They made a stunning pair, everyone remembered thinking that. This was the sort of coupling every parent dreamed of for their child: two of the city’s finest joining hands in holy matrimony in front of everyone who was anyone.
They all remembered thinking that, but no one could remember when the first bee arrived.
It was definitely somewhere after “Do you Cherie-Lynn Antoinette Wallace take Grady Johnson Howell Parkes to be your lawfully wedded husband,” but before “I now pronounce you husband and wife.”
Sugar was standing there listening to the words and repeating her vows when she heard a familiar buzzing. A bee had flown in through the open top window above the door to the sacristy and was circling the pulpit.
She stiffened as it came closer. Where there was one bee there were usually more.
Sure enough, another bee flew in through the same window, and another, and another.
Grady was holding both her hands by then and didn’t seem to notice them fly once around the altar and then head straight for him.
There were still only four, making a big lazy circle just a few feet above his head, so Sugar relaxed a little until she noticed that the bee at the front was bigger than the other three.
Grady cottoned on to them then, or cottoned on to something, and puffed out a lungful of air as if to blow them away.
They moved a little higher, but still they circled him.
Sugar couldn’t keep her eyes off them. The one in the front was definitely bigger. In fact, she looked like a queen. She pulled her hands away from Grady’s.
The rector shot her a warning look, but she ignored it.
“Grady, where did you take my bees?” she asked.
The people in the first few pews started to whisper, their murmurs rippling to the back of the church, where no one could see what exactly was going on, just that the bride was distracted.
“For Christ’s sake, not now, honey,” Grady hissed, and flapped his hand above his head to shoo the bees away.
But they weren’t going anywhere and the more Sugar looked at her, the more she was sure that the big one at the front was Elizabeth the First. Of course it was impossible to be completely sure. It was impossible to be completely sure about anything. About knowing if you were marrying the right man, for example.
You are strong, her grandfather had told her, standing beside his hive. And never let anybody make you feel like you are not.
He’d been standing right by his favorite queen bee when he said that. Could it be that the queen had now somehow sought Sugar out to remind her of those words?
She felt panic rise deep in her chest beneath the lace of her beautiful bodice.
But the panic wasn’t about what would happen if she married Grady Parkes. It was about what would happen if she didn’t. She would hurt him, humiliate her family, alienate their friends and create a stir the likes of which she had spent much of her life avoiding.
The rector flapped his notes vigorously at the bees then, and him they took notice of, circling Grady in wider faster loops before heading once more around the pulpit, then flying out the sacristy window from whence they had come.
“Give me your hand, Cherie-Lynn,” Grady said, as the guests craned their necks and began to talk openly among themselves. “Stop fooling around.”
Sugar was a good person; she always had been. She truly believed in doing unto others as she would have done unto her, just like Grampa Boone had always told her. If everyone did that, he said, the world would be a better place and Sugar wholeheartedly wanted the world to be a better place.
But something had gone wrong. In trying to fit in with what was expected of her, she’d lost touch with what was really important, deep down inside herself, a place that lately seemed as far away as the craters of the moon. She’d been there just a few days before, though; in the car with her bees flying along Ashley River Road with the Spanish moss waving her on. That was who she really was; a slightly out-of-kilter beekeeper who took the scenic route, not the quickest, who liked gardening in cutoffs more than cocktails in heels, who preferred the company of her bees to just about everybody in that church.
That was the real Sugar, not this flawless spectacle standing on an altar promising to love and obey a man of whom she was, if not afraid, then certainly unsure. And he might at times make her feel dizzy with love but he did not make her feel strong.
She felt the thrust of Etta’s hand at her elbow. “For God’s sake, pull yourself together,” she said through gritted teeth.
“Does she need a glass of water?” Grady asked.
Standing there looking at him, feeling the lump in her poor bruised heart where the disappointment of love had already left its callus, Sugar could only think that becoming his wife was not going to make the world a better place, certainly not her world.
Being seconds away from marrying him, of course, was hardly the ideal time to reach such a conclusion. There was limited scope for her to work out exactly what to do. In fact, she really had only one choice.
So it was that in front of two hundred and fifty of Charleston’s most privileged and popular citizens, Sugar Wallace turned and fled her own wedding.
Before Etta or Grady or the rector or anyone knew what was happening, before she could even whisper a heartfelt, “I’m sorry,” she had kicked off her heels and bolted out the side door next to the altar. Once outside, she ran through the cemetery, into the courtyard of the church offices next door, and jumped over the fence at the back of the hall and into the car park beside it.
Sugar had grown up south of Broad Street. She and Miss Pickles had walked every one of the hidden side alleys of downtown Charleston a hundred times over, so she knew the back lanes and secret passageways of the scented city better than the people who put them there in the first place.
From the hall car park she dashed across St. Michael’s Alley, then ran through an open gate and up the garden path beside an old grade-school teacher’s ivy-covered cottage, emerging out of the rear of the property into the open green space at the end of Ropemaker’s Lane.
From there, she spied another open backyard opposite. It was in the middle of a messy renovation and had no gate, just a muddy space full of rubble and building detritus behind the house the local pharmacist had just had repossessed because of his little problem with the ponies.
