It was all the same stuff that filled her mother’s apartment on the Upper East Side, so why she’d wanted to re-create it here, Ruby couldn’t imagine. It was not as though she wanted Ruby to think she was still at home. She liked having Ruby away from the Upper East Side as much as Ruby liked not being there.
Ruby had found the apartment herself about a year ago after seeing a sign advertising it on the noticeboard at the greenmarket around the corner. She’d been out walking after a fight with her mom that was so vicious she had gone from East Eighty-Second Street to Tompkins Square Park before she even noticed where she was.
She’d rung up straightaway about the apartment, and loony Lola, who lived upstairs, had ended up showing her the place half an hour later.
Then she’d walked all the way home again and begged her mom to let her move there. She couldn’t pay the rent herself, of course—she’d never even managed to hold down a job for more than a month or two—but her mother was tired of her, Ruby knew that. Why wouldn’t she be? Ruby was tired of herself. And if it wasn’t quite independence when someone else paid the bills, at least it meant they could get out of each other’s hair for a while.
Of course, her mother had been horrified that she was living in Alphabet City. Back when she was Ruby’s age, the area had been full of drug addicts and pimps and thieves and murderers. But what had eventually won her over was the insanely cheap rent and the apartment itself, which was solid and roomy. And available.
It had taken a while to adjust to nothing but her own company but Ruby now felt she was almost ready, almost well enough, to start looking for a job and standing on her own two feet. Almost.
Outside, the van driver and the woman were unloading things from the back of the van. The woman was holding some sort of a cooler, and the driver was carrying a stack of brightly colored square wooden boxes. He did not look like the sort of guy who normally carried stacks of boxes. He had creases in his jeans, as if he’d ironed them.
The couple came right over to the building so Ruby drew back from the window again, pulling her long sleeves right down over her hands. She was cold, although it looked like a nice enough day outside. She was always cold.
One of the tiny “penthouse” apartments had been empty a while now, she knew, so she should not have been so surprised that someone was moving in. But, even though it was an unreasonable thing to think, she had somehow assumed she would know when that was going to happen and that she would have a hand in it. Of course, with her mother paying the rent, she didn’t even know who the landlord was. Ruby had a hand in absolutely nothing.
Still, she did not know if she wanted a nun and a guy who ironed his jeans living in her building. She’d only just got used to the beefy redhead living in the other tiny rooftop apartment and he’d been there more than six months. Not that she’d ever spoken to him or anything, but she still saw him every now and then and, even though it did not annoy her as much as in the beginning, it still annoyed her.
She pulled closer to the window again as some skanky kid on a skateboard whipped past the woman in the pink dress so close and so fast it spun her around. The woman just clung to her cooler and laughed. Closer, Ruby could see how pretty she was, how delicate her features in that open face, how wide and clear her eyes. She looks nice, Ruby surprised herself by thinking. She hardly ever thought that about anyone.
Now the woman was laughing again and looking all soppy over loony Lola’s ridiculous balloons, as though Flores Street wasn’t the worst place in the world to find such a collection, and loony Lola wasn’t the worst person in the world to have it.
Well, she’ll find out soon enough exactly how much those balloons are begging for an attack of the knitting-needle variety if she’s moving in, Ruby thought.
She wondered if the bad box carrier was the woman’s boyfriend. They didn’t really match each other, although they both looked about the same age, older than her, but younger than her mom. Midthirties, maybe? They’d better not have a baby in that van, that was for sure. Loony Lola had put all of Alphabet City off babies, possibly forever, with her toddler son who never stopped his squawking. If there was going to be another one of those in the building, Ruby would have to shoot someone. Or herself.
