Queen Bee
Page 32
“I feel so much better!” she said every time someone told her how great she looked.
I prayed that the good Lord would give her plenty of time to be together with Suz. She deserved happiness. We all did. I just never believed that we, the crazy bunch of outliers that we were, would find it so happily and completely.
It became obvious that I needed to go to the hospital to deliver our baby at about four in the morning on May 14. My back had been killing me all week. My ankles were swollen, and I was just generally uncomfortable all over. I labored until around noon and then, by the grace of God, I delivered the most exquisite baby ever born.
“It’s a boy!” my doctor said. “A little fat guy, and he’s perfect!”
Ted cut the cord and fainted. He was out cold on the floor of the delivery room and had a small cut in his forehead.
“I thought he was the chief of police!” a nurse said.
They revived him, got him up and into a chair, and gave him a cold cloth and a Band-Aid.
“What are we going to name him?” Ted said.
“He’s Theodore, my love. He looks just like you.”
“Okay,” he said. “Theodore. I’ve always wanted a son.”
I was just so glad I’d have two Teds to love. What could be better? We brought him home and laid him in his bassinet and I thought my heart would burst from all the love I felt for my little Ted. I stared at him for days on end and walked around in a fog of joy.
I could go on with this story forever. You know it wouldn’t be hard. There will always be shenanigans to entertain you from the islanders like Leslie, Momma, Suz, well, all of us, and our friends, too. That’s what it is to live in the Lowcountry. The colors are a little brighter. The air is a little sweeter. Jokes are funnier, love runs deeper, and life overall is richer. But I have a baby to feed and a gorgeous husband who’ll be wanting dinner, too. Who knows? Maybe we’ll be back another time. Remember Tolstoy? He said something pretty clever. He said, “One can no more approach people without love than one can approach bees without care.” Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we took that tiny bit of advice? The hive has many lessons to teach us. This was only one of them.
Acknowledgments
There was an unusual amount of enthusiasm for this book from the very beginning. Many people gave me their thoughts and wisdom to make Queen Bee, we all hope, worthy of your time. The world around me is suddenly filled with beekeepers, honey bee keepers to be exact, all of them filled with hope that Queen Bee will gently enlighten and inform my readers on the importance of honey bees to our food supply and the beauty of the natural world while I’m telling you a story about human frailty and cowardice confronted with unstoppable and sometimes very unlikely love and devotion.
I began my research with BUZZ—The Nature and Necessity of Bees, a recent work of nonfiction authored by Thor Hanson. I bought a copy and was given two more. If your curiosity leads you to only read one book on the subject of honey bees, it has to be this one. I read it in two days, took copious notes, and quickly came to understand that honey bees have much to teach humanity. In fact, a lot more than I thought.
Then, as my list of questions grew, a dear friend and former beekeeper, Dawn Durst of Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, introduced me by phone to Jerry Freeman of Hamburg, Arkansas. Jerry had a saintly patience in all our conversations until I finally came to understand the risks our honey bees face and what might be done about it. He is the inventor of the Freeman Beetle Trap, a remedy to hive beetles. His website also offers plenty of sound information on Varroa mites and on beekeeping in general. You can visit Jerry at www.freemanbeetletrap.com.
And finally, in the category of Things Bees Do to Amaze Us, I owe a word of thanks to Allan Perry Hazel and his charming wife, Judy Hazel, of Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, and Ted Shrensel and his lovely wife, Bettie Frank-Shrensel, of Montclair, New Jersey. Both of these beekeeping couples had some hilarious stories to tell about hive personalities and the personal habits of bees. So, thanks to y’all, some of the funnier aspects of beekeeping will reach lots of people.
