“All right then, no, I don’t have something in my eye,” she said. “The truth is I need your help.”
“And I like helping so just tell me what I need to do.”
“You know that mission I told you I accomplished yesterday?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I need to accomplish it all over again.”
“Certainly explains why you have that cardboard carton.”
“Do you think you could come with me?”
“Do I have to wear a helmet?”
“No, I think it would be better if you don’t.”
“Then I can come with you, but only if you let me carry the carton. And only if I may say that you look particularly pleasing to the eye today. Particularly.”
It was true. She had brushed her hair, put on her lipstick, and was wearing her favorite dress and her nicest summer sandals. It wasn’t because she wanted Theo to see her in a better light than the day before either. She had no interest in what Theo wanted. None whatsoever. It was because everyone on the block would smell a rat if she turned up looking like an exterminator without actually being one two days in a row.
That’s what she told herself as she and George headed around the corner to Theo’s building.
“Would you be a sweetheart and buzz Apartment 4P for me?” she asked him.
“Who lives there?”
“Theo does.”
George looked at her, eyebrows raised.
“It’s not what you think,” Sugar said quickly. “Not at all. I have a situation, a difficult situation, which I can’t explain and which I can’t fix on my own, so I would appreciate it if, when we get up there, you do all the talking so I can go use the powder room.”
She pushed the buzzer herself and nudged George toward the speaker, knowing that women and powder rooms were a combination he would likely avoid.
“George Wainwright and Sugar Wallace,” he announced when Theo answered. “Do you mind if we come up?”
Theo, of course, did not mind, which moved George to raise his eyebrows even farther.
“I told you,” Sugar said as they stepped into the elevator. “It’s not what you think.”
When Theo opened the door, however, he was grinning from ear to ear, but it was the panting black retriever dog at his feet that caught Sugar’s immediate attention.
“You brought your kitten back,” Theo said, his smile disappearing. “I’m not sure how that’s going to work out.”
“You have a dog?” The dog was looking up at Sugar with large, black, baleful eyes. If Sugar had one really truly soft spot for anything other than lame ducks and bees, it involved canines.
“Dogs, heights; this is not a good day for George Wainwright,” George said, stepping backward.
“This is Princess,” Theo said. “I got him through the dog rescue program. Remember, I told you I was thinking of getting a man’s best friend?”
“You called a ‘him’ Princess?” George asked.
“The people who abandoned him called him Princess,” Theo explained. “They walked out and just left him to starve, didn’t they, Princess?” The dog looked up adoringly as Theo scratched his ears. “I’m just not sure how he is with kittens.”
“Kittens?” George repeated.
“Don’t worry about the kitten,” Sugar said, wishing she had never mentioned the nonexistent creature, her eyes still on Princess. He could have been her faithful old hound Miss Pickles’s twin sister.
“Can we come in?” George said to Theo. “I need to talk to you about something.”
“Of course,” Theo said, ushering them inside. “And can I just say that you look much better today, Sugar.”
She bridled but remembered her promise not to be mean. “Well, of course you can say it but you know those jeans were clean and that T-shirt has great sentimental value,” she said.
“No, no,” Theo said. “I mean you were unwell yesterday, when you brought the kitten.”
“Is it the kitten we need to be talking about?” George asked, confused.
“No, but now you come to mention it, Theo, I’m perhaps not as well as I may appear so can I please use the powder room again?”
Not waiting for a reply, she resisted the urge to stop and pat the dog, headed past the bathroom and up the back stairs. But Princess had already sniffed her out as a potential source of affection and followed. As Sugar pushed open the door to the roof terrace she felt the warm pressure of long soft fur against her legs.
“No! Princess! Go back,” she hissed, but it was too late, the dog was already outside, bounding around the empty space like a colt in spring grass.
Sugar couldn’t help but smile. Miss Pickles had been similarly willful; indeed, she left most human southern belles for dead with her demands regarding the kindness of strangers and the quality of sirloin.
Sugar called Princess over and he came straightaway, bent tail wagging maniacally, and sat down, just the way Miss Pickles used to, ready for some quality petting.
“You got to help me out here, boy,” she said, crouching so she could lean into his neck, smelling the expensive dog shampoo that Theo had used. “I need to get my bees and take them home so if you could just sit here quietly while I collect them, I’ll soon be on my way.”
Princess seemed to understand and sat obediently, tongue hanging out, his eyes following Sugar, who was horrified to spot Elizabeth the Sixth crawling over her subjects as they writhed between the substantial butt cheeks on the bronze nude.
“You can’t keep doing this,” she told her queen. “And especially not in there! You are going to get me in a whole lot of trouble, Elizabeth. You just don’t know who you are messing with here. It’s going to end in tears, I can assure you, and you know how I feel about tears.”
But it wasn’t Elizabeth the Sixth, in the end, who caused the trouble, it was Princess. He didn’t want to sit quietly while Sugar collected her bees, as it turned out. He didn’t want her to be on her way.
The moment he realized it was real live insects she was scraping into that cardboard box, he started barking fit to wake the dead.
And although the bees seemed unperturbed at such a vocal interruption, Theo was not. Theo was most perturbed.