She stopped inside the crumbling brick fence just to catch her breath and again she heard them before she saw them: more bees! The buzzing was coming from the far corner of the yard, on the other side of a pile of rubble. She scrambled awkwardly in bare feet across the heap of broken bricks and yanked-out foliage, and there she found her grandfather’s beehive, the one Grady had had taken away. The brood box and two supers were stacked neatly on top of each other, taken there, she imagined, by the workers creating the garden she would now never tend in Church Street.
A healthy collection of drones hovered at the entrance but she had no time to check and see if Elizabeth was in there. Instead, she pushed back her veil, hitched up her dress, hurried down the side of the half-renovated house and emerged out into Tradd Street. Her brother Troy’s house was four doors down on the opposite side and his Explorer was parked in the driveway beside it, keys in the ignition, gate unlocked, as usual.
Climbing up into the cab, Sugar suddenly knew what she was going to do.
She reversed back up the street and into the driveway beside the pharmacist’s house. She loaded her grandfather’s beehive into the rear of Troy’s Explorer; she jumped back in the cab, pulled out into Tradd Street, turned away from her brother’s house and put her foot on the gas.
She yanked off her veil and threw it on the passenger seat in case any of the wedding guests were out on the street looking for her. She pulled the pins out of her hair as she drove up through the French Quarter, shaking out her curls and heading for the I-26, driving carefully around the tourists on bikes and the horse-drawn carriages full of wide-eyed visitors to this beautiful city that she had
always loved so much.
The sunlight sparkled on the Cooper and she opened the window to breathe in that sharp, sultry salty air for one last time. It would have a hold on her forever, this southern city of her birth, squeezed between two mighty rivers, with its pretty houses, its lush gardens, its rich history and its proud past. But in the interest of her own ripe future, Sugar had to leave.
The freeway would be quicker, she reasoned, in case anyone came looking for her at her grandfather’s cabin. She had to move fast.
As soon as she got there, she opened up the hive and there was the queen, looking exactly like the bee in the church—but how else would she look?
Sugar had no time to ponder this further as she took off her $5,000 wedding dress and hung it in the closet in the spare room, pulling on an old pair of jeans and some sneakers left behind from one of her visits.
She transferred the hive into the back of the old pickup, loaded up her grandfather’s tools, a few spare supers, a bottle of Maker’s Mark, the spare cash he always kept at the back of the bread bin, her favorite cup, her grandmother’s prized collection of medicinal oils and a map from the spare room wall.
Then Sugar Honey Wallace and her bees hit the road.
They were about an hour and a half up the I-95 when she realized her hands were shaking on the wheel, her teeth were chattering.
She’d left Grady Parkes at the altar! The devastation, the scandal, the outrage—she was ruined.
And she was saved.
“Thank you, Elizabeth the First,” she said, tears of relief sliding down her cheeks. “Thank you.”
The queen passed this on to all her subjects and replied, in her own way, that the pleasure was all hers.
34TH
That is some story,” George admitted. “You just kept on going?”
“Yes, sir. I called, soon enough, to let Mama and Daddy know that I was OK, not that that particular piece of news seemed to please them, but it would have been rude not to. And I’d been rude enough.”
“But how did you get by, Miss Sugar? To begin with, how did you ever get by?”
“I stopped in Virginia to see Jay, my best friend from high school—you met him that first day although he may have seemed a bit snippy. Anyway, he wasn’t at the wedding owing to he’d been kind of run out of Charleston for refusing to stay in the closet, or that’s how he saw it. I kind of figured he would understand, which he did. He even went back to pick up a few things for me. It’s never as easy as just up and going. But I couldn’t stay with him, he was still running away himself, and so the bees and I, well, we just followed our noses and kept following them, year after year after year.”
It sounded like such a small thing when she put it like that—half a lifetime, almost, of arriving and leaving, with nothing but a few cases of honey and an address book full of grateful friends and neighbors to show for each stop. And Lord knew it hadn’t always been easy, especially to begin with when she was full of shame and secrets and had yet to work out that fitting in wherever she landed felt better than not fitting in where she started out.
But despite that, she had never regretted leaving Grady at the altar. She regretted causing him pain, and humiliation, of course she did, because no one deserved that, and she did love him. She just didn’t love him enough to be bullied into putting aside everything she liked about herself in order to make him happy. A life with bees and pockets of emptiness was and always would be hands down better than that.
“For what it’s worth,” said George, “I think you did the right thing. For you, at that time. You had to pay the price, sure, but the fact is, Sugar, it may just be about time you stopped paying it. It’s pretty much the same for anyone who makes a big call like that. I know how you must have felt—I do: I ran away and never went back either. The only difference is, I had someone to remind me every day that I did the right thing. I had Eliza. And you had no one.”
“I’ve never had no one, George,” Sugar insisted. “I don’t want you to think that I’ve been lonesome or sad or any of that jazz, because I haven’t. I’ve had a good life. And I’ve made a lot of friends and seen a lot of places and done a lot of things and besides, there’s always my bees.”
