“No, I’m the one who is sorry,” Theo said. “Trust me, I am really, really sorry for taking you to McSorley’s for a beer when I’d really only known you so fleetingly and for everything else too. For the whole wanting to get married and hold hands thing. I’m so sorry about that too. I was wrong.”
Sugar stopped what she was doing, her scoop raised in midair. “You were wrong about knowing that we were going to be together forever and walking down East Seventh Street in our old age?”
“No!” said Theo. “Not about that. I’m right about that.”
“Then aren’t we back to the whole ravings-of-a-complete-and-utter-lunatic thing? There you go, ma’am. Two double-scoop raspberry and white chocolate cones. Enjoy.”
“No, I was wrong to spring it on you like that in a bar where people still spit on the floor,” Theo said. “It was completely inappropriate but please don’t for a moment think that I was in any way mocking the seriousness of relationships or marriage. I was married once myself and, even though that didn’t work out, I still believe in the institution. I really do. I was just speaking without considering the consequences because, the truth is, you have this unbelievable effect on me and I just can’t seem to help myself but if you gave me another chance I know I could prove myself to you. Honestly, please, trust me. I beg of you.”
“You buying ice cream or auditioning for Shakespeare in the Park?” an elderly man agitating at his elbow interjected. “Gimme some of that mint lace, will you, sweetheart?”
“Are you crazy?” pitched in another customer, a plump woman of about Sugar’s own age, dressed in sweats. “Chocolate chip, two pints.” She leaned over to the elderly man. “The guy asks her to marry him after only just meeting her and means it? My husband waited fourteen years and even then he burped it out during an ad break.” She waved her hand at Sugar. “Say yes, honey. Look at the guy. I’d marry him myself if I didn’t have my in-laws coming for lunch. And he has that cute accent. Like Gerard Butler. Although what’s with the shirt?”
“He looks like one of those West Coast bums who smokes pot and writes poetry,” agreed the elderly man.
“I don’t smoke pot. Or write poetry, not that there’s anything wrong with that,” Theo told them. “And I didn’t ask her to marry me. I just said I could see us being married.”
“Now you sound like a lawyer,” the elderly man said.
“Are you a lawyer?” Sugar asked. “Because that would just completely take the cake if you were a lawyer.”
“Never mind that, or being married, or—would you just have dinner with me, Sugar? Please?”
“What does she want with dinner?” the old man said. “You’ve already told her you’re a loon.”
“Any chance of getting some ice cream back here?” asked a man at the back with a baby in a stroller. “Chocolate. One pint.”
“Hold your horses, we have a romance happening here,” said the woman in sweats. “Are you already married?” she asked Sugar.
“You know I would really prefer to stick to the subject of ice cream, if that’s all the same to you, ma’am.”
“Got a boyfriend?”
“Regular chocolate or chocolate chip?” Sugar asked the man with the stroller.
“How could you not have a boyfriend?” asked the old man. “If I was twenty years younger, I’d ask you to marry me myself.”
“Make that forty,” snorted the stroller man.
“Go for dinner with Gerard Butler,” the woman said.
“As long as he takes you somewhere nice,” added the old man, “and there’s no hanky-panky in the cab on the way home.”
“And make him pay, honey,” said the woman in sweats. “Enough with the going Dutch already. We hate that.” Then she and the old man shuffled off together arguing pleasantly about mint versus chocolate chip.
“I’ll just wait over there until you’re not so busy, if that’s OK,” Theo said, and he retreated to a shady bench as other hot and hungry customers slipped into the space he left. But more than once Sugar felt his thoughtful gaze upon her.
In the meantime, she spotted Mrs. Keschl, who came to the greenmarket every Sunday pretty much just to hassle the apple guy for not having tart enough apples. “Can I get you an ice-cream cone, Mrs. Keschl?” she called.
The old lady shuffled over. “What’s that black stuff in the back?”
“That’s licorice, not the most popular flavor it would appear.”
