She hesitated. “When my clients are all happy and the firm bills them for hours well spent, I have fun at my job,” she said, feeling a bit defensive. “That’s no crime. Working in my field is like going out on dates and to parties. People pay me to attend movie premieres and celebrity galas. How bad is that?”

“Doesn’t sound bad at all. Unless it makes real dates and real parties feel like work.”

Ouch, she thought. She stared down at the table, trying to talk herself out of asking what she knew she would ask. But she couldn’t stand it a moment longer, couldn’t keep in the bitter accusation that had been pressing at the back of her throat from the first moment she’d spied him today. “You didn’t show up that last night.”

He didn’t even ask which night she referred to. “I’m here now.”

Chapter Seven

chapter seven

The Zamboni driver had worked on the ice forever, it seemed. More than an ice tech or maintenance drone, he was a vital part of the skating operation, practically a celebrity in his own right. Sometimes kids even asked for his autograph, which he obligingly gave. He even put up with the tedious “Zamboni Song,” which some smart aleck invariably belted out now and then.

When his big Lego block of a machine chugged out onto the ice to enact the hourly ritual of renewal, he attracted as much attention as the amateur figure skaters practicing their double axels. The sight of the surface being groomed satisfied on a deep level; rough imperfections disappeared almost instantly. There was a mesmeric, Zen-like appeal in watching the resurfacing of the ice. In perfect, overlapping oval swaths, the machine scraped off the gouged and pitted epidermis of the rink, washed the shavings and then laid down a slick, smooth mirror of perfect ice in its wake.

Reaching a top speed of nine miles per hour, the Zamboni crept along so slowly that the driver had plenty of time to study the crowd, studying him. This was what kept him in his heated vinyl seat each winter, year after year—the opportunity to watch people. He had all the time in the world to observe the way they looked at the world, weathered storms, slammed into walls and picked themselves up after a fall, the way they raced out to embrace life.

He’d seen all sorts of people come and go. The crowd here was made up mostly of tourists and occasional regulars. Every once in awhile, someone interesting was swept up in emotional turmoil—that sort of thing always caught his attention. He’d never tire of watching a mother arguing with her almost-grown daughter. A newly divorced man working up the courage to ask a woman out. A young couple on the brink of falling in love.