off her feet. Not that she cared about his genes or his prospects; she just fell head over heels in love with him: the flesh and bones and skin and smile and eyes and magnetism of him. Until then, she hadn’t known that falling in love really was like falling: fast and uncontrollable with no way of knowing how soft or otherwise the landing would be. It wasn’t sweet or safe, as she had imagined. It was frightening. There was a big black empty space growing inside her and only Grady could fill it with his voice, his touch, his attention. When she didn’t have any of those things she felt like she was drowning. When she did have them, the thrill of finding that everything she had assumed was out of her reach was right there in front of her was almost as suffocating, but blissfully so.
The more she saw of him, the more she could think of little other than his lips on her neck, his hands on her naked body.
Not that his hands had been on her naked body. He was nothing but a gentleman on that front although the longer they dated the more she thrashed around in her linen sheets at night dreaming of the day when he would be thrashing around in them with her.
In the meantime, just saying
his name gave her goose bumps.
“Grady and I thought we might go to the beach tomorrow,” she would say and feel the delicious shiver run down her spine. “Grady and I are having lunch with his sister at McCrady’s on Sunday.” “Grady and I are going to Savannah for the weekend.” “Grady and I, Grady and I, Grady and I . . .”
Etta was so happy she all but floated a foot off the ground. And Sugar’s father and brothers were encouraging of the romance too. Grady Parkes Senior owned a shipping company that was a major client of the Port Authority, and to get his business in the tough economic times everyone seemed to be going through—even the Wallaces—would be more than beneficial.
But Sugar did not need to be talked into loving Grady. Chemistry had taken care of that and, after a lifetime of feeling out of step, she suddenly saw the myriad benefits of falling in line.
She dropped out of college (‘Good riddance,” sniffed Etta), she stopped reading books, she stopped walking the dog, she stopped hanging out with her grandfather and helping with the hives. She did whatever Grady wanted her to do whenever Grady wanted her to do it. But it didn’t feel like a sacrifice—she just couldn’t get enough of him and the way he made her feel. This was what everyone was talking about. This was love and she was in it and not thinking twice.
When Grady came to the house to ask for Sugar’s hand in marriage just four months after that first day at the Yacht Club, Sugar thought her daddy was even happier than she was and that was saying something, because Sugar herself was impossibly happy. And because she’d never loved anyone like that before she assumed that it was a state in which she would stay forever.
About that, of course, she was entirely wrong.
It started the night of their engagement party, which was held in the ballroom of the Wallaces’ Legare Street mansion, where two hundred and fifty of the happy couple’s nearest and dearest gathered to toast their future.
Sugar had enjoyed herself so much, dancing with Grady and his brothers and her brothers and anyone else who asked her; she was loving the limelight for once, delighting in being the belle of the ball.