The Wedding Bees (23 page)

“Oh boy,” said Lola.

“He's talking about Theo,” Ruby said directly to Sugar. “Theo loves you. He really loves you, Sugar.”

The torrent of longing that she had been trying so hard to keep dammed up inside her finally unleashed itself. “But he's allergic to bees,” she cried. “And I can't live with that. My bees have stuck with me through thick and thin and I can't knowingly risk them doing something terrible to someone I may or may not care about.”

“You have to admit she throws good parties,” Mrs. Keschl said to Mr. McNally. “More interesting than most.”

“Miss Sugar,” George said, “your bees keep going to Theo's house and not stinging him. Isn't that telling you something? It's not how he feels about the bees; it's how the bees feel about him. It's time, Miss Sugar, to put the past behind you. You're not scared of knowingly risking his life, it's your own life you're afraid of.”

“I can't do it,” Sugar wept. “I just can't.”

“Isn't that called a defeatist attitude where you come from?” Nate asked, loud and brave for him. “That's what you told me when I didn't go for the job at Citroen.”

This slowed Sugar's tears as she hiccuped, gaining a few extra breaths. “I was just upset because I thought it was the right thing for you, honey. You'd make such a great pastry chef.”

“It's the same thing,” said Ruby. “It's the same thing as us thinking Theo would be the right thing for you.”

“I'll do it then,” Nate said boldly. “I'll find a job there if you go for Theo.”

George smiled at him, and Nate stood a little straighter and smiled back.

“What's it to y'all if I do or if I don't?” Sugar asked, looking around them, her eyes filling with tears again. “I don't see why it has to be such a major referendum.”

“Here we are with the democracy again,” said Mrs. Keschl. “Just get off your tush and go get the guy.”

“But you said yourself boyfriends just squash the joy of living out of you. You said you wouldn't do it again.”

“What do I know?” Mrs. Keschl argued. “I live down the stairs from my nincompoop of an ex-husband! If I truly didn't want to see his ugly mug at least once a day I'd move to one of our other buildings.”

“You have other buildings?” Lola's mind was set to blow.

“You want to see my ugly mug?” asked Mr. McNally.

“But you don't get along with each other,” said Sugar. “You're always hollering.”

“Me and Hannah, we have our differences,” said Mr. McNally.

“But that doesn't mean there's no spark,” agreed Mrs. Keschl.

“Hannah?” Lola repeated. “Wow. I never thought about you having a first name let alone a spark.”

“Could you stop hollering at me?” Mr. McNally asked his ex-wife.

She shrugged. “Could you take me dancing?”

“Name the day and give me time to get new lifts.”

“Then yes, Jimmy. I'll stop hollering at you.”

“This is like the weirdest brunch,” said Lola. “Especially since no one is even drinking anything.”

“There's a bottle of Maker's on top of the refrigerator,” Sugar said. “I think I could use some, on the rocks, half a teaspoon of my California gold, a squeeze of lime and some fresh mint, if you don't mind making it.”

“I'll do it,” said Nate, scuttling to the kitchen.

“Count me in,” said Mrs. Keschl.

Lola, too, raised her hand for a drink. “I think romance is highly overrated,” she said, “but if you do end up getting married, I think Ethan would make an awesome page boy.”

“If I end up getting married?” Sugar blew her nose. “Listen, I appreciate what you're trying to do, honestly, it's real touching, but it's not as easy as—”

“I'll do something,” Ruby said quietly. “If you let Theo love you, I'll talk to the shrinks. For you. I'll do it. For you and Theo. So I can be the one in the story to say I knew it, that we all knew it, that we were in the room with you and we all knew that one day you would be together forever even though Theo was allergic to bees and bees were what you cared about most in the world.”

“Oh, honey,” Sugar said. “The bees are what I've cared about the longest. Y'all are what I care about the most.”

“So let's eat some of this big white hat,” said Mr. McNally.

“And then we'll go and get the bees,” said Nate.

“And put poor Mr. Theo out of his misery,” added George.

Sugar rose slowly from the table. “I don't know what to say.”

“Just say you'll do it,” suggested Lola.

Sugar fixed her with a long, thoughtful look. “I will not promise anything about Ethan being a page boy because there is not going to be a wedding,” she said, “but if I go over there would you at least consider opening your balloon shop in the morning and keeping it that way till nighttime at least for four or five days of the week?”

“Like that would ever work,” said Lola. “But OK. Whatever.”

36
TH

H
as it ever occurred to you that your bees are trying to tell you something?” Theo asked without preamble after opening his apartment door to Sugar, with Nate and Ruby standing shyly behind her.

“It hadn't,” said Sugar.

