He pulled back the curtain and sniffed.
He was of solid build with a round, pleasant face and thick, curly copper-colored hair. He couldn’t quite meet her eyes but managed a shy smile.
“And they really liked my pastries.”
“Yes, Nate, honey. They really did. Now you sure I can’t get you a handkerchief?”
14TH
Two weeks after he first met her in the street, Theo saw her again, and this time it was so definitely Sugar that he couldn’t believe he’d bothered to follow the pregnant Asian woman.
She was walking toward him along East Seventh Street: a slender goddess in a pale green floral dress on a sidewalk that suddenly seemed devoid of any other color. Her hair was loose and falling in a thick shiny swath behind her shoulders, swinging with each step. He instantly craved every detail about her: what she smelled like, what she ate for breakfast, what she sang in the shower, what her first pet was called, who was mean to her at school.
He wanted to tell her about his first tooth falling out, about his mother not wanting to worry him with her lung cancer, about his new favorite song, about how ready he suddenly was for the next chapter in his life.
He could feel her in his bones from twenty paces. His mother was right. His aunts were right. Marlena was right. She was the one and he just knew it. Ridiculous. But true. But ridiculous.
But true.
And while he was standing there, watching her, baffled by the strangeness of such inexplicable certainty, Sugar looked up and saw him.
She stopped in her tracks, one hand flying to the delicate gold necklace and pendant that rested neatly on her smooth pale skin.
Theo had continued to be a frequent visitor to her dreams but she’d swatted the memories of them away like flies, all but forgetting he existed in real life. Yet there he was, standing in another loud Hawaiian shirt on the sidewalk, impossible to deny. And he had such a funny look on his face; excited, but pained. He was jiggling on the spot—buzzing, almost, like a bee.
Sugar smiled. She didn’t really want to but couldn’t help herself. Her body seemed to have its own separate reaction to him; nothing to do with the rest of her. She never quite remembered what her dreams were about but woke up after them feeling not embarrassed, exactly, but—no, actually, she was embarrassed.
“Why, hello, Theo,” she said, reverting to her default setting of politeness. It trumped embarrassment every time. “How nice to see you again. I’m Sugar Wallace. We met the other day on Avenue B with George, you know, the gentleman with the burger wrapper stuck to his coat?”
That was how she remembered George, Theo thought. Because of the burger wrapper? “Wallace,” he said. “Of course. As if I could forget you, although the Wallace I did. So stupid. William Wallace, after all. Braveheart!”
“I’m sorry?”
“Famous Scotsman,” he said. “No relation, I’m sure. Like the Amish.” It occurred to Theo that he hadn’t thought for even a moment about what he would say to Sugar when he found her.
“No, no relation to William Wallace,” she said. “Although I did see Mel Gibson once, out in California. At least I think it was him.”
“Was he short?”
“He was sitting down.”
“Speaking of which,” Theo said, rather artfully he thought. “Would you like to go for a drink? McSorley’s is right across the street and it’s one of New York’s oldest bars.”
It was just past eleven in the morning and, where Sugar came from, a girl did not start drinking till lunchtime and, even then, probably not with a man she’d met just the one time while scraping a potentially homeless person off the pavement.
“Oh,” she said.
Theo had a meeting he was supposed to be at in ten minutes’ time and didn’t know himself about the sense in asking her for a drink at that hour, but McSorley’s was right there. And there was no place like it outside of the backstreets of Edinburgh and possibly Dublin and, in a pinch, London.
Mostly though, he just could not bear to think of Sugar slipping through his fingers again.
“Would it help if I said please?” Theo asked.
It always did. “Well, all right then,” she agreed.
But when he put his hand on her elbow to escort her across the street the rush of heat she felt radiating from his touch proved too much of a shock. She stopped short of an audible gasp and scurried into McSorley’s unaided.
