“Buzz-off Bride?” Sugar suggested. “Yeah, I heard about that.”
“Well, you created quite a stir. But it was a long time ago and I guess we have better things to discuss. Want to come sit on the porch? I have a bottle of bourbon inside and I could certainly handle a belt or two.”
Inside, the house was just as Sugar remembered it, but freshly painted and with a few additions like a dishwasher and a new leather sofa instead of the old wicker furniture her grandfather had preferred.
“Who’s been living here?”
“Nobody,” Ben said.
“Then who’s been keeping it?”
“I have.”
“Why?”
“Why, in case you came back, Sugar.”
Sugar looked at him, astonished. “You kept it for me?”
“Hell, yes,” he said, checking his language. “Sorry. I mean heck yes. I guess I always thought that one day you would just turn up here and then time went on and weeks turned to months and months to years and . . . I know we should’ve done more to track you down and bring you home but that doesn’t mean we didn’t miss you. Or we didn’t think about it. We missed you like crazy. Me especially. The whole family just wasn’t the same without you.”
“I didn’t want you to find me and bring me home, Ben. And that’s the truth. I knew I’d shamed y’all and I guess I got used to thinking everyone was better off without me, but I just couldn’t marry Grady. I was going to have a miserable life with him and I just saw something in the church that made it clear to me it was now or never.”
“The bees?”
“Yes, sir. The bees.”
“Well, it certainly added a level of drama St. Michael’s is not entirely used to.”
“The funny thing is, the closer the wedding got, the more I felt unsure about marrying him, but I never felt unsure about running away.”
“Yeah, well, Grady showed his true colors eventually,” Ben said drily. “Troy still won’t hear a word against him but I’m glad you didn’t stay, Sugar. I’m glad you went away.”
“You are?”
“I love Charleston, I really do, and I have the girls now and I want them to grow up how we did: in a beautiful city we’re all proud to live in. We sail on the weekends or go crabbing with Jeanne’s folks on Edisto Island or I bring them here, even though Jeanne won’t come with us. We’re Charlestonians, Sugar, through and through, in most respects, and I’ve made my peace with that, but the truth is I’m not like Troy and Daddy. There are some aspects of my life here that I hate, but it isn’t being here that’s the problem.”
“Then what is the problem?”
“One of them is my job. I’m good at being a lawyer but the longer I do it, the less I like it, yet I’m stuck with it.”
“You’re not stuck, Ben. You don’t have to be a lawyer—you could do anything you want.”
Ben put his feet up on the porch railing and took a slug of bourbon. “I only wish that were true, Sugar, but Jeanne and I, we’re used to the good life now. And I have Daddy, I have our big brother, I have a million commitments. Believe me, I’m stuck. And most of the time I’m OK with that but you don’t know how I’ve envied you over the years, carving out a different life for yourself, going where the wind blows you. That takes guts.”
For the briefest sliver in time, the world shimmered and Sugar saw her life as an enviable jewel: a shining gem radiating energy and possibility that no one but she would ever possess, no matter what its deficiencies. “The guts aren’t particularly mine,” she said. “I’m just doing what Grampa’s bees tell me to. Every year I put my queen on his map—remember he used to have it on the wall in the spare room? It’s my queen who shows me where to go and I just follow her. It seems easier than deciding for myself, Ben, so it doesn’t feel brave to me. In fact, most people would say it seems downright demented.”
“So the bees brought you back here?”
“No, the bees took me to New York and when I got there . . . Well, yeah, I guess they kind of did bring me back here. It’s a long story, and it’s taken a long time, you know, since Grady, but thanks to my bees I have Theo.”
“Hey, baby girl,” her brother said. “I’m real pleased for you. You deserve it, you know?”
“He’s a lawyer, I hate to tell you, and he used to be all highfalutin but he works for nonprofits now. And he’s not scared of anything or anybody. You should have seen him last night at dinner with Mama!”
Ben coughed on his bourbon. “How did that go?”