She took her plate of cracker slivers and covered them in three layers of plastic wrap, then put them on the top shelf in the kitchen cabinet, standing on tippy toe and pushing the plate as far back as she could. She would come back to the crackers later. She had stomach crunches to do. And maybe she would do her arm weight routine today since she’d only done it once the day before. And then maybe today she would walk to the Whole Foods Market on East Houston to get some quinoa because she’d read on the Internet that it was the new superfood, although actually she thought the Chelsea Whole Foods had a better layout so she might walk there instead, depending on how long her exercises took.
Maybe the van driver and the happy woman had met over a bunch of flowers, she thought. Maybe the woman’s first husband had died and the driver had delivered flowers to her, then fallen in love with her. Or maybe the woman worked in the store and he was the delivery boy and after years of not telling each other how they felt, they were trapped together in the flower cooler one night and it all came out and now here they were.
Stupider things had happened.
3RD
Sugar paused at the iron railing leading down to the basement where the motley balloons bobbed sadly in the faint spring breeze. One of them was a world globe, its Northern Hemisphere seriously dented, another was a somewhat flaccid superhero, and the rest were a forlorn collection of ordinary shapes in washed-out colors and various stages of deflation.
The same boisterous ivy from the stoop spilled down the stairs like a feather boa and had thrown itself around a dusty window bearing a sign that read, if only just: LOLA’S BALLOONS.
Through the dirty glass Sugar could also see part of an inflated zebra, half of a giraffe, and the face of a blow-up monkey floating on the inside, but a large handwritten sign hanging crookedly from the rather imposing black door read CLOSED.
“Well, how about that,” she said. “I guess it’s a store.”
“Yeah, it looks real inviting,” said Jay, hitching up the empty hive boxes he was carrying.
“I know what you mean,” Sugar agreed. “A balloon shop should always be open, just like a garden should always have flowers and a hive should always have bees. Closed is simply not a word that should be associated with something as bright and beautiful as balloons.”
“These balloons are not bright and beautiful,” Jay said, resting on the railing. “These balloons are pale and pitiful. In fact, unless ‘Lola’ is tying those things to herself and jumping out of cakes at bachelor parties she should probably rethink her business strategy.”
“How you get from an innocent child’s plaything to a girl jumping out of a cake, I just cannot fathom,” Sugar said. “Are you sure they even do that at bachelor parties these days?”
“Not the bachelor parties I go to,” Jay admitted. “Come on now, can we get going?”
They climbed the stoop to the apartment building’s weathered outer door, heavy and difficult to open, which led to a tiny stifling space where the mailboxes were, with a second door squeaking moodily before letting them into the lobby. This was dark and had seen better days, but the worn red-and-green tiled floor was clean, and the place smelled better than many of the ones Sugar had moved into over the past few years.
The somber gray door to the only first-floor apartment had five locks on it, though, causing Jay to raise his eyes to the heavens instantly. “Please tell me this isn’t you.”
“Of course not, sweetie pie. I can’t keep bees on the first floor!”
Jay looked up the narrow stairwell. “Can you keep them on the second?”
“No, I cannot. And not the third or fourth either. It’s a climb, I admit it, but I do believe that when we get up there, there’ll be a lovely surprise for my girls.” She held
up her bee box. “They’ll be so happy, they’ll make honey you will cry just thinking about.”
“Is this your way of telling me there’s no elevator?”
“This is my way of telling you that nine out of ten health professionals say climbing stairs is the best way to maintain your cardiovascular fitness.”
Jay owned a florist shop in Middleburg, Virginia, and usually maintained his cardiovascular fitness in an air-conditioned gym under the tutelage of a personal trainer with a beautiful body and a magnetic mean streak. It was testament to his love for Sugar that he was hauling heavy boxes up countless stairs and driving his assistant’s cruddy van, not his own spotless Miata. “You go on up, check the place out and find me the smelling salts,” he said. “I’ll keep unloading.”
“Aren’t you glad I have movers bringing the rest of my stock tomorrow?”
“I’m glad you trust me with your precious essentials, sweetie, but one year it would be nice to see you without pulling a groin muscle.”