It was like stepping back in time. There was sawdust on the floor and faded sepia framed photos crowding the walls. An eight-foot-tall ice chest behind the battered bar was piled with old chamber pots and jugs and urns. Ancient horse paraphernalia hung from the ceiling; dusty knickknacks filled up every nook and cranny.
A black woodburner sat in the middle of the crooked tables and chairs and the dappled light cast a surreal sheen on the whole place—giving it the aura of a faded sepia photo itself.
There was no one else in there but Sugar would not have been surprised if a saloon girl had appeared from the back room or a cowboy fell in the door with a gunshot wound. However, it was a cranky-looking gray-haired barman wearing a garbage bag for an apron who sidled out from the shadows at the back of the room and slid behind the bar.
“Are you open?” Theo asked him.
“Did you break in?”
“No.”
“Then we’re open.”
“All part of the service,” Theo assured Sugar, showing her to a small round table near the window. The light danced in through the elm tree on the street outside.
She felt like she was asleep and dreaming again.
“Wait right here,” Theo said. “I’ll get you a drink.”
She opened her mouth to say she pretty much always stuck to bourbon, no matter what the hour, but Theo had already turned to the barman and ordered.
Despite the fact he was wearing a loud shirt and horrifically mismatching checked Bermuda shorts, he looked good from the back, there was no denying it. He was tall with broad shoulders and hips that weren’t too slim, and nice legs, she realized. The Theo she dreamed about looked exactly the same, but without the shirt and Bermuda shorts.
An unfamiliar heat leaked out from some long-forgotten place deep inside her, waking the butterflies that had been lying dormant for years from their slumber.
“I got you a double,” Theo said, returning and putting two half-pints of beer in front of her. “Light ale and dark ale. I hope that’s OK. It’s the specialty of the house.”
He had beautiful long fingers, like a piano player.
“They’re both for me?”
“That’s all they serve here. It’s the tradition.”
“Oh, all right then, thank you. And what are you having?”
“The same,” said Theo, heading back to the bar for two more half-pints. “To your health.”
Sugar took a sip of the light ale, which fizzed on her tongue, further unsettling the butterflies. She could almost see their wings uncrumpling and trying to spread out after so much time in hibernation. “I’m not usually much of a beer drinker,” she said. “You should try a mint julep, maybe, made with good Kentucky bourbon. One afternoon. Or evening. The evenings are probably better. I’m more inclined to drink iced tea at this time of the day, to be perfectly honest.” She took another sip, this time of the dark ale, as Theo’s smile slid toward the sawdust.
“I guess iced tea would have been better,” he said. Of course it would have been. “I don’t usually drink beer in the morning myself. Or anything else. I’m so sorry. What an idiot.”
“No need to feel too bad about it,” said Sugar. “It’s not like you’ve lured me into a cave and made me eat raw buffalo.”
“That’s happened to you?”
“No,” she said, blushing as she wondered if a cave and perhaps a small amount of nonthreatening dragging had featured in one of her dreams. “I’m just trying to make you feel better.”
“I do feel better,” he said. “Not about that but about everythin
g.”
“Everything?”
“About you, actually. I’ve been thinking about you ever since we met the other day. I’ve been looking for you. Seriously. So to find you, it seems so . . . I don’t know. I want to say miraculous but that’s not quite what I mean although it’s as close as I can come up with.”
His eyes were such a transfixing color that she had to look away from them. She was drinking the beer too quickly. “Oh, well . . . I’m . . . all right then,” she said. “That’s good. So do you work around here?”
“Yes,” he said. “Not far. And live too.” Why could he not string a sentence together? “You?”
“I’ve just moved here,” she said, keeping it deliberately vague. “But you’re from Scotland, right?”
“Glasgow,” he said. “Son of Shona Fitzgerald, deceased, and father unknown. By me, anyway. Obviously she knew him, but only briefly. Not that she was fast or anything. And she really did love him but there was always a shadow of doubt, so she said.”
