The Wedding Bees Read Free Page A

would know when that was going to happen and that she would have a hand in it. Of course, with her mother paying the rent, she didn’t even know who the landlord was. Ruby had a hand in absolutely nothing.
    Still, she did not know if she wanted a nun and a guy who ironed his jeans living in her building. She’d only just got used to the beefy redhead living in the other tiny rooftop apartment and he’d been there more than six months. Not that she’d ever spoken to him or anything, but she still saw him every now and then and, even though it did not annoy her as much as in the beginning, it still annoyed her.
    She pulled closer to the window again as some skanky kid on a skateboard whipped past the woman in the pink dress so close and so fast it spun her around. The woman just clung to her cooler and laughed. Closer, Ruby could see how pretty she was, how delicate her features in that open face, how wide and clear her eyes. She looks nice, Ruby surprised herself by thinking. She hardly ever thought that about anyone.
    Now the woman was laughing again and looking all soppy over loony Lola’s ridiculous balloons, as though Flores Street wasn’t the worst place in the world to find such a collection, and loony Lola wasn’t the worst person in the world to have it.
    Well, she’ll find out soon enough exactly how much those balloons are begging for an attack of the knitting-needle variety if she’s moving in, Ruby thought.
    She wondered if the bad box carrier was the woman’s boyfriend. They didn’t really match each other, although they both looked about the same age, older than her, but younger than her mom. Midthirties, maybe? They’d better not have a baby in that van, that was for sure. Loony Lola had put all of Alphabet City off babies, possibly forever, with her toddler son who never stopped his squawking. If there was going to be another one of those in the building, Ruby would have to shoot someone. Or herself.
    She took her plate of cracker slivers and covered them in three layers of plastic wrap, then put them on the top shelf in the kitchen cabinet, standing on tippy toe and pushing the plate as far back as she could. She would come back to the crackers later. She had stomach crunches to do. And maybe she would do her arm weight routine today since she’d only done it once the day before. And then maybe today she would walk to the Whole Foods Market on East Houston to get some quinoa because she’d read on the Internet that it was the new superfood, although actually she thought the Chelsea Whole Foods had a better layout so she might walk there instead, depending on how long her exercises took.
    Maybe the van driver and the happy woman had met over a bunch of flowers, she thought. Maybe the woman’s first husband had died and the driver had delivered flowers to her, then fallen in love with her. Or maybe the woman worked in the store and he was the delivery boy and after years of not telling each other how they felt, they were trapped together in the flower cooler one night and it all came out and now here they were.
    Stupider things had happened.

3 RD
    S ugar paused at the iron railing leading down to the basement where the motley balloons bobbed sadly in the faint spring breeze. One of them was a world globe, its Northern Hemisphere seriously dented, another was a somewhat flaccid superhero, and the rest were a forlorn collection of ordinary shapes in washed-out colors and various stages of deflation.
    The same boisterous ivy from the stoop spilled down the stairs like a feather boa and had thrown itself around a dusty window bearing a sign that read, if only just: LOLA’S BALLOONS .
    Through the dirty glass Sugar could also see part of an inflated zebra, half of a giraffe, and the face of a blow-up monkey floating on the inside, but a large handwritten sign hanging crookedly from the rather imposing black door read CLOSED .
    â€œWell, how about