Up on the fifth floor, Sugar unlocked the door of her new home and stepped inside.
This was the fifteenth threshold she had stepped across in as many years and always she felt the thrill of the new, even if she sometimes felt the icy blast of a drafty window or the hot breath of a lecherous landlord as well.
Apartment 5B, 33 Flores Street had neither.
It was a 600-square-foot studio, with a bed in the middle of the far wall, although far was hardly the right word as nothing in a place that size was really far from anything else in it.
But what Sugar had been promised by the landlady when she had called after finding the listing on a beekeepers’ website, what she could barely believe existed in the world, let alone in New York City, let alone that it was to be hers for the next year, was the terrace that ran the length of the apartment outside the French doors.
From wherever she stood inside the tiny space she could see out across the neighboring rooftops; north to the treetops of Tompkins Square Park, south to the taller towers of the Lower East Side and east to the gritty glitz of the Alphabet City skyscape and beyond.
This wasn’t the ordinary Empire State or Chrysler building vista that she’d seen sprouting up above the other skyscrapers in television shows and movie opening credits. This was a distinctly downtown horizon spiked with water towers, sprinkled with satellite dishes, scarred with spindly staircases and squat air-conditioning units, the occasional rooftop garden greenery dazzling for all the world like scattered emeralds.
It was a secret, suspended in the air, and she was now in on it.
In other words, it was perfect.
She had not loved a room so much since her brothers, Ben and Troy, had made over her bedroom at home when she was eleven years old. They’d painted it powder blue when she was spending the weekend with her grandfather and, although she didn’t even like powder blue (which she had told her mother, who had clearly never passed it on), she’d loved that room anyway because they’d done it just for her.
Not that she was going to go thinking about that now.
Thankfully there was nothing powder blue in her new Manhattan home but that was not to say it lacked color. The wall behind the bed was particularly orange, the color of almost-burned marmalade, and the tiles in the neat little kitchen tucked against the right-hand wall were a brilliant turquoise.
A tired but not-dead-yet sofa in a faded eggplant color provided the only seating in the room, a jauntily tiled coffee table nudging one arm.
And outside through the French doors was the city, that big silver city with its slashes of blue spring sky and its rooftops turned to the heavens like sunflowers in a crowded crop of squared-off stalks.
Sugar placed her bees gently on the kitchen counter and rested both hands on top of the box, feeling the gentle hum of her colony-in-waiting beneath her palms.
“It’s going to be a good year,” she told them. “Just you wait and see.”
“Talking to those damn things again?” Jay said coming in behind her, setting down a load of honey-filled cartons. “One of these days I’m going to show up to move you and you’ll be all black and gold and fuzzy yourself.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” said Sugar. “There are worse things to be than a honeybee.”
“Yeah, you could be a homeless bum or the crazy-haired Smurf of a neighbor I just passed with her screaming kid on the stairway. Or you could be someone else’s honeybee, just the regular kind, that gets ignored or eaten by birds or stood on, not treated like next of kin.”
It was true. Sugar did treat her bees like next of kin but then again, they were.
Along with her manners, the accent she tried so hard to soften, a single china cup covered in blue daisies and a weathered box of essential oils, they were all she carried with her from her past. Her bees relied on her for shelter and food but she relied on them too. She made her living from their honey, not just the healthful liquid itself but from the salves and gels and tinctures and remedies she created and sold at farm stands or farmers’ markets wherever she lived.
It was the most symbiotic of relationships.
“I treat everyone like next of kin,” she told Jay. “Including bums and crazies and my oldest dearest friend in the whole wide world.”
Jay looked at her, standing there like Holly Golightly in her vintage dress with the spikes of the city rising and falling behind her.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said, with a smile that had barely changed since they first became friends in grade school. “You thought Weetamoo Woods was the badlands, remember? I can look after myself, Jay. I’ve had a lot of practice.”
“I know, Sugar, and that’s exactly what I worry about. Don’t you get tired of it? Don’t you want to put down roots?”
