She looked across at the scene of Elizabeth the Sixth’s betrayal. “That’s not even swarming, that’s absconding.”
“It’s different?”
“With a swarm, they leave enough bees behind so you can keep going. She hasn’t even done that. She’s taken all of them.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to go over there and get them back,” Sugar said. “That’s what I’d do if it happened anywhere else.”
Agitated, she kneeled down and started to pick up the broken pieces of her cup. “I’ve had this cup as long as I’ve had them,” she said. “This is terrible.”
“I can pick that up,” Nate said. “You should go and get the bees.”
She stood up, putting the shattered remains of the cup on the table, her hands shaking as she fingered the pale blue daisies, another link with her past now lost. “Any chance you could come with me?” she asked. “It’s pretty easy to catch a swarm but a second pair of hands never goes astray and I need to work out where that building is and get into it somehow.”
“I won’t get stung, will I?” Nate asked.
“I wouldn’t think so but you could wear my bee suit.”
Nate blushed. “It won’t fit.”
“Then you could just wear the helmet and veil and your own shirt with long sleeves and long pants. It’ll be just like playing the front end of the horse in the school play.”
This didn’t do much for Nate, as he had not even been picked to play the back end of the horse in the school play. But once he had the helmet on, and the veil down in front of his face, he found that he liked it in there. It smelled good and the world looked better through such a filter.
Sugar did not even brush her hair or put on her lipstick, just dashed out the door in jeans, T-shirt and sneakers, her thoughts scattered to the wind as she hurried down the stairs.
It wasn’t that swarming bees were usually in that much of a hurry to go anywhere; as a rule they camped overnight on their way to wherever they were headed. But the whole abscondment was such a departure from Elizabeth the Sixth’s usual behavior that Sugar didn’t think it was safe to take any risks. She wanted her bees back, pronto, before they upped and did anything even more upsetting, although she was hard-pressed to figure out what that would be.
“The building must be on East Fifth Street,” Nate said as they reached the bottom of the stairs. “About five from the corner, I’d say.”
George did a double take as he reached to open the door for them. “I’m not even going to ask,” he said. “Although others might.”
Sugar waved a cardboard carton at him as they turned up Flores Street and headed for Avenue B.
“What’s the box for?” Nate wanted to know.
“That’s what I’ll bring the bees home in. They’re not hard to capture. Not that it’s the catching them that worries me, it’s why they would abscond in the first place.”
They took a right at Avenue B, another into East Fifth Street and soon found the building. Luckily for them, someone was coming out of it just as they approached.
“Excuse me, ma’am, would you be so kind as to tell me how I might get up on to the rooftop?” Sugar asked.
“Are you the exterminators?” the woman asked. “Because you were supposed to come a month ago.”
“No, ma’am,” answered Sugar. “We’re the opposite of exterminators.”
“You’re bringing rats into the building? Oh great. Maybe you could add some bedbugs while you’re at it.”
“No, I’m sorry, we’re nothing to do with your building, as such. We live in one of the places out back and something precious—which is not in need of extermination—has sort of gotten stuck up there and we’re just trying to figure out what to do.”
The woman looked at her uncomprehendingly.
“Her bees ran away,” said Nate. “She inherited them from her grandfather.”
“Oh, I got a painting when my grandfather died,” the woman said. “I sold it and went to Paris for a whole summer.”
“I can bring you some honey,” said Sugar, “if you tell us how to get up on the rooftop.”
“Well, it’s private,” the woman said. “Belongs to the guy in 4P. I don’t know him that well but if I let you in the building, you can take the elevator up and just knock on his door. It’s probably harder for him to turn you away then. Tell him Carol sent you. And I’m in 3A if you’re serious about the honey.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m serious. And thank you.”
Nate straightened his helmet, Sugar hitched up her cardboard carton, and up they went.
“Now, some people get a little antsy if they think a big old bunch of bees has just landed in their backyard for no apparent reason,” Sugar explained outside the door of the penthouse apartment. “So if it’s possible, we keep 4P in his apartment while we or at least I go and get them. You got that?”
“I got it,” Nate said, bold inside his hat and veil, and Sugar knocked robustly on the door.
As soon as the door opened, however, she knew getting a little antsy was more than just a possibility because the guy in 4P was Theo.
31ST
Oh, shoot,” said Sugar.
“Oh, Sugar!” said Theo.
“You live here?” Nate asked from inside his veil.
“Who’s that?”
“This is Nate. I think you met him at my apartment before you, you know, ran off and all. Listen, Theo, I don’t want you to go thinking that—”
“Why is he wearing that hat?”
Sugar and Nate looked at each other. The beekeeper’s visor was possibly not the best idea in the world given that the bee rescue was secret.
“He can’t be in the sunlight,” Sugar lied, trying to cross her fingers without dropping the carton. “Like that boy on 60 Minutes.”
“And I feel faint from being out in the street,” Nate said, rather woodenly, although Sugar had to hand it to him for quick thinking. “Can we come in?”
“Of course.” Theo stood back and let them in. “With pleasure. Be my guests. I’m so surprised. But pleased! Surprised and pleased but obviously more pleased. What can I get you? A soda, a coffee, anything else that isn’t alcoholic?”
