Page 30 of Love's a Script
He left the room then and headed down for breakfast. The confusion in the lobby and restaurant from the previous day had greatly improved, and folks seemed to have accepted this would be their circumstances for a while. A few old men casually chatted with each other as they watched the snowfall at the biggest window in the restaurant, someone was walking around in their robe, and a group of kids were playing a game of tag in a corner of the lobby.
The spread at the breakfast buffet was less varied than the day before, with the offerings including two types of cereals, whole wheat bread, and a fruit salad.
“What you see is what there is,” the staff member nearby would periodically announce.
Ruben ate his breakfast with the Arizona couple who spent the meal outlining more of their endgame preparations. Today they’d be stockpiling lithium batteries they could find around the hotel. At first, Ruben humored them with questions, but grew fascinated by their intensive plans.
Once Ruben was finished with breakfast, he visited the activity desk. Anything he might have tolerated was already full for the morning, so he returned to his empty hotel room. He spent a portion of time reading, another completing a lower body stretch routine for his aching calves, then he worked on his laptop before abandoning it for television when the internet connection began to lag. He became restless and was seriously considering the 11:30 a.m. bracelet-making session when his cousin called.
“They’re predicting it’ll be at most another day,” Junie said. “And thank god because I don’t know how many more rounds of Yahtzee I have in me.” She’d been hunkering down through the blizzard at her parents’ home, and Ruben had been getting a play-by-play of the trying experience through text: All I’ve watched today is Sanford and Son episodes and the news… Time has no meaning here… I keep forgetting not to swear.
“It’ll probably be longer for us up here,” Ruben said. “The roads to the highway haven’t been cleared at all.”
“An extended vacation in a nice hotel doesn’t sound bad.”
“It’s not exactly a restful alpine getaway right now,” he replied, telling her about the guest overcapacity, middling food, and haphazard summer camp entertainment. “I’m also rooming with Mary.”
“Who’s—wait, you mean your matchmaker, Mary?”
“Yeah, it was a coincidence. We were attending different events at the hotel. She didn’t have a room, I had two beds in mine, so I offered one to her.”
“Okay, so you’re definitely having a better time than me. Getting snowed in with a beautiful woman is actually my dream scenario.”
“Well, my situation is not that,” Ruben said with a dismissive laugh that sounded forced to his own ears, but he quickly changed the subject. This situation could never be that.
Inside the bridal suite of Mary’s former client, things were already in disarray. The bed had been stripped of its sheets, the mattress thrust off its base, and suitcases had been opened and emptied.
Vanessa sat on a chair in the corner of the room, eyes red and swollen as her bridesmaids looked on helplessly.
“Hey,” Mary said softly as she advanced toward the group.
Vanessa leaped from her seat and raced to hug Mary. “It’s not here! I’ve looked everywhere!” Vanessa wailed, her arms like a vice around Mary’s neck. “It was Ian’s great-grandmother’s ring, and I’ve lost it!”
“It’s going to be okay,” Mary said, pulling back to look straight into her former client’s eyes. “Listen to me. We know you wore the ring on the wedding day, so it’s in this hotel somewhere. We’ll go through this room again. Then we’ll search all the spots you took photos. Ian and the groomsman can tackle the ceremony and reception halls.”
“Ian doesn’t know yet,” Vanessa said, on the verge of tears again. “I don’t want to tell him.”
“It’ll be faster if we divide and conquer, so we should tell him what’s going on. Does that work for you?”
Vanessa nodded, and once Mary gave the bridesmaids instructions on how to systematically go through the space, she found the groom in the hallway, baffled as to why his wife had refused to talk to him all morning.
After Mary explained the situation, Ian asked, “Is she okay?”
“No, not really, but it would help if you went in there and told her you don’t hate her for possibly losing a family heirloom twenty-four hours after your wedding.”
With the slight tension in the new marriage on its way to repair, Mary joined the search efforts in the suite.
She scrutinized the carpet, several times mistaking glitter remnants from the bachelorette party for the ring. She went through every drawer in the room twice over. Nothing. And when Mary and the bridal party broke for lunch, the ring was still missing.
The women sat around on different available surfaces, waiting for the groomsmen—whose search of the halls had also produced nothing—to deliver lunch from the restaurant.
“I was so scared this whole wedding would fly by and I wouldn’t remember a thing,” Vanessa said dejectedly, “but I can say these have been the longest days of my life.”
The bridesmaids, realizing their friend needed distraction, overwhelmed the moment with good memories, gossip, and inside jokes. There was hardly a gap of silence, and Mary looked on with admiration at the display of friendship.
“Mary,” said the maid of honor, a tall woman with shiny auburn hair, “who is that man you sit with at mealtimes? The one with the freckles.”
Not only had Mary not expected the question, but she was surprised to see the entire bridal party had leaned in to listen to her reply.