There’s another huge acknowledgment owed to Emma Waters and all the fine folks at the Savannah Bee Company first for having such a wonderful and informative website and for your generous sponsorship of my Fan Fest 2019, but perhaps most important for your generous support of The Bee Cause project that brings bees into classrooms all over the country to teach children about the critical importance of honey bees in our lives and in the environment. And also to Tamara Enright of The Bee Cause. Part of the proceeds from books sold during my book tour this year will support the work of The Bee Cause as well. My team from William Morrow is mighty proud to know you and to congratulate your fine work. In addition, special thanks to J. L. Napolski and all the nice people at Dixie Vodka for their support of book tour and Fan Fest. You have most definitely put the fun back in book tour. Ahem.
For years I have offered various nonprofits around the country the opportunity for one or more of their patrons to appear in my books as a character as a way for them to raise money. The winner never knows if they’ll be a good guy or a bad guy. They take their chances. This year the Naples, Florida, Friends of the Library brought two of their supporters to immortality. Holly McNee Jensen and Leslie Stevens. Holly and Leslie, I gave you both starring roles and I hope you enjoy this crazy duo. And Carin MacLean, who generously gave to my old grammar school, Stella Maris/Christ Our King in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, I hope you enjoy your pedestal and I’m sorry, well, I should’ve sent flowers. Last, I’d like to thank Stubble the dog’s owners for their generous support of the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey. Although I have barely met any of these kind and generous souls, and Stubble not at all, I am sure they are nothing like the characters they portray. What we do know about them is that they support the arts, literacy, and education, a worthy pursuit all around. And so I salute y’all and thank you again on behalf of these fine institutions. On a side note, my sister Lynn tells me she was stopped by a friend at her bridge club who said her daughter was very upset because she was supposed to be a character in this book or last year’s (details were unclear) and I asked her to find out who this was and I’d take care of it right away. Well, that never happened. So if you are that person, please contact me on Facebook or Instagram with a little bit of validation and we can remedy the situation.
Sometimes friends and acquaintances just show up in my pages. Usually it’s because I’m thinking of them but always because I need another name for a character. This time, Andrea Blatt, Barbara Hagerty, Joanne Langbein, Anthony Stith, and Darlene and Mark Tanenbaum slipped in and I hope y’all get a kick out of seeing your name in print. And Darlene and Mark, special thanks for keeping me hydrated and fed during the last days of writing this book.
Then there are those to thank for various reasons. Thank you, Harlan Greene for your excellent advice I took to heart and tried very hard to adhere to. Thanks to Martin and Toni McKerrow of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, for their amazing hospitality and also to my writer pal Elin Hilderbrand for her insanely wonderful blurb for this book. I owe you one! Thanks to Judy Linder, my great cousin, for helping find fun bee facts and connecting them to the chapters and huge thanks to my fabulous daughter, Victoria Frank Peluso, for so many things I can’t even remember them all—help with proofing, bee facts, social media, brainstorming, and for our first children’s book, a true collaborative effort, Teddy Spaghetti, which we hope will be published in the summer of 2020 by the children’s imprint of HarperCollins. And it should be obvious to Margaret Anastas, our children’s editor, that we love her to bits. Yes, we do. Victoria and I are super excited to work with you.
And heading over to the floors of William Morrow, let’s start with Carrie Feron, my fearless editor, the one I adore. Our fifteenth book together? Where does the time go? Your thoughts, ideas, and advice always bring me to a richer and more satisfying story for the enjoyment of so many others and I am d
eeply grateful for all of it. And I am also seriously grateful to Asanté Simons, assistant extraordinaire to my fearless editor, for the endless questions she answers and the many things she does to keep me above water. And let us not forget to blow a kiss to Michael Kelly! No reason. Just blowing kisses.