The shadow of doubt had been his father’s occupation as a full-time burglar. It was the difference, his mother claimed, between a lifetime of happiness and a two-to-four stretch in Barlinnie. “He went away soon after they, you know . . . so that was pretty much that.”
Sugar thought his eyes seemed more turquoise today, the lashes thick and dark, like a little boy’s in a grown man’s face.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” she said. “And your father too, I guess.”
“I don’t know why I told you that,” Theo said. “I’m making myself sound tragic and although we did live in a very small flat with my gran and four of my aunties, I actually thought it was the best. I didn’t even notice I was short of a father until I was eighteen.”
Sugar’s butterflies had gotten their wings unfurled and were flapping, flapping, flapping.
“You certainly seem pretty cheerful about it.”
“Oh, my mother would have loved you,” said Theo.
Sugar nearly choked on her beer. “Excuse me?”
“It’s true. I have very good instincts. Everyone says so.”
She laughed and it was such a sweet sound, he relaxed. Though he wished he hadn’t blathered on about his family like that. “So, do you like it here then?” he asked. “In New York?”
Her face lit up. “I think it’s the most amazing place I’ve ever been. There’s a balloon shop in my apartment building. Dmitri down the street teaches the accordion from his accordion repair store. And I can get a knish just about any time I want although actually that’s not that often. Oh, and Chinese pancakes. Have you been to Vanessa’s on Eldridge Street? The colors down there in Chinatown; I mean it’s the opposite of coordinated, but talk about alive . . .”
The way she looked, sounded, smelled (like limes, mixed with something sweeter): everything struck him. There was no other word for it. She struck him. Sitting there in the dappled sunlight of the dusty saloon, Theo’s whole life suddenly made sense. Everything that had happened to him up until that point, everything that he had made happen, it all led up to this very moment, sitting there with Sugar, the one, without a shadow of a doubt, he thought. The one. He just knew.
She smiled at him. “It’s real pretty in here, isn’t it? I mean for a gloomy old spit-on-the-floor barroom.”
“Do you like children?” Theo asked.
“I’m only a godmother about twenty-two times over.”
“Do you like oysters?”
“I’m from the South,” she said. “It goes without saying.”
“Per Se or Babbo?”
“The restaurants? I’m sure they’re both great but, like I say, I prefer Vanessa’s pancakes. And I cook. I like eating at home. Where are you going with this, exactly?”
“Sugar Wallace,” he said, “this is going to sound really weird, but from the moment we met I just had this feeling about you . . . and I don’t really know how to put this without totally giving you the creeps but on the other hand I know that this doesn’t happen every day. George was supposed to fall on me, you were supposed to get me to help him up, we were supposed to meet on the sidewalk right outside here today because we are going to end up together, you and I, Sugar. I don’t know what will happen next but I swear I can actually see us together in forty years, an old married couple, holding hands and hobbling down East Seventh Street toward Tompkins Square Park in the sunshine. I can see that right now.”
The words hadn’t even skimmed the surface of his thinking before they tumbled from his mouth. He just opened it and out they poured into a puddle on the table between them, unfiltered.
The look on Sugar’s face left no doubt in his mind that filtered would have been better. Perhaps honesty was mostly the best policy, but not always.
“Too much? It sounds like too much. But I just know it, Sugar. I can’t properly explain it but I know it. My mam always said I would know ‘the one’ when I found her and she was right, God rest her. I found you and I can feel it. Can’t you feel it?”
“That we will be an old married couple, holding hands and hobbling down East Seventh Street in forty years’ time because we both like oysters?” Sugar was not smiling anymore. “Where I come from,” she said, “we don’t joke about that kind of thing.”
Where she came from, being married was definitely not a laughing matter.
“Where I come from it’s exactly the same,” Theo said, panicking. “I know this seems strange, and trust me I am not normally like this, but I just have this overwhelming certainty that we are going to spend the rest of our lives together.”