“How did Princess get out on the roof?” he asked George, who had been halfway through a very involved story about a particular inhabitant of East Sixty-Seventh Street who had gone sixteen months, by George’s calculations, without once leaving the building and had also, he thought, been called Theo.
“And where’s Sugar? Do you think she’s all right?”
“Can’t speak for the dog but Sugar seems to know what she’s doing,” George said.
“I’d better go and see what’s happening,” Theo said, getting up from his chair, and George, who had just realized the shut-in on East Sixty-Seventh Street had actually been called Leo, decided the game, whatever it was, was up, and stood to follow.
Up on the rooftop, Princess was dancing around Sugar and her carton half full of bees with all the pride of having rounded them up himself.
“What are you doing?” Theo asked her, approaching the sculpture and seeing the large black mark at the top of its butt cheeks. “Are you defacing my Fernando Botero?”
“Stop, Theo!” Sugar cried. “Stop right there!”
“I don’t have to stop anywhere: this is my rooftop. What’s going on?”
“Stop, Theo. Please!”
But Theo was already just a couple of yards away from what he thought was the site of Sugar’s bizarre vandalism.
“If you don’t like it, you just have to say; I should sell it anyway, it’s worth a fortune but it was never really . . .”
He realized, at that point, that the dark tattoo on his priceless sculpture’s bottom was not paint at all. It was moving. It was alive. It was bees.
“Bees,” he said, the air squeezing out of his lungs. “Bees.”
“It’s not my fault,” Sugar insisted, trying to scrape the remaining inse
cts off the sculpture. “It’s nothing to do with me. They were right as rain over at my apartment but then they just started coming over here of their own accord and I have to keep coming and rescuing them and taking them home again and I would have said, I mean I hate to be anything less than truthful, despite the little white lie about Nate and the boy from 60 Minutes, but I thought it would upset you to know so—”
“Your bees are running away from home?” George asked.
“I wish people would stop saying that,” Sugar answered. “They’re not running away, they’re just—”
“Vacationing?”
“Bees,” Theo repeated, followed by six short, shallow breaths. He scrunched up his eyes and dug his fingernails into his palms.
“I’m real sorry,” Sugar said. He looked so distressed and it alarmed her that she hated so much to see it. Why should she care? But she did. She cared a lot. “This must be awful for you.”
“No!” Theo wheezed. “Good!”
“This is what good looks like?” George had found the middle of the rooftop, the spot farthest from any possibility of falling over any of the edges. He held on to the knee of the sculpture and tried not to sway.
“In therapy,” Theo said through gritted teeth. “Bee therapy.”
“Now I swear I have heard it all,” George said. “A male dog called Princess and a man in bee therapy. Are you finished with me now, Miss Sugar? I’m as giddy as a schoolgirl up here.”
“I’m OK,” said Theo. “I’m OK. I’m OK.”
“If he’s OK then we are all in trouble,” George told Sugar. “You’d better get those bees out of here before the poor guy bursts a blood vessel.”
“I’m trying, I’m trying,” Sugar said, sweeping the last of them into the box and taping it shut. “All right then. We’re good to go.”
Princess, finally, stopped his barking and calmly started licking his nether regions; Theo remained where he was, sweating like a galloping horse and carving holes into his palms with his nails.
“I’m OK,” he repeated, and his breathing seemed to even out a little. “I’m OK. Kitten?”
“Shoot, no need to worry about the kitten,” Sugar said, unable to meet his eyes. “I can’t apologize enough for this, Theo. We’ll leave you alone now and I will make certain this never happens again.”
“Welcome. Congratulations,” Theo said, frozen to the spot.
Sugar’s deep desire to not cause him any pain was alarming, to say the least. What she really wanted to do was take him in her arms, kiss away his fear, soothe and assure him. Instead, she took control of herself and bustled over to the door back into the apartment, indicating that George should come with her. “Thank you for your hospitality,” she called brightly. “And have a nice day!”
“He was just standing there,” she said as they stepped into the elevator. “He’s allergic and he was just standing there, and Elizabeth the Sixth and her girls didn’t even bat a wingtip. I don’t get it. I don’t understand, George. What the heck is going on? What does it all mean?”
“It means it’s time you told me the rest of your story,” said George, as they stepped out in to the street where he could breathe freely again. “You take that poor little kitty cat and those bees back home and do with them whatever you need to. I’ll get some shrimp pancakes and we’ll meet in Grace’s Garden in an hour. And don’t even think of leaving me waiting there either, Miss Sugar. I’m old. I could go at any time. And you don’t want that on your conscience.”
Sugar had enough on her conscience to last her a lifetime. “I’ll be there,” she said.
Elizabeth the Sixth’s great-great-great-grandmother, Queen Elizabeth the First, knew when there was a threat in the neighborhood, whether it was a bear or a wasp or a person wearing too much aftershave.
Each potential predator carried its own set of smells and vibrations and as soon as Elizabeth the First picked up on them, she communicated to the rest of the hive to be on high alert. It didn’t take much: just a flick of her pheromones and the guard bees ramped up their electric charge while the foragers stayed closer to the hive in case they were needed.