“Not great. She’s still so angry with me. I don’t think she’s ever going to forgive me and Daddy’s never going to disagree with her but I’m OK with that now.”
“There’s something you should know about Mama’s anger,” Ben said. “You can’t go around thinking that it’s just for you. It’s not. Most of it is for Daddy. He cheats on her, Sugar; he has done for a long time. She knows and he knows she knows and they stay together because he needs her and she’s scared of being ruined, but she is angry. She’s probably wanted to run off and live in New York herself a thousand times.”
“Daddy? Cheating? Are you sure?”
“As sure as sure can be.”
“But that’s terrible! Does Troy know?”
“Everybody knows.”
“Oh, poor Mama. Can’t you get him to stop?”
“I stay out of it, Sugar. He doesn’t listen much to me anyway. Troy’s his wingman. I’m not nearly enough of a good ol’ boy in some ways, I sometimes think, but I get by. Just look at my girls. They are the best thing I ever did. And I don’t even know why I’m telling you this except I guess you always were the best person to talk to. Shoot, enough about me anyway. Tell me about Theo. Where’s he from? What’s he like?”
“He’s from Scotland, and I thought he was plum crazy to begin with truth be told,” Sugar said. “But the more I get to know him the saner he seems. Turns out the only thing he’s really crazy about is me and that sure feels good.”
“Are you going to give marrying him a try?”
“I don’t think I’m the marrying kind.”
“If he really loves you and you really love him and you’re not living within spitting distance of our mother, I guess you don’t need a wedding.”
They sat there companionably in the shade of the dogwoods and Ben told her that he’d come out to the cabin the day after she’d fled and found Troy’s truck and another swarm of confused bees. He didn’t know where they came from but he reclaimed some of their grandfather’s hives from the old beekeeper friend who had inherited them.
“He helped set me up to begin with and then I started coming out to check on them on my own,” he said. “And I guess I got a feeling for the darn things. Then I got on with fixing up the house and taking care of the garden and before you knew it, I had a hobby that didn’t involve a golf ball and every other lawyer in Charleston.”
He kept it on the down-low to begin with, he said, because he didn’t want Etta getting wind of it and cutting up rough but then the girls came along and he started bringing them out and they had taken to beekeeping like ducks to water.
“Guess it’s in our blood,” Ben said and Sugar felt a shift deep in her bones that she couldn’t explain but that made her feel calmer and happier than maybe she ever had.
When the girls got back with Theo, he stayed on the porch with Ben while Charlotte and Rebecca showed Sugar the bees.
The three of them each pulled off a chunk of honeycomb and sat under the peach trees eating it, the honey dripping through their fingers and in Rebecca’s case right down her front.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said to Sugar. “We’re usually real careful.”
“Why would I mind, honey?” Sugar replied.
The girls looked at each other.
“It’s your dress,” Charlotte said. “You were going to be married to Mr. Parkes in it but you left it here for us instead.”
It was no longer white and it didn’t drape the same way on someone who was only
four feet tall but it was indeed her buzz-off bridal gown.
“It’s my turn to wear it today because Charlie had it last time,” Rebecca said.
“It looks beautiful on you, sweetie,” said Sugar. “I can’t imagine a better use for it than dressing up two such gorgeous girls.”
“Daddy put it in the washing machine once and it shrank,” confessed Charlotte, “but we didn’t mind, did we, Becca?”
When the time came for them to leave, Sugar felt a different person from the one who had thrashed her way through the overgrown hydrangea bushes hours before. She felt like part of a family again, even if it wasn’t entirely hers or even a whole family. “Thank you for taking such good care of Grampa’s place,” she said to Ben. “I thought it would break my heart coming back here but you know what? It’s done just the opposite.”
“It’s your place, Sugar,” he said. “It’s ready and waiting, whenever you want it.”
“Come back for our birthdays!” Rebecca said. “Mine’s on September 4 and Charlie’s is on September 6 and we always go for a picnic at Drayton Hall.”
