Page 60 of Love's a Script
Hattie carefully asked, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. But you’ve been annoying all morning, and I didn’t appreciate you blaming me earlier for something that isn’t my fault. You forgot your bib, not me.”
“Okay, yes, you’re right,” Hattie said, her hands up. “I apologize.”
The sisters sat silently and listened to their driver tinker with the complexities under the front hood. However, it was soon clear that the problem didn’t have a quick fix when he abandoned mechanics to make a call. When he returned to the driver’s seat, he told them, “Another car will be here to pick you up, don’t worry.”
“How long will that take?” Mary asked.
“Fifteen minutes.”
It was the first year the sisters weren’t using their own vehicles as they’d grown tired of the parking mayhem at the plunge site, but now they were at risk of missing the whole event.
“Mitch can be here in five,” Hattie said, but that was a severe underestimation. Getting all three boys in the car alone would take double that time.
Mary pulled out her phone to see if there were faster options on the rideshare app, but an incoming call interrupted her progress. The number was unattached to a contact in her phone, but she recognized it. She didn’t debate before picking up. “Ruben?”
A calm settled over her once she heard his smooth voice on the other line, and despite everything, she said to him, “I could use your help.”
Ruben’s hands were jittery, as if electricity mingled with the blood in his veins, and he tightened his grip around the steering wheel to steady them as he pulled into the bare parking lot of the Catholic high school where Mary and her sister waited for him.
On his drive over, as he’d thought of what he needed to tell Mary, he’d considered the possibility that she wouldn’t reciprocate his feelings. It didn’t lessen his resolve, however. He knew that even if she didn’t feel the way he did, she couldn’t deny their connection, and he was pinning hope on her seeing that it was worth exploring.
“Talk about right place, right time,” Hattie said to Ruben when he exited the car to greet them and open the trunk for their bags.
“Yes, thank you for coming,” Mary said.
“Always. Whenever,” he replied, realizing the response too intense when the sisters looked at him in unison. But he didn’t attempt to backtrack. She’d soon understand.
“So, polar plunging,” he said, once they were on the main road. “How does it work?”
Ruben looked at Mary in the back seat through his rearview mirror, but she was staring out of the window with a neutral expression as Hattie, in the passenger seat, replied, “Basically, you strip down to your underwear or bathing suit and sit in an ice-cold lake for two minutes.”
“And you both do this every year for fun?”
Hattie answered on the sisters’ behalf again. “For fun and charity.”
“Cool, cool,” Ruben said before trying a few more topics to draw Mary into conversation. None of them did the trick.
“The last time we met,” Hattie said, “I don’t think I caught how you and Mary know each other.”
“Through work,” he replied. “I joined her agency for a story.”
“Oh!” Hattie perked up. “You were one of Mary’s clients. Did you find someone?”
He hesitated. “Not exactly.”
“Hmm. It’s not for everyone.”
Ruben detected a slight condescension in Hattie’s tone, perhaps subconscious and dulled from years of repetition.
“Few things are for everyone,” he said, “but the agency has a 92 percent success rating, so don’t put too much stock in my experience. Your sister is great at what she does. People get married because of her. She’s passionate and thoughtful and rigorous with her approach. I just happened to be a client who was too much of a duck for the process to work.”
“A duck?” Hattie asked.
“A skeptical smartass,” he said as Mary’s eyes finally met his in the rearview mirror. She quickly looked away, and he wanted to express all his feelings right then, get her to understand that what he felt for her went beyond his admiration for her work ethic. But she deserved more from a declaration of love where his attention wasn’t split between her face and traffic.
For the rest of the journey, he was siloed in his thoughts and emerged again only while looking for parking at the event grounds. The plunge site was a lakefront populated with people, cars, one media truck, and erected white tents with signs denoting change rooms, a registration booth, food concession stands, a heating zone, and a first aid station.