All the bees knew Sugar: they carried their feelings for her with them in their genes, they could sense her from more than half a mile away and would no sooner find her a threat than fly to the moon. But Elizabeth the First sensed Grady Parkes from half a mile away too, and her resulting hum was not one of blissful content. It was his smell, partly: an aftershave with base notes of tobacco and cedar and a hint of bitter herbs, and his natural scent, which was too sour for Elizabeth the First’s liking. She registered him as something to watch out for and passed this on through the realm.
But it was the chill in the air she picked up when Sugar and her grandfather were standing by the hive, talking about him, that alerted the queen to the fact that he could pose a far more lethal danger.
The queen and Grampa Boone were close. He knew how she felt, it was as simple as that, and what’s more, it was mutual. She knew he was fearful for his baby girl. And she knew the reason for his fear was sitting in the car just a stone’s throw away radiating overpowering smells and an oppressive disposition.
Not long after, Grampa Boone was gone, and Elizabeth the First knew then that it was up to her to keep the hive intact until Sugar came and got them, which she finally did. What’s more, Elizabeth the First liked her new home in the garden in Church Street. In the pretty corner south of Broad behind the big magnolia there were so many more scents to interpret, blooms to visit; she was happy about the water feature and looking forward to getting to know her new neighborhood.
Then Grady arrived and started cursing and kicking at her home, and one of the worker bees who knew he was not to be trusted acted on her own behalf and launched a minor attack. When Grady caused Sugar to fall, his pheromones fizzing, the other workers went on high alert.
This was not what Sugar’s grandfather had raised his bees to witness.
It would not be tolerated.
33RD
George was waiting on their bench beneath the oak, with that same bluebird perched on a bough behind him, and Sugar’s pancake and a soda waiting on a napkin beside him. He smiled when he saw her and although Sugar was so churned up inside she could barely even contemplate food, a sliver of that same comforting calm she’d felt last time in the garden slid around her shoulders like a stole.
“I haven’t told anyone this before,” she said, sitting down. “So if it doesn’t make sense, or I start to cry, or run for the hills, you’ll have to forgive me, I’m doing the best I can.”
“Your best is all you can do, Miss Sugar,” said George. “And yours is better than most.”
“It was the last Saturday in August,” she said. “Usually too hot to get married in Charleston, according to Grady’s mama, anyway, but mine just wanted us down that aisle as soon as she could possibly arrange it.”
Actually, the morning had been blessedly cooler than those of the previous days and weeks, cool enough for Etta to stop fussing about the flowers at the Yacht Club where the reception was to be, and the green of the lawn in the Legare Street garden where she was hosting a postwedding luncheon the following day.
The hairdresser had come early and piled Sugar’s long hair in a graceful updo; the dressmaker herself had made one last-minute alteration and fitted the gown like a whale-boned glove.
Her makeup was immaculate, her eyes soft and clear, her lips pink and perfect.
She’d even been practicing walking in heels to make sure that she didn’t tumble and fall off her father’s arm, revealing the satin La Perla underwear Etta had given her to wear beneath the dazzling dress.
Afterward, everybody would agree that, despite what happened, Sugar was the most beautiful bride they had ever seen.
The sunlight was filtering through the elegant arched windows of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church on the corner of Meeting and Broad Streets, the intersection at the very heart of Charleston where City Hall met the
Courthouse and the Post Office.
The pristine white St. Michael’s was where Sugar’s parents had been married thirty years before, and her father’s parents before them. In fact, the bells of St. Michael’s had been chiming at Wallace family weddings since 1764.
Sugar and her father arrived from Legare Street in a white carriage pulled by four glossy gray horses, their manes long and silky, their black oiled livery glistening.
The organist lit up as she stepped out of the coach, the choir bursting into the psalm Etta had chosen as Sugar entered the church and started slowly down the aisle on the arm of her proud father.
Her mother stood in the front row wearing a stunning suit of the palest draped cream silk, knowing she was stopping just short of outshining her daughter, and pleased with that.
Ben and Troy were groomsmen, their girlfriends bridesmaids, as Etta thought that would save anyone else from being offended and they were both exceptionally blond and pretty.
The church was full. The mother of the bride had outdone herself in the wedding preparations with everything from the first invitation to the promise of Cristal champagne at the reception to the details of the barbecue to be held the following day.
No one who knew that the Wallaces’ only daughter was getting married that weekend wanted anything other than to be right there with them, sharing in the festivities, from beginning to bitter end. It was going to be some party.
“Grady looks like the cat that got the cream,” his cousin Luke muttered under his breath to his brother, Ed.
“He always looks like that,” Ed replied.
“He’s had a lot of cream,” Luke said and they both laughed, which earned them a poke in the ribs from their mother. But they envied Grady too. Sugar Wallace was just about the tastiest-looking cream they had ever seen and the two of them all but drooled as she glided past them toward the altar.
A veil of the finest French silk tulle showed a glimpse of exquisite shoulder beneath the fragile lace of her gown. Every eye was on her as she kissed her daddy’s cheek and slowly turned to Grady, who was standing there with tears glistening in his own eyes, as overwhelmed by her beauty as everyone else.