“Sometimes Poppa and Ettie go too,” said Charlotte. “We dress up.”
“But not in this,” Becky said, lifting up the trailing hem of the wedding dress. “This is a secret.”
“A picnic at Drayton Hall sounds just wonderful,” said Sugar. “And if I don’t see you then, I still hope I’ll see y’all real soon anyway.”
She and Theo might not be welcome at the house on Legare Street but they could escape to this special little hidden corner of her old world if they wanted to, couldn’t they? They could be part of these little girls’ lives, maybe even her other brother’s family too, if he was open to it.
As they sailed down the canopied tunnel of Ashley River Road, past the emerald green sprawl of South Carolina’s historic finest, past the happy picnic grounds of her youth, she felt welcome anyway. Relationships could crack, never to be filled, leaving impossible chasms gaping forever after, that was the fact of it, and that was harsh.
But new pathways could also be navigated, forging their way through uncharted territory, winding their way around those inhospitable obstacles like ribbons of tide through the low country salt marshes.
And that was just plain thrilling.
“You know, you have never actually asked me properly,” she said to Theo.
“Asked you what?”
“To marry you.”
Theo all but drove off the road. “Are you kidding? What about my heroic risk-taking next to your bees on my rooftop that day?”
“I don’t consider blackmail that formal a proposal.”
“What about the fact you told me I was never to ask you ever again?”
“Oh, well, I’ve changed my mind about that.”
“You have?”
“I have. Not because I think we should get married, but because I no longer think we shouldn’t. It suddenly seems far less complicated.”
“Far less complicated? I can hardly believe my ears,” Theo said, slowing down. “I’m sensing that I need to strike while the iron’s hot with this one.”
“Strike away,” said Sugar.
He pulled off onto a verge by the glossy white railings of yet another sprawling Ashley River plantation and got out of the car, coming around to Sugar’s side and opening her door.
A chestnut mare with a lightning-strike blaze trotted over to the railing to see what was going on, shaking her silky mane and snorting happily.
Theo ignored this—although he was actually scared of horses too—and took Sugar’s hand, helping her out on to the lush green grass.
Then he got down on one knee and turned to his beloved.
“Sugar Honey Wallace, beekeeper extraordinaire, love of my life, woman of my dreams, best friend forever—will you do me the great, great honor of becoming my wife?”
Sugar looked around at the vast rolling pastures in this happiest of places from her youth, then at the festoons of Spanish moss waving her gently toward her future. “Why yes, Theo Fitzgerald,” she said. “After all the effort you’ve put in, it would be rude not to.”
44TH
As love’s blossoms were bearing fruit in the South, so its early buds were blooming on Sugar’s rooftop in the North.
Ruby and Nate had been charged with looking after Elizabeth the Sixth while her keeper was away and had met to brave the removal of the hive lid, pulling out the honey frames and eventually finding the queen. As they put the hive back together once they saw she was in fine fettle, Ruby’s shoulder touched Nate’s arm and she felt a jolt so strong, she later told Sugar, it was like being launched into space.
Nate was a little further down the track with the possibilities of their friendship, however, so when he felt the electric shock of contact, he knew exactly what it was and what to do about it. Also, he was wearing the beekeeper’s visor, which gave him extra powers in the field of communication.
“Can I make you lunch?” he asked Ruby. “You don’t have to eat it. I would just like to make it for you.”
It was hard to tell girls how you felt about them, but sometimes it was worth the risk, was the conclusion he had come to.
Ruby had no intention of eating anything but with every meal Nate prepared for her from that day on, she felt herself sliding further and further away from the lonely heart who just read about other people’s happy endings, toward a happy ending of her own.
The day he got a trial at Citroen for another pastry chef position, she waited outside for the four hours it took him to find out that Roland Morant had too much in common with his boss at the diner to ever want to work for him or anyone like either of them ever again. “Out of the frying pan into the fire,” he said when he emerged, his cheeks burning.