An awkward silence mushroomed as Sugar found herself lost for words.
“What a cool apartment,” Nate said. “It’s, like, fifty times bigger than mine.”
“Perhaps you would like to show us around,” Sugar said. “Then we can decide what we’d like to drink.”
Theo’s apartment was indeed fifty times bigger than Nate’s, and twenty-five times bigger than Sugar’s, and had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a gourmet kitchen, a vast living area and a separate office.
The space was modern and cool, but it was furnished in a way that befitted a man who had abandoned corporate law to wear Hawaiian shirts. There was actually a palm tree in one corner, although it doubled as a basketball hoop, and a small pinball machine in another. But there was a comfortable old worn leather sofa too, and bookshelves heaving with books, mostly well-read paperbacks, plus drawings on the wall that Sugar thought might have been done by his niece. At least she hoped so.
“Don’t you ever feel like going outside?” she asked.
“Not really,” Theo replied. “We Scots are not known for our sun-worshipping skills. Actually, we don’t really have sun in Scotland, but I do have a roof terrace that you get to by the stairs next to the spare bathroom.”
“Do you have hot chocolate?” Sugar asked immediately. “The real sort that you boil the milk for and then mix in the chocolate and then wait a few minutes until it’s perfect drinking temperature?”
“Um, maybe, somewhere,” said Theo. “Would you like one?”
“I certainly would,” Sugar said, “and if you’ve a mind to boil the milk real slow, that’s how I prefer it. Don’t you, Nate?”
“Yes, I do,” he said. “Although I see you have an espresso machine so a cappuccino would be good too. As well as a ho
t chocolate. Just in case.”
Sugar smiled at him as Theo started opening cupboards to look for the hot chocolate.
“If you boys will excuse me,” she said. “I’ll just use the powder room.”
“Do you want to leave that carton here?” Theo asked.
“No, I need to take it with me,” said Sugar, groping for an excuse. “My new kitten’s in here.” She then scurried around a corner, straight past the powder room and up a narrow staircase before opening the security door and emerging onto Theo’s rooftop.
“Elizabeth the Sixth!” she said when she reached the sculpture around whose elbow indeed her bees were still, thankfully, huddled in their heaving elbow patch. “What in the heck are you doing here?”
She looked back across the gap at her own rooftop, at the thriving oasis of greenery she and Nate had created in the higgledy-piggledy morass of the city. Why would her queen want to come here to Theo’s bland empty space and sit on a fat bronze arm when she had always been so happy wherever Sugar was, surrounded by nectar and pollen and good old-fashioned beekeeper hospitality?
Often when bees swarmed it was to a tree branch, which could be shaken or chopped off, but in the case of Theo’s sculpture, Sugar had to use her hands to gently brush the bees off and into the carton. Luckily they fell in easy clumps, the last of which she could clearly see contained Elizabeth the Sixth.
“I don’t understand,” Sugar said. “You’re not even putting up a fight. What’s this all about?”
It wasn’t the first time she’d wished a bee could talk back.
“I look after you, don’t I? You know how much I care. I’d be lost without you, Elizabeth, especially at the moment. Truly, I would.”
She taped up the box and headed back down to Theo’s apartment, opening and slamming the spare bathroom door on her way past.
“I’m sorry,” she said, clutching the carton. “I’m not feeling so good all of a sudden. Do you mind if I skip the hot chocolate and just get Nate to take me home?”
Theo’s face fell and she resolutely ignored the full force of the tug at her heartstrings. She simply did not have time to consider the complications as far as he was concerned.
“But you came looking for me,” Theo said following her to the door. “Didn’t you? I was hoping that maybe you had found it in your heart to forgive me.”
“No, that’s not why I’m here. I just wanted to check something and now I’ve checked it, so we can go.”
“Plus you’re not feeling well,” Nate reminded her. “Remember?”
“You checked something in the spare bathroom? Wait, Sugar, please, just tell me what’s going on so I can fix it. I can change the spare bathroom. I can move the spare bathroom. I can seal the spare bathroom up forever. Please! Just tell me what I can do. And Nate, shouldn’t you be carrying the kitten since Sugar’s not feeling good?”
Nate obediently reached for it but Sugar hugged it to her chest and waited for Theo to open the door.
“I went and talked to an allergist,” he said, touching her lightly on the shoulder. “That’s what I meant with the balloons. I told him about you, about the, you know, bees, about the nearly dying thing and he says it’s different now. He says I probably wouldn’t die now, not if I carried this new doohickey from Sweden. Hang on, don’t go—I’ll get it! I want to show you.”
Sugar could feel the spot where he touched her burning beneath her T-shirt and found her staunch outlook on the subject of Theo suddenly seeming perilously unstable. She tried to remember that feeling in the pit of her stomach from when he ran out on her at the dinner party because a feeling like that went a long way toward not repeating a terrible mistake. But instead all she could grasp was the unfamiliar sensation that had so deliciously claimed her when he kissed her in her kitchen. She needed to forget that kiss.