“Strikes me those bees are no ordinary critters.”
“I know; that’s why I’m so worried that Elizabeth the Sixth has gone and lost her marbles. I don’t want to lose her this soon. I’m only just getting to know her.”
“Sugar, you’re a smart woman in most respects. But you are blind in one.”
“You think?”
“Those bees of yours are trying to tell you something now just like those other ones told you before.”
“You mean the wedding bees? I’ll never know if they were mine.”
“Are you crazy? Of course they were! You think that was a coincidence? Your granddaddy told them to look out for you and that was what they were doing. They didn’t want you to marry a man who was going to bully you and take away the things you loved. And you ask me, those bees are doing it all over again, but in reverse.”
“Elizabeth is clever, George, but she’s not that clever.”
“You said it yourself, Sugar. Your bees saved you. Back then they saved you and I figure they’re doing it again. Now you might want to think on that a while, that’s all I’m saying.”
Behind them a plume of bees rose up from behind the hydrangea bush and headed through the neighboring backyards to Sugar’s own rooftop.
They had a lot to waggle about.
35TH
The following morning at precisely eleven, George knocked on the door of Sugar’s apartment and informed her that he’d taken the liberty of inviting everyone in the building to one of her famous brunches and told them it was potluck.
“Goodness gracious, George,” she said, letting him in. “Why?”
“Because I thought you might not have enough food.”
“No, I mean why did you invite them?”
“To celebrate a special occasion,” he said. “The special occasion of you not making a terrible mistake all those years ago.” He was hanging on to the kitchen counter like he was in a boat on the high sea. “Such bold moves ought to be celebrated.”
“It’s not common knowledge,” protested Sugar. “You’re the only person I’ve told and I’m not ready for it to be out there. I will never be ready for it to be out there.”
“Well, it’s not exactly out there, Miss Sugar. I guess I intimated that it was more your birthday.”
“My birthday is in the fall.”
“You’ll get to celebrate it twice then,” said George. “Miss Sugar, I feel like I’m in your bedroom again and I have trouble with that.”
“If you’re going to ask people to my house without telling me, you’ll have to live with the layout.”
“I couldn’t hardly ask them to Harlem. Or to Miss Ruby’s. Seems to me she only eats celery. And there’ll be nothing tasty at Miss Lola’s. Mrs. Keschl lives on canned tuna, I know that for a fact, and so does Mr. McNally, so you don’t want to celebrate your birthday in either of their apartments and poor Mr. Nate would probably have a heart attack if we all turned up at his place.”
“You have a point,” said Sugar. “And as it happens I like to entertain but I’m going to have to do it outside on the terrace so you’ll need to sit out there if you don’t want to be in my boudoir. What say I give you a job to take your mind off the whole height thing? You could set the table. I have these beeswax candles that we could sit on top of my silk magnolia blooms. What do you think?”
“I think New York looks like a different place up here,” admitted George. “Sure is one fine-looking city from this angle. And you have such a beautiful garden, Miss Sugar. It’s not like being up at the top of something at all.”
“You’re not on a pole, George. It’s an apartment. Just like on the ground but higher. You were at Theo’s, remember?”
“His rooftop was so big. I felt like it was harder to fall off it.”
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“Well, there it is right there. Look across at it.”
“Across is good,” said George, looking. “Down is bad, but I like across.”
Indeed, he was getting a good view of Princess, who was currently romping around Theo’s rooftop.
“So how are your bees today, Miss Sugar?”
“They’re still here,” she said, coming out with the table settings and following George’s gaze. “That poor dog. Princess? He’s going to have gender issues all his life.”
“I’m no expert on dogs,” George said, “being more of a parakeet person myself, but he seems pretty happy.”
Princess proved this point by jumping in the air, barking and changing direction as though being chased by an imaginary friend.
Sugar ignored him and welcomed Nate, who was first to arrive and who came through the door bearing a mouthwateringly scrumptious-looking dessert sitting on an elaborate cake stand.
“Happy birthday, Sugar,” he said, placing it carefully on the table in between the candles.
It was a giant, round, flat-topped meringue, finished with billows of thick glossy cream, topped with raspberries, fresh mint and shavings of dark chocolate.
“Oh my,” Sugar and George said at the same time, as Nate beamed with pride.
“It’s called a pavlova,” he said.
“It looks like a beret,” Ruby said, appearing behind Sugar, as pale as a ghost, bearing another cake box from Poseidon filled with baklava and finikia. “I think the Crankles are behind me.”
“Would you ever get off my back about ironing my feckin’ shirts?” they heard Mr. McNally roar.
“Would you get off your wrinkled old behind and iron them?” retorted Mrs. Keschl.
“Is fecking a curse word?” Sugar asked. Nate and Ruby shrugged but George said that even if it hadn’t started out that way, it certainly seemed like it was now.
“Many happy returns,” Mrs. Keschl said, handing Sugar an inexpertly wrapped package. “It’s a crystal honey pot. My sister-in-law gave it to me forty-nine years ago. Made in Slovenia.”