The Wedding Bees (21 page)

33
RD

G
eorge was waiting on their bench beneath the oak, with that same bluebird perched on a bough behind him, and Sugar's pancake and a soda waiting on a napkin beside him. He smiled when he saw her and although Sugar was so churned up inside she could barely even contemplate food, a sliver of that same comforting calm she'd felt last time in the garden slid around her shoulders like a stole.

“I haven't told anyone this before,” she said, sitting down. “So if it doesn't make sense, or I start to cry, or run for the hills, you'll have to forgive me, I'm doing the best I can.”

“Your best is all you can do, Miss Sugar,” said George. “And yours is better than most.”

“It was the last Saturday in August,” she said. “Usually too hot to get married in Charleston, according to Grady's mama, anyway, but mine just wanted us down that aisle as soon as she could possibly arrange it.”

Actually, the morning had been blessedly cooler than those of the previous days and weeks, cool enough for Etta to stop fussing about the flowers at the Yacht Club where the reception was to be, and the green of the lawn in the Legare Street garden where she was hosting a postwedding luncheon the following day.

The hairdresser had come early and piled Sugar's long hair in a graceful updo; the dressmaker herself had made one last-minute alteration and fitted the gown like a whale-boned glove.

Her makeup was immaculate, her eyes soft and clear, her lips pink and perfect.

She'd even been practicing walking in heels to make sure that she didn't tumble and fall off her father's arm, revealing the satin La Perla underwear Etta had given her to wear beneath the dazzling dress.

Afterward, everybody would agree that, despite what happened, Sugar was the most beautiful bride they had ever seen.

The sunlight was filtering through the elegant arched windows of St. Michael's Episcopal Church on the corner of Meeting and Broad Streets, the intersection at the very heart of Charleston where City Hall met the Courthouse and the Post Office.

The pristine white St. Michael's was where Sugar's parents had been married thirty years before, and her father's parents before them. In fact, the bells of St. Michael's had been chiming at Wallace family weddings since 1764.

Sugar and her father arrived from Legare Street in a white carriage pulled by four glossy gray horses, their manes long and silky, their black oiled livery glistening.

The organist lit up as she stepped out of the coach, the choir bursting into the psalm Etta had chosen as Sugar entered the church and started slowly down the aisle on the arm of her proud father.

Her mother stood in the front row wearing a stunning suit of the palest draped cream silk, knowing she was stopping just short of outshining her daughter, and pleased with that.

Ben and Troy were groomsmen, their girlfriends bridesmaids, as Etta thought that would save anyone else from being offended and they were both exceptionally blond and pretty.

The church was full. The mother of the bride had outdone herself in the wedding preparations with everything from the first invitation to the promise of Cristal champagne at the reception to the details of the barbecue to be held the following day.

No one who knew that the Wallaces' only daughter was getting married that weekend wanted anything other than to be right there with them, sharing in the festivities, from beginning to bitter end. It was going to be some party.

“Grady looks like the cat that got the cream,” his cousin Luke muttered under his breath to his brother, Ed.

“He always looks like that,” Ed replied.

“He's had a lot of cream,” Luke said and they both laughed, which earned them a poke in the ribs from their mother. But they envied Grady too. Sugar Wallace was just about the tastiest-looking cream they had ever seen and the two of them all but drooled as she glided past them toward the altar.

A veil of the finest French silk tulle showed a glimpse of exquisite shoulder beneath the fragile lace of her gown. Every eye was on her as she kissed her daddy's cheek and slowly turned to Grady, who was standing there with tears glistening in his own eyes, as overwhelmed by her beauty as everyone else.

They made a stunning pair, everyone remembered thinking that. This was the sort of coupling every parent dreamed of for their child: two of the city's finest joining hands in holy matrimony in front of everyone who was anyone.

They all remembered thinking that, but no one could remember when the first bee arrived.

It was definitely somewhere after “Do you Cherie-Lynn Antoinette Wallace take Grady Johnson Howell Parkes to be your lawfully wedded husband,” but before “I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

Sugar was standing there listening to the words and repeating her vows when she heard a familiar buzzing. A bee had flown in through the open top window above the door to the sacristy and was circling the pulpit.

She stiffened as it came closer. Where there was one bee there were usually more.

Sure enough, another bee flew in through the same window, and another, and another.

Grady was holding both her hands by then and didn't seem to notice them fly once around the altar and then head straight for him.

There were still only four, making a big lazy circle just a few feet above his head, so Sugar relaxed a little until she noticed that the bee at the front was bigger than the other three.

Grady cottoned on to them then, or cottoned on to something, and puffed out a lungful of air as if to blow them away.

They moved a little higher, but still they circled him.

Sugar couldn't keep her eyes off them. The one in the front was definitely bigger. In fact, she looked like a queen. She pulled her hands away from Grady's.

The rector shot her a warning look, but she ignored it.

“Grady, where did you take my bees?” she asked.

The people in the first few pews started to whisper, their murmurs rippling to the back of the church, where no one could see what exactly was going on, just that the bride was distracted.

“For Christ's sake, not now, honey,” Grady hissed, and flapped his hand above his head to shoo the bees away.

But they weren't going anywhere and the more Sugar looked at her, the more she was sure that the big one at the front was Elizabeth the First. Of course it was impossible to be completely sure. It was impossible to be completely sure about anything. About knowing if you were marrying the right man, for example.

You are strong
, her grandfather had told her, standing beside his hive.
And never let anybody make you feel like you are not
.

He'd been standing right by his favorite queen bee when he said that. Could it be that the queen had now somehow sought Sugar out to remind her of those words?

She felt panic rise deep in her chest beneath the lace of her beautiful bodice.