“I’ll take one of those then,” the old lady said. “And you’d better make it half price since I’m helping you get rid of it.”
Not half an hour later Mr. McNally spied Sugar behind the makeshift counter and pushed his way to the front of the line, ignoring the complaints from those elbowed out of his path.
“So, you,” he said.
“Sorry, y’all,” Sugar told the other disgruntled customers. “This is my neighbor Mr. McNally and he has blood sugar issues.” Sometimes a little white lie went a long way to avoiding a riot. “What can I get you, Mr. McNally?”
“What’s that black stuff down the back?”
“That’s licorice. Would you like some of that?”
“What do you think I’m waiting for?”
“That’s Mrs. Keschl’s favorite too,” she said as she handed over a cone. For a moment she thought he was going to throw it back in her face. “Just taste it before you do anything rash,” she said.
He did, and found it to his liking, so he grunted what might have been a thank you and elbowed his way back out of the crowd.
Finally, there was a lull in the queue and, taking the opportunity to catch Sugar on her own, Theo appeared in front of her again.
“Just consider this,” he said. “If I hadn’t already mentioned the whole marriage thing, it would not be so weird to be asking you out. It’s just dinner, Sugar. Look at it that way. And if, after dinner, you still think I’m bonkers, I promise I will never ask you anything ever again. In fact, I promise you’ll never even see me again.”
Sugar had been on plenty of dinner dates since she left Charleston—she liked male company, she had grown up with it—but she restricted her dating to men in whom she was not seriously interested because it was easier to avoid complications that way. On occasion she’d allowed the odd dalliance to develop into something a little more substantial: she’d spent a wonderful winter with a ski instructor in Idaho; and a sizzling summer with a winemaker in Napa.
But she was not in the market for a heart-stopping, pulseracing, knee-weakening, bone-shaking, jaw-dropping love affair. She’d had one of those once before. It had wrecked her life, and a few others besides, and she did not want another one.
Yet there she was standing in a beautiful park in the spring, in New York, ice-cream scoop in hand, her heart stopped, her pulse racing, her knees weak, her bones shook up and her jaw all but hanging on the ground.
She let the scoop fall back into the mint lace.
She thought she’d been so strong all these years, avoiding the vicious thrust of Cupid’s arrow, yet, gazing across those rainbow pints of ice cream into the blue, blue eyes of Theo Fitzgerald she suddenly wasn’t so sure. Maybe Cupid just hadn’t been pointing in her direction all this time. Or he had been and was a terrible shot.
She hadn’t been in love with the ski instructor—she’d been drawn by his grief at losing his wife to cancer and knew she could help him. And she hadn’t felt anything close to a quiver for the winemaker either. He’d had hay fever, which she’d cured with her California honey, plus he had really nice hair.
All these years without a heart-stopping love affair she’d still been happy. Mrs. Keschl was right: Sugar’s glass was always half full, more than half full. Plus she filled up everyone else’s glass while she was at it. That was just what she did. And despite everything that had happened to her, despite what had gone so terribly wrong with that one big love affair all those years ago, she had never—apart from a few days when she first left Charleston and that was perfectly und
erstandable—felt lacking.
She’d felt in control.
Until now.
Now, looking across the ice cream at Theo Fitzgerald with his pleading eyes and the thoughtful wrinkle between them, she felt what was missing, right there in the empty space in front of her. She couldn’t see it but it nonetheless danced between them like bonfire flames, only twice as hot. She hadn’t felt that heat in all these years, had barely registered its absence, but now it was here burning up the oxygen right under her nose, and she just couldn’t ignore the yearning it thrust her way.
But she didn’t want it.
What she had learned the first time was that this physical desire and the longing that came with it could not be trusted for anything other than to ensure a certain painful sort of torment, which she simply could not bear to suffer again. Theo might be good-looking and have a cute accent and make her laugh and have at least a modicum of gumption, but the way he made her feel scared the living daylights out of her. And her living daylights had long had their fill of being scared.