“Until now,” said Ruby, placing her bony hands on the small of Sugar's back and pushing her into the room. Nate reached in behind her and pulled shut the door, leaving Sugar standing inches away from Theo inside.

“I am so sorry for such rudeness,” Sugar said. “You must think I—” But before she could even work out exactly what it was that he must think, the last fifteen years of trying so hard not to have quite such a broken heart got the better of her. She felt frightened and cornered and in her confusion all she could do was stand there flapping her hands, gasping for air like a fish on a sun-scorched dockside.

“I have tea,” Theo said, and led her gently to his big leather couch, Princess at his heel. “And I have honey—I got it from the Union Square greenmarket. It's rooftop honey, like yours. I would have come to Tompkins Square and got some from you but I thought you might throw it at me. I've been trying all different sorts and I think I'm developing quite a taste.”

She sat, still gasping and near dying of humiliation, as Princess rested his chin on her knee and gazed up at her while Theo rustled around in the kitchen.

“Did you know there's a drink in Africa called a dawa, which is just gin, fresh lime and honey? Dawa means ‘magic potion' in Swahili, which I think would probably be a fairly honest interpretation of something involving just gin and honey. Not that I'm suggesting you should have one now. Now is tea time. I know that. Here, try this.” He sat down beside her on the sofa and watched her as she tried to calm her breathing and sip her drink.

“I'm so sorry for all this carrying on,” she finally said. “My mama taught me never to cry in front of men because it reduces their testosterone and I've just cried in front of three of them, four if you count Ethan.”

“Well, my mother taught me that men have too much testosterone,” Theo answered. “So we're probably even.”

“I just feel so embarrassed that my bees are causing such a commotion up there on your Fernando Botero.”

“Anything that brings you here is not a commotion,” Theo said.

“You talk like you know me but you don't,” said Sugar. “There's a lot about me you don't know and trust me, you won't like it.”

“Have you killed anyone?”

“Of course not!”

“Are you on a no-carb diet?”

“There is no such thing as no-carb. Truly, Theo, I'm from the South. It's like oysters. Be serious. I don't mean those sort of things. I mean other things. Real bad things.”

“Sugar Wallace, do you have ugly toes?”

“As a matter of fact, they are not my best feature but the thing about toes is that they are very easy to keep covered if you're having a bad foot day.”

“I have nearly a full-time job containing my nasal hair,” admitted Theo. “And that's bad because it's on my face, and the front of my face at that.”

It's such a nice face, Sugar thought, putting her drink down and taking a long hard look at it. In fact it suddenly seemed very familiar to her, given how little she had actually been around it and how hard she had tried to avoid looking at it.

But now there it was, just waiting for her eyes to rest on it.

She felt her butterflies start break-dancing in her stomach again and fought the urge to flatten them.

What if she let herself love Theo and he didn't love her back the right way, like Grady? She'd survived that, but only by going out of her way to make sure it never happened again. She didn't know if she could expose her heart to that again. She wasn't even sure she knew how to.

What she did know was that for the first time since Grady she was sitting with a man who made her pulse race, her cheeks color, her palms sweat and her head spin.

If love was a roller coaster, she was already on it.

George was right. She had to get on with the future. The worst that could happen was that Ruby would get help, Nate would get a better job, the Crankles would stop being cranky, and more than one person a week in this particular corner of the great big beautiful city of New York might be able to buy a balloon.

“I was engaged once but I ran away from my own wedding,” she said. “I humiliated my fiancé, I disgraced my family, I abandoned my friends, I left my whole life and I have not been home ever since.”

Theo took this in his stride. He had anticipated worse. “So you're on the lam?”

“On a limb more than a lam.”

“Well, that was bad for you and your former fiancé and your family and your friends, and no doubt the wedding planner and all right, probably the caterer too, but it's not bad for me, Sugar. It got you here, didn't it?”

“I was only twenty,” Sugar said wondering what it was about sympathy that made a person feel worse rather than better for getting it. “And I have to confess I really loved him, Theo, but he turned out to have different ideas when it came to loving me back and I turned out to have a mind of my own even though I didn't particularly see it that way at the time.”

“I can be a real jessie,” said Theo. “But I already love your mind the way it is.”

“I heard that about you being a jessie,” Sugar said. “But I'm not even sure what one is.”

“It's like a big girl's blouse,” Theo said.

“Well, that hardly helps!” Sugar said. “I'm in real trouble here, Theo. I don't like feeling the way I feel about you. My equilibrium is all over the place and it has been ever since I met you. And you ran out on me, Theo, and I understand that now, because of being allergic and all but I don't want to feel like that ever again. And those bees mean everything to me, which is why I'm so rattled that I can't get them to stick when they've stuck with me through all sorts. I just can't believe they would up and leave me for someone who's allergic.”