At the sight of his humiliated face, Ruby slid one small cold hand into his large warm one, and more or less never let it go.
She also had the idea that was to improve not only her fortune and his, but Lola’s too.
The balloon/tattoo store was open a lot more often now and while balloon sales had barely lifted, Lola’s needles were getting a thorough workout. Potential clients wafted in and out and around the basement all day long, with nothing else to do but clutter up the stoop and annoy the heck out of George.
“You should sell your pastries in there,” Ruby suggested to Nate one afternoon. “That place needs good food. And coffee.”
When they put it to Lola, she liked the idea but thought the combination was too weird.
“But that’s Alphabet City,” George protested when he heard about it. “It’s where the weird people come so they don’t feel so weird anymore. Sounds like a perfect fit to me.”
With Nate doing the baking, Ruby making the coffee, both of them showing great enthusiasm for inflating, and Lola tattooing to her heart’s content, Lola’s Balloons finally took off.
“It’s like a commune in there,” Mrs. Keschl told Mr. McNally on their way home from a tango lesson one evening. “And they must be sharing the leftovers too, because I think the big one’s getting smaller and the little one’s getting, well, at least not littler.”
True to her word Ruby had been seeing the holistic counselor on the Upper West Side. It was not an easy fix: for every two steps she took forward, she took one and a half back—sometimes three. Her disease was not a logical one and the cure not guaranteed, nor quick, but one thing her friends did know was that now Ruby wanted to stick around. And with Nate in her world her heart at least was no longer starving.
45TH
The morning of Sugar Wallace’s second wedding dawned every bit as beautiful as the first, but this time she felt no fear, no doubt, only the blissful thrill of being certain. For reasons that had remained a closely guarded secret among her friends, she had not been able to stay in her own apartment for the preceding forty-eight hours.
Wedding preparations were taking place on Theo’s rooftop and some of them were only to be revealed on the day itself, she had been tol
d, so she had been installed in Ruby’s apartment on the first floor while Ruby stayed with Nate.
This suited Sugar just fine, as she spent the two days before getting married not having facials and hair treatments and massages, but harvesting her New York rooftop honey.
She never liked to do it in sight of the bees because although they had an unspoken agreement—she looked after them and they looked after her—she was still, when it came down to it, robbing them. Of course, Elizabeth the Sixth could not have given a tinker’s cuss. She and her bees had been so happy and industrious in the weeks since Sugar and Theo had been betrothed that they had enough honey to just about feed the whole of Alphabet City.
Still, Sugar wanted to do the right thing, so Nate helped her carry the supers full of heaving honey-filled frames down to Ruby’s apartment, then enlisted the new couple’s muscle (although Ruby didn’t have much of that) to scrape off the beeswax from the capped cells and release the liquid gold.
First they decanted it into big drums, then strained and poured it into a dozen large ceramic urns from which Sugar would work her magic in the months to come.
The morning of Sugar Wallace’s second wedding, she had her first mouthful ever of Alphabet City honey and it was her sweetest, most delicious harvest yet. She shared dripping spoonfuls of it with her friends as they helped her get ready, everyone in soaring good spirits.
“Nate’s finikias had sold out by eleven yesterday morning,” Ruby told her as she watched Sugar clip up a few tendrils of long curled hair while Lola adjusted her dress.
“And I’m tattooing my ass off,” Lola said. “Sorry. My butt.”
Lola might love fake fur vests and leather minis for herself, but she had made Sugar a dress the bride had been born to wear (although she refused the offer of a tattoo saying SCOTLAND 4 EVA across her back).
The gown was a pale gold silk that seemed to drip like honey itself from her shoulders to where it pooled on the ground at her feet.
“You look so beautiful,” said Jay, wiping his eyes. He had not stopped crying since he’d arrived.
“You look like you need a drink,” Mrs. Keschl told him. “Although I’m thinking you prefer something with a little umbrella in it.”