The Wedding Bees (11 page)

19
TH

T
hey'd met at the Carolina Yacht Club when she was twenty. Sugar did not sail herself, but her mother, Etta, had sent her down to the club to deliver a message to her brother Troy. She found him sitting up in the clubhouse that overlooked the sparkling water of the Cooper River, having a beer with a law school friend: Grady Parkes.

She knew of Grady. Every woman in Charleston knew of Grady.

A few years older than the other young men Sugar mixed with at the time, he was beyond handsome, with blond hair, gray eyes, a sportsman's tan and an electrifying charisma that pulled every man, woman and child in his direction as though he were a magnet and they just poor hapless lead shavings.

Grady looked her in the eye, smiled his ridiculous smile and insisted she sit down and that she stay sitting down when Troy left half an hour later.

Things like that, people like him, didn't usually happen to her. Indeed, she'd assumed the Grady Parkeses of this world were made for more sophisticated souls than hers. But within minutes of having his attention all to herself he had her feeling like she was as sophisticated a soul as he had ever met. Within an hour she thought—as she looked in those clever gray eyes, the river twinkling behind him—that if he didn't ask her out, she would die, she would just die.

She'd heard other girls say such things in the past and privately thought they seemed hysterical. But that's what wanting Grady felt like: hysteria.

He took her breath away, literally. Her heart, she felt, was beating in her cheeks.

And she could tell from the expression on Etta's face when she found them still chatting together under an umbrella some time later that this was something of which her mother thoroughly approved. She didn't know then that the whole thing was a setup, although she should have guessed because she was supposed to be going with her mother to the Garden Club that afternoon. Etta was very particular about her club commitments, and about Sugar's too, but when Sugar started to excuse herself her mother suddenly would not hear of it.

“Y'all just look so cute, the two of you, sitting there like that,” she said. “You never mind about the Garden Club, Cherie-Lynn. I can take care of that myself. Just relax and enjoy yourself. Go on! So nice to see you, Grady. And make sure to say hello to that handsome devil of a daddy of yours now, won't you?” And she was gone in a swirl of primrose and mauve, her hips swinging as she walked away from them, knowing Grady's eyes would be on her.

Seeing her mama wiggle and swagger like that always reminded Sugar of her own shortcomings in this department. She knew the sort of daughter Etta wished she had—another wiggler and swaggerer—but that flirtatious behavior just didn't come naturally to Sugar. She wasn't a tomboy, exactly. Her mother would have shot her rather than let that happen, but Sugar didn't particularly like parties or shopping trips or lengthy visits to the beauty parlor, all of which her mother adored.

She preferred helping her grandfather with his bees on his orchard farther up the Ashley River; she always had. She liked reading books on her own or walking the family dog, Miss Pickles. Worse, she couldn't manage high heels no matter how hard she tried, which was an utter disgrace to her southern roots. The pretty only daughter of a well-known beauty married to one of the city's wealthier sons should by rights follow directly in her mother's footsteps: in nothing less than three-inch stilettos, as far as Etta was concerned.

But she and Sugar were cut from different cloth.

“The girl just doesn't have your spunk, Etta,” Sugar once overheard her father, Blake, saying. “But that doesn't mean there's something wrong with her. Heaven knows you have enough spunk for the whole goddamned family. She just takes after your daddy, is all. That's what riles you.”

Until that point, Sugar hadn't known that she riled her mother but it certainly explained the undercurrent she often felt herself caught in, or swimming against.

“You're such an odd girl,” Etta once said, looking at her as though she was something the cat had just dragged in. “Why I couldn't have a daughter like Treena Murray or Melissa Knowles, I'll never know. Melissa and her mama are having golf lessons together, she told me at church on Sunday, and they have a spa weekend planned on Kiawah Island.”

Melissa Knowles was a fashionable socialite who would not give Sugar the time of day if her life depended on it. And Sugar was no good at golf. Or tennis. She wasn't sporty at all, or musical, or particularly academic, or remotely interested in spa weekends on Kiawah Island.