But the panic wasn't about what would happen if she married Grady Parkes. It was about what would happen if she didn't. She would hurt him, humiliate her family, alienate their friends and create a stir the likes of which she had spent much of her life avoiding.

The rector flapped his notes vigorously at the bees then, and him they took notice of, circling Grady in wider faster loops before heading once more around the pulpit, then flying out the sacristy window from whence they had come.

“Give me your hand, Cherie-Lynn,” Grady said, as the guests craned their necks and began to talk openly among themselves. “Stop fooling around.”

Sugar was a good person; she always had been. She truly believed in doing unto others as she would have done unto her, just like Grampa Boone had always told her. If everyone did that, he said, the world would be a better place and Sugar wholeheartedly wanted the world to be a better place.

But something had gone wrong. In trying to fit in with what was expected of her, she'd lost touch with what was really important, deep down inside herself, a place that lately seemed as far away as the craters of the moon. She'd been there just a few days before, though; in the car with her bees flying along Ashley River Road with the Spanish moss waving her on. That was who she really was; a slightly out-of-kilter beekeeper who took the scenic route, not the quickest, who liked gardening in cutoffs more than cocktails in heels, who preferred the company of her bees to just about everybody in that church.

That was the real Sugar, not this flawless spectacle standing on an altar promising to love and obey a man of whom she was, if not afraid, then certainly unsure. And he might at times make her feel dizzy with love but he did not make her feel strong.

She felt the thrust of Etta's hand at her elbow. “For God's sake, pull yourself together,” she said through gritted teeth.

“Does she need a glass of water?” Grady asked.

Standing there looking at him, feeling the lump in her poor bruised heart where the disappointment of love had already left its callus, Sugar could only think that becoming his wife was not going to make the world a better place, certainly not her world.

Being seconds away from marrying him, of course, was hardly the ideal time to reach such a conclusion. There was limited scope for her to work out exactly what to do. In fact, she really had only one choice.

So it was that in front of two hundred and fifty of Charleston's most privileged and popular citizens, Sugar Wallace turned and fled her own wedding.

Before Etta or Grady or the rector or anyone knew what was happening, before she could even whisper a heartfelt, “I'm sorry,” she had kicked off her heels and bolted out the side door next to the altar. Once outside, she ran through the cemetery, into the courtyard of the church offices next door, and jumped over the fence at the back of the hall and into the car park beside it.

Sugar had grown up south of Broad Street. She and Miss Pickles had walked every one of the hidden side alleys of downtown Charleston a hundred times over, so she knew the back lanes and secret passageways of the scented city better than the people who put them there in the first place.

From the hall car park she dashed across St. Michael's Alley, then ran through an open gate and up the garden path beside an old grade-school teacher's ivy-covered cottage, emerging out of the rear of the property into the open green space at the end of Ropemaker's Lane.

From there, she spied another open backyard opposite. It was in the middle of a messy renovation and had no gate, just a muddy space full of rubble and building detritus behind the house the local pharmacist had just had repossessed because of his little problem with the ponies.

She stopped inside the crumbling brick fence just to catch her breath and again she heard them before she saw them: more bees! The buzzing was coming from the far corner of the yard, on the other side of a pile of rubble. She scrambled awkwardly in bare feet across the heap of broken bricks and yanked-out foliage, and there she found her grandfather's beehive, the one Grady had had taken away. The brood box and two supers were stacked neatly on top of each other, taken there, she imagined, by the workers creating the garden she would now never tend in Church Street.

A healthy collection of drones hovered at the entrance but she had no time to check and see if Elizabeth was in there. Instead, she pushed back her veil, hitched up her dress, hurried down the side of the half-renovated house and emerged out into Tradd Street. Her brother Troy's house was four doors down on the opposite side and his Explorer was parked in the driveway beside it, keys in the ignition, gate unlocked, as usual.

Climbing up into the cab, Sugar suddenly knew what she was going to do.

She reversed back up the street and into the driveway beside the pharmacist's house. She loaded her grandfather's beehive into the rear of Troy's Explorer; she jumped back in the cab, pulled out into Tradd Street, turned away from her brother's house and put her foot on the gas.

She yanked off her veil and threw it on the passenger seat in case any of the wedding guests were out on the street looking for her. She pulled the pins out of her hair as she drove up through the French Quarter, shaking out her curls and heading for the I-26, driving carefully around the tourists on bikes and the horse-drawn carriages full of wide-eyed visitors to this beautiful city that she had always loved so much.

The sunlight sparkled on the Cooper and she opened the window to breathe in that sharp, sultry salty air for one last time. It would have a hold on her forever, this southern city of her birth, squeezed between two mighty rivers, with its pretty houses, its lush gardens, its rich history and its proud past. But in the interest of her own ripe future, Sugar had to leave.

The freeway would be quicker, she reasoned, in case anyone came looking for her at her grandfather's cabin. She had to move fast.

As soon as she got there, she opened up the hive and there was the queen, looking exactly like the bee in the church—but how else would she look?

Sugar had no time to ponder this further as she took off her $5,000 wedding dress and hung it in the closet in the spare room, pulling on an old pair of jeans and some sneakers left behind from one of her visits.

She transferred the hive into the back of the old pickup, loaded up her grandfather's tools, a few spare supers, a bottle of Maker's Mark, the spare cash he always kept at the back of the bread bin, her favorite cup, her grandmother's prized collection of medicinal oils and a map from the spare room wall.

Then Sugar Honey Wallace and her bees hit the road.

They were about an hour and a half up the I-95 when she realized her hands were shaking on the wheel, her teeth were chattering.

She'd left Grady Parkes at the altar! The devastation, the scandal, the outrage—she was ruined.

And she was saved.

“Thank you, Elizabeth the First,” she said, tears of relief sliding down her cheeks. “Thank you.”