“I do put them down, Jay, wherever I go. I just pull them up again every spring and plant myself somewhere else is all.”
“Well, those bees of yours must be some confused critters, crisscrossing the country at your every whim and fancy. Don’t you want a significant other?” Jay persisted. “A family? You know, of your own, not your neighbor’s or your hairdresser’s or whomsoever you happen to be rescuing? I don’t want to say the words ‘tick tock’ but still . . .”
“I don’t rescue people, Jay; that is so sappy. I just help my friends when they need helping and give them a jar or two of honey.”
“Sugar, you are a one-woman detox center stroke guidance counselor stroke bank teller stroke babysitter stroke you name it. I’ve met these people, remember?”
“What nonsense. I just do what any neighbor would do and then I’m on my way.”
“That’s my point. You’re always on your way. Don’t you want to actually arrive? I think of my life before I met Paul and we got the house and the dogs and matching chenille bathrobes and it’s so much better than it was before. I want that for you too.”
Maybe her smile hadn’t changed but Jay was sure the light did not quite shine in her eyes the way it once had and was dimming further right now in front of him.
“I’m happy for you, sweetie, you know I am,” she said. “And so grateful to have you in my life, even if it’s only once a year, in fact especially if it’s only once a year because if I wanted someone to make me feel bad about my life on a regular basis I would have stayed at home with . . .”
“Your mother? Ouch! That is one low blow, Cherie-Lynn Wallace!”
“And is that you shirking football practice again, Jason Llewellyn Winthrop the Third?”
They looked at each other for a moment, then laughed, and Jay stepped into her open arms for a hug, the way old friends who have been through a lot together do.
“You do realize there are prison cells bigger than this apartment,” he said, over her shoulder.
Sugar grabbed his hand, opened the doors to the terrace, and pulled him outside. “But look at this!”
His eyes skimmed over the floating crop of neighboring rooftops and landed on one bland empty space with nothing bu
t a large sculpture of what looked like a reclining nude in the middle.
“Who would just put a fat naked lady on their rooftop?” he asked, pointing it out.
“You would spot the only blot on the landscape. Look, we can see the Williamsburg Bridge from here and that’s Brooklyn sprawled out behind it.”
“Hard to believe you can see quite so much sky in a city this size,” he admitted.
“It’s a different world up here, isn’t it? Like we’re floating, or part of a beautiful hat.”
Not for Sugar the out-of-place rooftop artworks or the everyday detritus at street level, thought Jay. She saw the world with different eyes. It had helped her get over the complications of her past, he knew that, but it was her future that worried him. “Are you happy though?” he asked. “Truly? That’s all I want to know.”
Sugar felt the buzz of the metropolis humming in her bones as she stood there with the city at her feet. All she could think of was her queen bee waking herself up, shaking herself off and laying herself a great big new happy family in the crazy electric air on this perfect Manhattan rooftop.
“Of course I am,” she said. “I’m in New York! Now let’s find a place to put the hive then I’ll give you an iced tea and a slice of honey loaf and you can get off home.”
For most bees, life was short and sweet and pretty uncomplicated. There was certainly no debating any mysterious twists and turns, no choices to make, no wondering how it might all end up. It would end up in a puddle, or against a windscreen, or without wings in a brisk northerly after a busy life of about six weeks, most of it spent hunting for nectar.
But a queen was different and Sugar’s queen, Elizabeth the Sixth, was more different than most.
She had known the instant she first emerged from her birthweek diet of nothing but the finest royal jelly that there was more to her life than backing her regal rear into a million empty honeycomb cells and making baby bees.
For she had a special purpose: one passed down in her DNA from Elizabeth the Fifth and before her, the Fourth. In fact, it had been in all Sugar’s queens, right back to the one raised by her granddaddy fifteen years before beneath the Belle of Georgia peach trees in his leafy backyard in Summerville, South Carolina.