But she didn't want to seem odd, and she certainly didn't want to keep upsetting her mama, so she tried to do the right thing. She spent time on her hair, her nails, her skin and her looks in general, even though she could just have easily spent every day inside a beekeeper's suit, which Etta knew, and which drove her crazy.

“Did Mama help you with the bees when she was my age?” Sugar once asked Grampa Boone when she was in high school and struggling to feign interest in cheerleading tryouts and horse-riding lessons.

“Your mama never had much time for bees at any age, Sugar Honey,” he answered. “Not interested in much outside her own hive. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Just a different way of looking at the world, is all. She came out that way—always wanting to be somewhere else, be something else. You, Sugar child, on the other hand, take after me, and your grandmother. We got all the time in the world when it comes to bees.”

“And honey,” added Sugar.

“Well, you particularly take after your grandmother in that regard,” he said. “She fixed more people than any doctor you could find around here, that's for sure. Couldn't cross the street without stopping to help someone.”

Sugar had inherited this do-gooder spirit, as her mama called it. Even back then she would make up lotions and potions using her grandmother's supply of precious oils mixed with her grandfather's honey and use them on Miss Pickles, or her music teacher or the man outside the Piggly Wiggly who was always begging for change.

“It's polite to help people out once in a while, Cherie-Lynn,” Etta said. “But do you have to make such an honest-to-goodness career out of it?”

Indeed Sugar did want to make an honest-to-goodness career out of it. After vocational counseling during her senior year of high school, she decided she wanted to become a nurse, but her parents would not hear of it.

“Wallaces don't clean up other people's mess,” her father said. “It's not what we do. You don't need to be a nurse, honey. You don't need to be anything. There's no shame in getting married and starting a family when you're still young. That's what your mama did and look how happy she is.”

There was absolutely no doubt in Sugar's mind that Etta was happy. She envied her mother's ability to derive such pleasure from flower arranging or upholstery or lunching with her friends but she couldn't quite manage it herself. She enrolled at the College of Charleston majoring in biology, which felt like nursing once or twice removed. She even glimpsed something of a future where biology and honey could combine and take her somewhere.

She did want a husband, a man like her grandfather, who adored his wife, took care of his family and kept bees, of course, but until Grady it was more of a distant dream than a distinct possibility. Watching an afternoon regatta over lemonade on the clubhouse deck, it all suddenly got a lot more distinct. Biology took her somewhere that day all right.

Grady's cool fingers on her arm, his lips firm on her cheek, his strong, salty scent wafting in the air as they parted that first afternoon woke a fire in her belly—and beyond—that she didn't know could burn.

“Bethany Towers says girls your age line up just to be ignored by Grady Parkes,” Etta told her daughter after their third date. “Play your cards right with this one, Cherie-Lynn, because I'm telling you, Grady is as good as it gets.”

Sugar didn't need to be told that. She was just as much of a lead shaving as the next pretty southern belle waiting for a handsome man with acceptable genes and blinding prospects to sweep her off her feet. Not that she cared about his genes or his prospects; she just fell head over heels in love with him: the flesh and bones and skin and smile and eyes and magnetism of him. Until then, she hadn't known that falling in love really was like falling: fast and uncontrollable with no way of knowing how soft or otherwise the landing would be. It wasn't sweet or safe, as she had imagined. It was frightening. There was a big black empty space growing inside her and only Grady could fill it with his voice, his touch, his attention. When she didn't have any of those things she felt like she was drowning. When she did have them, the thrill of finding that everything she had assumed was out of her reach was right there in front of her was almost as suffocating, but blissfully so.

The more she saw of him, the more she could think of little other than his lips on her neck, his hands on her naked body.

Not that his hands had been on her naked body. He was nothing but a gentleman on that front although the longer they dated the more she thrashed around in her linen sheets at night dreaming of the day when he would be thrashing around in them with her.

In the meantime, just saying his name gave her goose bumps.