She liked the strong independent woman she’d turned into over the years. She’d created that woman more or less from dust and had come to take it for granted that she would be that woman forever. She could not let a crazy person like Theo turn her back into anything else.
“I’m sorry, Theo,” she said. “Really, I am. But I think it would be better if we just skip to the part where we never see each other again. Thanks for coming by but I would be really grateful if you left the greenmarket alone on a Sunday from here on in. I don’t mean to be rude and I’m sorry if it seems that way but I have to go now.” A new wave of hot and hungry customers swallowed the space between them and Theo melted back into the park.
He was not going to remind her that he never got his ginger crème supreme. But nor was he going to give up. And she might not want him at Tompkins Square on a Sunday but he would find a way to win her heart, even if he couldn’t come back to the greenmarket.
Ginger crème supreme was Sugar’s favorite flavor too, as it happened, but the longer she sat beside the beehive on her roof terrace and continued to plow her way through a whole pint of it, the more perplexed Elizabeth the Sixth became.
The queen knew Theo Fitzgerald was what she had been waiting for: that certainty had emerged from the twisted rods of her DNA as definitely as the instinct to survive. What she didn’t know was what to do next. Her DNA was telling her diddly-squat about that. She had assumed, inasmuch as a queen bee could, that Sugar would now take over. But all Sugar was taking were large spoonfuls of full-fat dairy products with a strong whiff of ginger, which was good for fending off colds and easing constipation but not a great favorite with bees.
Something had to change, that was for sure, and as nothing but great waves of angst continued to emanate from Sugar, Elizabeth the Sixth decided that the something would have to be her. She backed her rear into the closest baby-making cell and stayed there.
Her go-slow had just turned into a tools-down.
Initially, her handmaidens panicked. A hive could not survive if its queen stopped laying. They started to clamber over her, desperate for guidance, fearful that she was weakening and that they needed to start feeding a new queen. But, to the contrary, the signals Elizabeth the Sixth was sending out were only getting stronger.
Trust me, she told them. And although they were bewildered, they trusted her.
18TH
Mrs. Keschl arrived at Sugar’s door the following afternoon asking for more candles. She’d been burning them all day every day since the brunch and had grown used to the smell of rose oil. “Usually my place smells of onions,” she told Sugar. “Usually I like the smell of onions. But now I like the smell of candles.”
“They’re supposed to be uplifting, Mrs. Keschl. Have you felt uplifted?”
“You don’t get uplifted at my age,” Mrs. Keschl said. “It’s all downhill from about twenty years ago.”
She looked over Sugar’s shoulder at the kaleidoscope of foliage blooming out on the terrace. “So. Green fingers,” she said, pushing past and stepping outside. “It’s like the Garden of Eden up here. Good work. Coffee, if you’re making it. Milk. Two sugars.”
Sugar obliged and went to make the coffee, watching Mrs. Keschl through the window as she gently lifted the moonflower to her nose to smell it, then closely inspected the magnolia.
Actually, she was happy to have the company. She’d had a terrible night’s sleep and had woken with an uncustomary headache. Usually a cup of mint tea and a few quiet moments spent lingering on the skyline and she couldn’t wait to get on with her day, but this morning had been different. She’d had to fight the urge to stay in bed and pull the sheets up over her head. Worse, she’d felt on the verge of tears ever since and it was not a verge she cared for.
“I have some lemon honey tarts,” she said, as she delivered the coffee. “Nate made the shells, and the bees and I did the rest. Speaking of which, are you OK to sit here while I do my hive check?”
“I’m OK to sit here till Thanksgiving if you keep bringing food,” Mrs. Keschl said.
“Have you lived on Flores Street long?” Sugar asked as she lifted the lid off the hive, then removed the top super, which was already filling with capped honey.
“Forever,” Mrs. Keschl said. “Although the neighborhood didn’t always look like this. There used to be more dead people.”