Sugar put her near-empty beer tankard back on the table next to the other near-empty tankard. “You don’t know the first thing about me,” she said.
“But I do! You picked George up off the street! No one does that here. In Barlanark, yes. Most people in Barlanark end up on the street themselves at some stage so we’re used to picking each other up. But not here. You’re kind, Sugar. And you are smart and beautiful. You’re really beautiful. Plus you came for a drink with me, doesn’t that mean something?”
“I came for a drink with you to be polite. And I do know what is going to happen next,” she said, gathering up her bag. “So I can help you out with that part of your little story.”
“This is not turning out the way I imagined,” Theo said. “I’ve scared you.”
“I’m not scared. I’m—well, I don’t know what I am but I met a man once before in a Walmart parking lot who wanted to take me to Norway. Of course, it was easier to tell he was crazy because he had shopping bags on his feet and was wearing a crown.”
“I don’t even own a hat, if that makes a difference.”
Sugar stood up. “No, it doesn’t. You shouldn’t joke and you shouldn’t go around telling perfect strangers you’re going to end up with them!”
“You’re right, of course, I can see that now. I’m so, so sorry, Sugar.”
“I’m sorry too, Theo, but I think I really do prefer iced tea in the morning, so please excuse me. Thank you for the drink, for the drinks, and you take care. Oh, and I don’t know if you were thinking of following me but I seriously hope you don’t because that officially would give me the creeps.”
She turned and picked her way around the bar tables, disappearing out through the saloon doors, the sunlight blinding Theo as he watched her dissolve into the street, his heart sinking into the sawdust beneath his feet as he fought the urge to do exactly what she had just asked him not to. How had he gotten it so horribly wrong?
Outside, Sugar’s heart felt like it was pumping the blood of a thousand nations through her body.
Something deep and dark and complicated was battling to emerge. It had to do with the blowtorch on crème brûlée, with the butterflies, with the heat, the inexplicable pull she felt when she looked into Theo’s eyes—and it was most unwelcome.
The gall of the man, talking about being married, of all things, and hand-holding and forty years together after he’d known her for all of
twenty minutes!
She would not cry, she told herself, she absolutely would not. She would go home and maybe work on the syrup she was developing for Ethan and a cream for Mr. McNally’s psoriasis.
She would not cry.
But if she did, she could not honestly deny as she fled home to Flores Street, it wouldn’t be because a deranged stranger had talked about wanting to hold her hand in forty years’ time.
If she did cry it would be because despite everything—and there was a lot of everything—in the split second before she decided Theo Fitzgerald was out of his mind, she too had seen them hobbling down East Seventh Street in their dotage, holding hands. Together.
Elizabeth the Sixth was graciously basking in reports from her foragers of a particularly fragrant wisteria vine climbing up a back garden wall not half a block away when she felt Sugar’s approach.
She stopped what she was doing—which was backing her rear end into a cell to lay her 1,327th egg for the day—and alerted all her senses. She could not hear—she did not have ears—but she used her sight, her smell, her touch and 150 million years of evolution to keep her antennae on the pulse of the world around her, in particular Sugar’s world.
In Elizabeth the Sixth’s eyes (all five of them), Sugar had been changing color with each passing day since she first spoke Theo’s name out loud, appearing extra-vibrant when she had dreamed of him at night, and even more so when she thought of him during the day.
This energy emanating from her keeper gave the queen considerable oomph, and she had been building hive numbers up with alacrity, proving a popular ruler whose house bees were keen to look after her and whose workers were desperate to feed her and get the honey stores going.
But when Sugar came home from McSorley’s she radiated a powerful energy that the queen could not recall from her genetic memory file.
It wasn’t just ale, this new influence. It was strong and unhappy.
Bamboozled by such complicated pheromonal activity, Elizabeth the Sixth started throwing in an extra waggle of her tush with every egg she laid, somewhat hindering her progress.