Page 15 of Love's a Script
The other matchmakers’ heads swiveled from Eden to their boss.
“No, I’m still deciding,” Cassidy replied.
“Then is there a date you can give us when to expect an announcement?” Eden asked shamelessly.
Cassidy looked around at all of them. “I see,” she said, removing her thick-framed glasses. “I’ll tell you what, during next month’s meeting, I’ll have an answer for you.”
A round of excited chatter swept the conference room, and Mary leaned over to Eden and said, “Thank you.”
“It had to be done,” her colleague replied. “I can’t work under a perpetual drumroll anymore.”
The matchmakers got up to leave the room and start their workday, but Cassidy called Mary to hang back.
“How’s it going with Ruben Byers?” Cassidy asked, her attention split between Mary and the phone in her hand. “What’s the status of the radio documentary?”
“Oh, we don’t discuss his work,” Mary said.
Cassidy looked up with a frown. “Do you have any sense of whether he’s appreciating the process?”
“I think so. He had a first date with his second match over the weekend. It wasn’t a success, but he still seems optimistic.”
Mary had paired Ruben and Aliya together because of their outlooks on life. They were go-getters, principled, the types of people who would rewrite an instruction manual they thought inadequate. However, according to them both, a second date was not in the cards. Despite their similarities, they’d rubbed each other the wrong way. Aliya called him low energy in her post-date evaluation, and in Ruben’s verbose write-up that inexplicably included a review of the sports bar they’d patroned and the history of the first miniature golf course in the country, he said Aliya was overly competitive.
“Have you set him up with his next match?” Cassidy asked.
“I’ll be working on that this week.”
“Okay, great work. Keep it up,” Cassidy said.
“Thank you!” Mary held her smile in place until her boss turned to leave. She’d sounded confident, but truthfully she wasn’t sure how she’d proceed. The time constraint, the effect of each failed date on Ruben’s attitude toward matchmaking, and her boss’s investment in the outcome were weighing on Mary, making her second-guess the instincts that she’d used to match couples long before she’d ever known the name Ruben Byers.
Chapter Ten
It was a Saturday morning with agreeable weather, but Ruben was tucked away on the top floor of the downtown library. He sat in front of a microfilm machine scrolling through photographic reproductions of century-old newspapers, looking for the personal advertisements sections in each issue. There, with a simple turn of a dial, he read about people—some his age, many much younger, and most of them white—seeking companionship, a spouse.
Even though time and circumstance separated them, Ruben wanted to know, for instance, if the malting plant worker from Biggar, Saskatchewan, ever did get a response from a woman of mild nature and good morals.
Ruben was loading yet another microfilm reel when a Black boy in a noisy snow jacket appeared at his side and studied the computer monitor.
“Hello,” Ruben said, looking around for an accompanying adult. “You here with someone?” It was a large library with three levels, and the children’s section was on the ground floor.
“Luther!” came a woman’s sharp whispered call.
“You Luther?” Ruben asked the boy, who showed off his gummy smile then bolted down one of the aisles.
Moments later, the woman who’d called for the boy came into view with her back to him. She had a grip on a toddler’s wrist and a diaper bag slipping from her shoulder. “Come on, Luther. You’ve gotta listen to Auntie. Story time is going to start soon and we won’t?—”
“He’s between the third and fourth filing cabinets,” Ruben told her.
The woman turned, presumably to thank him, but she froze as did he when he recognized Mary. Even on her day off, she looked polished, wearing a neutral-colored outfit with a sleek hairdo. A peal of giggles from Luther as he darted down a different aisle knocked them out of their mutual surprise.
“Could you…” Mary placed the diaper bag at Ruben’s feet and handed him the toddler’s arm before taking off in the direction of the hiding nephew.
“How’s it going?” Ruben awkwardly asked the child he was now in charge of, but the boy didn’t respond, more interested in the floppy curly-haired doll he held in the crease of his elbow. Ruben watched Mary track Luther through the aisles, begging compliance with promises of treats and gifts that grew more elaborate with each offer. At one point she vowed to find him a real firetruck to drive.
Finally, she got a hold of the kid, and she returned to collect the other boy and the diaper bag. It was then Ruben noticed she also had a third child, a baby, strapped to her chest.
“Let me carry this for you,” he said.