“Dead people?” Sugar pulled out the most populated frame of bees to look for Elizabeth the Sixth.
“Junkies and hos and that,” explained Mrs. Keschl. “Then they made The Godfather Part II around the corner and the neighborhood started to come alive.”
“Well, that’s strange,” said Sugar.
“I know. You would expect more dead people after a Mafia movie, not fewer, am I right?”
“No, I mean, yes, I mean what’s strange is Elizabeth the Sixth, my queen. She doesn’t seem to be laying.”
There was no fresh brood pattern, no change in the frame around Elizabeth the Sixth since Sugar had last checked the hive. But her queen was alive, she was being fed, she looked healthy.
She just wasn’t working.
Sugar slid the frame back into the brood box and put the hive back together again.
“You look like you swallowed some of those bees,” said Mrs. Keschl. “Got any more little cakes?”
“It’s never happened before,” Sugar told George out on the stoop the following day.
“It’s not colony collapse disorder because the bees just disappear with that, and it’s not the varroa mite because you can actually see varroa mites and my bees have never had them. And it can’t be foulbrood either because that’s obvious in the hive and yet there’s no sign of it. It’s none of those things, George.”
“Sorry to hear that, Miss Sugar,” he said.
He’d never seen her so agitated. She was missing her rosy glow, had dark rings under her eyes and her smile lacked its usual warmth.
In his weeks on the stoop of the orange brick building on Flores Street, he had closely observed all its inhabitants—that was a doorman’s job—but he had paid particular attention to Sugar of whom he was of course especially fond. She was a rare thing in his opinion: a modern city dweller who put stock in caring for those around her. She was treating everyone in the building one way or another with her honey, and her time, and it did his heart a world of good to see.
Plus, 33 Flores Street clearly wasn’t the first place where Sugar had worked her particular brand of magic. George had never known anyone to get so much mail from so many different corners of the country. She might get two dozen letters or cards in a single week—and that wasn’t all. One day she might show him the copy of a report card some proud mom had sent her from California; the next it could be a needlework sampler hand stitched by a former landlady in Idaho; the day after she might be unwrapping a wonky clay pin-tray sent by some seven-year-old from Santa Fe.
But George worried that Sugar’s caring w
as something of a one-way street. She put her heart and soul into helping fix up everyone else but didn’t let anyone do the same for her. A person could only do that for so long.
“Oh, look at Lola’s world,” she said, pointing at the sad balloon. “It’s gotten so small. That’s not a good advertisement at all.”
“You sure have to wonder about that woman’s career advice,” George agreed. “Although Ethan seems to be doing better—you wouldn’t have anything to do with that I suppose?”
“Ambrosia,” Sugar said, brightening. “I make it with honey, propolis and royal jelly and it works wonders.”
“Well, I couldn’t guarantee it but I thought I saw his mama actually smile yesterday,” George said. “And what are you doing to Mrs. Keschl? She was singing last night and that woman has a much sweeter voice than you would ever imagine.”
“I’m keeping her stocked up with rose oil candles,” Sugar admitted. “Burning them is supposed to reduce irritation.”
“She certainly seems to have a plentiful supply of that.”
“I’m starting to gather quite a supply myself,” said Sugar. “I just don’t understand why Elizabeth the Sixth would stop laying like that, George. I’m doing all I can to make her happy but it’s like she’s just choosing not to be and that’s not like her at all.”
“You know, I have a place I go to when the problems of the world need my special attention. I don’t suppose you would care to join me there, Miss Sugar, talk things through a little?”
“Is it a bar? Because I’m not a real big drinker at this time of the day.”
“I’m not a drinker at all, Miss Sugar. This is nature I’m talking about: that’s why I know you will like it. And the best thing about being an honorary doorman is I don’t need to ask my boss if I can leave my post because I don’t have a boss. And look at that, it’s near enough to lunchtime.”
He offered Sugar his arm and she took it.