To the William Morrow team: Brian Murray, Liate Stehlik, Kelly Rudolph, Julie Paulauski, Kathryn Gordon, Kate Hudkins, Lisa Sharkey and the whole team at Studio 16, Frank Albanese, Virginia Stanley, Andrea Rosen, Josh Marwell, Andy LeCount, Carla Parker, Donna Waikus, Michael Morris, Rachel Levenberg, Gabe Barillas, Andrea Molitor, copyeditor Greg Villepique, Jennifer Hart, Rachel Levinger, Nyamekye Waliyaya, Suzanne Mitchell, and last but Lawsa not least, Brian Grogan: thank you one and all for all the miracles, and for your amazing support. And to our new secret weapon, Gretchen Koss of Tandem Literary. Girl? You killed it last year! Let’s do it again!
Speaking of powerhouses? Deep bows and many curtsies to genius, Suzanne Gluck, my agent at WME, and Andrea Blatt, of course! Many thanks to Michelle Feehan of New York and Matilda Forbes Watson, London. And thanks to Sylvie Rabineau and Hilary Zaitz Michael of WME Los Angeles. Y’all are the best!
Let us not forget Patti Morrison, my book tour buddy who keeps me out of trouble. Well, mostly. Anyway, many thanks for your excellent friendship and humor!
And then there are the extraordinary booksellers, and I mean every single one of you across this big wonderful country of ours, I thank you from the bottom of my heart, most especially Margot Sage-El and the Jedis of Watchung Booksellers in Montclair, New Jersey, Vicki Crafton and her wonderful booksellers at Litchfield Books in Pawley’s Island, South Carolina, Jonathan Sanchez of Blue Bicycle Books in Charleston, Wendy Hudson from Mitchell’s Book Corner on Nantucket and all the wonderful people from the Nantucket Book Festival and Jacquie Lee, who, lucky for me, always finds a way to enhance book tour or my life in general. I love y’all and you know it’s true.
To my growing family! Carmine and Victoria and that precious angel from heaven, Teddy Peluso, whom we all adore—as y’all know, I love y’all so much! And Liam and Maddie Frank—I love y’all so much and miss you every day. And to Brian and Roberta Benton and Matthew and Danielle Benton and of course, little Luke, you all inspire me and fill my heart. And to my amazing husband, Peter. Mr. Frank? There are no words to describe my enormous love for you, but love you I do with all my heart, and all of you with all I’ve got.
Finally, to my readers, to whom I owe the greatest debt of all, I am sending you the most sincere and profound thanks for reading my stories, for sending along so many nice emails and posts and for coming to my book events. Y’all are the why of why I try and write a book each year. I hope Queen Bee will bring you lots of happiness and give you a thing or two to think about. There’s a lot of magic down here in the Lowcountry. Please come see us and get some for yourself. I love you all and thank you once again.
About the Author
New York Times bestselling author DOROTHEA BENTON FRANK was born and raised on Sullivans Island, South Carolina. She resides in the New York area with her husband.
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Also by Dorothea Benton Frank
By Invitation Only
Same Beach, Next Year
All Summer Long
All the Single Ladies
The Hurricane Sisters
The Last Original Wife
Porch Lights
Folly Beach
Lowcountry Summer
Return to Sullivan’s Island
Bulls Island
The Christmas Pearl
The Land of Mango Sunsets
Full of Grace
Pawley’s Island
Shem Creek
Isle of Palms
Plantation
Sullivan’s Island
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
QUEEN BEE. Copyright © 2019 by Dorothea Benton Frank. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Cover design by Elsie Lyons
Cover photographs © Colin Anderson/Getty Images (woman); © apomares/iStock/Getty Images (sky); © Evannovostro/Shutterstock (water)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Frank, Dorothea Benton, author.
Title: Queen bee : a novel / Dorothea Benton Frank.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : William Morrow, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019010862 | ISBN 9780062861214 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062861238 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780062958990 (b&n exclusive) | ISBN 9780062959065 (bam exclusive) | ISBN 9780062912602 (large print) | ISBN 9780062861221 (ebook)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Family Life.
Classification: LCC PS3556.R3338 Q84 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010862
Digital Edition MAY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-286122-1
Version 04232019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-286121-4
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