“Come on, let’s scram,” she said to Nate, but he shook his head just as she caught sight of herself in Theo’s hall mirror and saw what a state she was in. Her mother would garrote her for being in someone else’s house looking like that. It was a fine thing that Sugar particularly didn’t want Theo to care for her because if she did, she would be mortified.
Before she could juggle the box of bees to open the door, however, Theo came back holding a crayon-sized white stick.
“This is the new antiallergy EpiPen. If I carry one of these around with me all the time, then I probably wouldn’t even need to go to the hospital. You know, if I was stung. It means I could visit with you.”
His handsome face suited being hopeful far more than crestfallen. His eyes had brightened, his smile was closer. Forget the kiss, Sugar told herself. Forget the kiss.
“Thank you for your hospitality, Theo, and that is a particularly lovely soap you have in the powder room but you will not be visiting with me. You tried to get me drunk, remember? You stalked me, then you ran out on me. So I’m sorry to say that I meant it when I said I never want to see you again.”
Nate’s eyes were bulging under his visor and Theo’s smile had retreated once more.
“But you came here,” he said.
“Well, that’s completely different and not related to the not wanting to see you again at all. Because that starts now.” She was getting flustered and it felt like the bees were getting that way too. They couldn’t stay in the carton too long—it would overheat. She had to get them home.
“If you could just tell me—”
“I’m sorry. Theo, but we need to go. Nate, would you be a honey and get the door?”
“I like your kitchen,” Nate said, before following Sugar to the elevator.
Theo watched as it swallowed the two of them up and took her away from him again.
“Who the heck does he think he is?” Sugar seethed as they made their way back to Flores Street. “You can’t just pester a person into liking you. It doesn’t work that way and even if it did, why hasn’t he got so much as a sad old rubber plant up there on that enormous rooftop of his? Does the man have something against gardens?”
“Can’t stand to think what your mission was but I hope it’s accomplished,” George said as he opened the door for them.
“Certainly is,” Sugar said. “Thank you for asking.”
Back on her rooftop, Nate helped shift Elizabeth the Sixth and her subjects back into the brood box, then place the honeyfilled supers on top. They were getting heavy with drying nectar but Sugar filled up the hive-top feeder to sweeten the bees more anyway. She wanted to make sure they didn’t stray again.
“You going to take that visor off and tell me what this silent treatment is about?” she asked Nate when they had the bees settled.
Nate really liked the visor. He wished he could wear it to work. It made him bolder.
“Theo is not pestering you,” he said. “His wife ran off with a gardener so he does have something against gardens. He really likes you, that’s all. And he’s doing everything to show you that but you’re being mean.”
Sugar’s mouth fell open. “You think I’m being mean?”
“I know you are. It’s not easy to tell a girl how you feel about her. It’s hard. Some people can’t even do it at all.”
He really was just about the sweetest neighbor she had ever had. And she’d had some honeys.
“You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be mean; that’s the last thing I want to be. I apologize, and it won’t happen again, but it can be just as hard to hand your heart over to someone as it is to ask for that heart in the first place, Nate. Especially if you’ve done it before and it hasn’t worked out so well.”
“That’s the same for everyone,” Nate said. “Theo too.”
“He told you about his wife and the gardener?”
“He told Lola,” Nate answered. “When he bought the balloons. He said he didn’t think he would ever fall in love again but he did with you, only then he lost his shit—I’m sorry, he lost his shizz—because he’s allergic and he made a big jessie out of himself. That’
s what he said. A jessie.”
“Is that a Scottish thing?”
“A scared Scottish thing, I guess.”
“Well, whatever it is, I won’t be mean again, I promise. But enough about him. Did you think any more about the job at Citroen?”
Nate looked at her through his veil. “It’ll be gone by now,” he said. “And I wouldn’t have gotten it anyway.”
“But if you’re not even going to try how will you ever know? That’s defeatist talk where I come from and you are such a star, Nate.”
“It makes me feel bad when you keep asking about it.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, honey. I’m just trying to help.”
“It doesn’t feel like help,” said Nate. “There’s too much of it.”
“Oh,” said Sugar.
Nate took off the hat and was just himself again.
“Um, I gotta go,” he said. “Bye.”
32ND
Sugar’s plan to never see Theo again came unstuck almost immediately when she woke up the next day and, before she could even get out of bed, saw her bees rise up out of their hive as one and abscond right back to his rooftop.
It was as if they had been waiting for her to wake up and do it in front of her.
“You have to be kidding me,” she moaned, after leaping out of bed and reaching her rooftop railing just as they took up residence this time on the rear end of the sculpture.
Again she checked the hive and saw Elizabeth the Sixth had taken nearly every last living creature with her save, this time, a few lazy drones who were chewing at the honeycomb.
“Nate? Honey? Are you there?” she called out, but she had woken in the night and heard him gardening, so wasn’t surprised that he was still sleeping. She didn’t have the heart to wake him now, especially after what he’d said the day before.
“Why, George, you look extra-specially distinguished today, you know that?” she said, down on the stoop, batting her eyelashes in a way she thought would make any southern mama glow with pride.
“You got something in your eye, Miss Sugar? Better do something about that real quick before the wind changes and leaves you blinking like an owl in the sunlight forever.”