“Grady and I thought we might go to the beach tomorrow,” she would say and feel the delicious shiver run down her spine. “Grady and I are having lunch with his sister at McCrady's on Sunday.” “Grady and I are going to Savannah for the weekend.” “Grady and I, Grady and I, Grady and I . . .”

Etta was so happy she all but floated a foot off the ground. And Sugar's father and brothers were encouraging of the romance too. Grady Parkes Senior owned a shipping company that was a major client of the Port Authority, and to get his business in the tough economic times everyone seemed to be going through—even the Wallaces—would be more than beneficial.

But Sugar did not need to be talked into loving Grady. Chemistry had taken care of that and, after a lifetime of feeling out of step, she suddenly saw the myriad benefits of falling in line.

She dropped out of college (‘Good riddance,” sniffed Etta), she stopped reading books, she stopped walking the dog, she stopped hanging out with her grandfather and helping with the hives. She did whatever Grady wanted her to do whenever Grady wanted her to do it. But it didn't feel like a sacrifice—she just couldn't get enough of him and the way he made her feel. This was what everyone was talking about. This was love and she was in it and not thinking twice.

When Grady came to the house to ask for Sugar's hand in marriage just four months after that first day at the Yacht Club, Sugar thought her daddy was even happier than she was and that was saying something, because Sugar herself was impossibly happy. And because she'd never loved anyone like that before she assumed that it was a state in which she would stay forever.

About that, of course, she was entirely wrong.

It started the night of their engagement party, which was held in the ballroom of the Wallaces' Legare Street mansion, where two hundred and fifty of the happy couple's nearest and dearest gathered to toast their future.

Sugar had enjoyed herself so much, dancing with Grady and his brothers and her brothers and anyone else who asked her; she was loving the limelight for once, delighting in being the belle of the ball.

The only glitch was Grampa Boone, who had been invited but didn't want to come. He wasn't feeling well, he said, which was unlike him, but he rarely came to the parties at the Wallace mansion anyway. He said they made him itchy. He said they used to make Sugar itchy too but she just laughed and told him Grady had cured her of that. Still, she felt bad about her granddaddy because he and her fiancé had never even met. Grady didn't much care for the countryside, he said, but kept promising to go to Summerville with her as soon as they had a free weekend.

He looked so handsome the night of the party, and he was so gracious and charming. He paid as much attention to Sugar's whiskery great-aunt Emmerline as he did to Meredith Burrows who was a model in New York and drop-dead gorgeous although, according to Grady, too bony for his liking.

They'd been to other balls and grand parties before, the two of them, during their brief courtship. Grady loved to socialize and on his arm Sugar truly didn't find it quite the chore she always had before. But did he always drink that much? she wondered halfway through the night. She hadn't noticed him being drunk any other time, and it wasn't as though he was falling down or embarrassing himself or anything. Charleston men were known for being able to hold their liquor. But despite that grace and charm of his, she recalled afterward seeing a gleam in his eye that she hadn't noticed before. She hadn't thought at the time that it was dangerous but then why would she? She was at her engagement party with the man of her dreams.

But after their two proud daddies made their speeches and their two proud mamas cried delicate tears (Etta's didn't even smear her mascara), Grady pulled Sugar outside, down the stairs at the back of the house and into the room that her mother referred to as her “decoupage studio.”

“You are so beautiful,” Grady said, pressing her up against the wall. “You are so fucking beautiful. God, I love you. You're amazing. Do you know that? I love you so much, so fucking much. You are perfect. Fucking perfect.”

He'd been such a gentleman up until then; she'd just assumed they would wait. She was embarrassingly old-fashioned like that, despite dreaming over and over of their first time together, the lingering kisses, the slow removal of clothes in the half-light of their first shared bedroom, the exquisite tenderness of two people exploring each other's bodies, knowing they had a lifetime to get to know each other's pleasures and pain. But hearing him say how much he loved her, as though he meant it so much it was tearing him in two, despite the cursing, which usually made her flinch, Sugar suddenly didn't feel quite so old-fashioned after all.