“I've got the super-duper pen from Sweden, remember? And maybe they're not leaving you. Maybe they're coming to me.”

“They came to Grady too and that did not turn out so well for anyone.”

“Grady?”

“The last man I nearly married, not that I'm saying that I'm nearly marrying you. It was Queen Elizabeth the First who told me not to go through with it. At least I think it was her. And I think that's what she was saying. You know what? It's kind of complicated.”

“So, your bees stopped you from getting married?”

“I believe so.”

“And you listened to them? You believed in them?”

“Of course. I'm a beekeeper. That's what we do.”

“All right then.” Theo stood up and held out his hand. “Let's go up right now and see what the bees have to say about me.”

“I will do no such thing, Theo. Grady wasn't allergic. The bees only riled him—a lot, mind you—but they could actually kill you. And that is just not a good foundation for a relationship.”

“People deal with worse problems every day,” Theo said, pulling her to her feet, regardless. “It's not like you love Celine Dion or anything.”

“Why, of course I love Celine Dion. Who doesn't? There's nothing not to love: she's perfectly nice. Only a monster would not love Celine Dion. It's not like not loving the guy who bites the head off defenseless little birds.”

“I like that guy!”

“Well, you see, Theo, we are not compatible at all. It's just hormones or pheromones or what are those other things that you get when you're running a marathon?”

“Endorphins,” said Theo, as he guided her up the stairs and out onto his rooftop. “And anyway, we're communicating, aren't we? Communication is the key to any successful relationship, everyone knows that. Compatibility with insects never even gets a mention.”

Holding tight to Sugar's hand, he pulled her right over to the sculpture, whose generous bust was crawling with Elizabeth the Sixth and her subjects.

“Please, Theo,” Sugar begged, trying to pull him back. “Don't.”

“Sugar Wallace, you need to know that I am more sure about you than anything else I have ever been sure about in all my life and I can't think of a better way to demonstrate it.”

He got down on one knee then, his head perilously close to the sculpture's moving bee brassiere and, as he did, to Sugar's horror, Elizabeth the Sixth rose from the other bee bodies and hovered above them, until one by one hundred by one thousand they all lifted off the Fernando Botero and formed a thick black ribbon in the air behind him.

“Get up, Theo, please,” Sugar pleaded. “Let's go inside. We can talk about it there.”

But Theo stayed where he was as Elizabeth the Sixth led the moving band of her subjects in a circular banner above his head, like a hologram halo. “No,” he said, sweating slightly but firm. “I will not go inside. You think these bees are what stand between you and me and our future happiness but I am here to show you that this is not the case.”

“Do you even have your pen thing?” Sugar asked. “What should I do? If you get stung—what should I do?”

“I will not get stung,” said Theo; and indeed the queen and her cohorts did not appear to be getting any closer to him. “I will not get stung any more than I already have been, Sugar. But even if I do—you know what? We all get stung one way or the other. We can't hide away for fear of the same thing happening again.”

“We can! That's exactly what we should do! You especially! Please, Theo—get up.”

“I will not get up until you say you will marry me.”

“I don't even know you!”

“I could make you happy.”

Kneeling awkwardly next to a rooftop nude, surrounded by bees that could kill him, he seemed like the person least in charge of anyone's happiness. Yet she could see in those blue, blue eyes of his that unswerving certainty, the tenderness that rattled her bones, the desire that echoed in her shivers.

“Theo, I'm really scared.”

“I know you are. But if you agree to marry me I will not be stung to death right here in front of all your friends watching from outside your apartment and you will not have to carry that guilty burden to your grave.”

Sugar turned to see her friends waving at her from her own rooftop.

“What is this—International Blackmail Day?”

“It's not blackmail if you really want to say yes but are just too polite.”

“I'm not too polite. I'm the right amount. Theo, please. The bees are not themselves; I can't speak for their actions.”

“So you do want to say yes?”

“No! I most definitely don't, Theo, but maybe . . .”

“But maybe?”

“But maybe, OK, just hang on a moment here. Maybe if you agree never to ask me to marry you again, I will go out for dinner with you.”

“Do you promise?”

“Do you?”

“I do.”

“Then yes, I do too.”

As she uttered the words, Elizabeth the Sixth swept her faithful followers up high into the air above both of them, away from Theo, away from his rooftop, up over toward the treetops of Tompkins Square Park and then back on a victory lap, swirling them eventually back down onto the sculpture and settling them in the crotch of the Fernando Botero.

On the neighboring rooftop, Mrs. Keschl, Mr. McNally, Nate, Ruby, George, Lola and even Ethan cheered.