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Sleep deprivation starts to mess with your mind. I think that's been the hardest part of this whole experience. I now understand how Mimi nods off in an instant. If I sit still for too long, I'm starting to do the same thing.
I don’t know how K-pop stars keep up this frantic pace. I feel so bad for my poor Ki Tae!
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Letty placed her hands behind her back and moaned like a grandmother as she stretched. “When I get back to Pittsburgh, I’m going to sleep for a hundred years.”
“I don’t blame you,” Ben said as they walked together to their beat up mode of transportation. He opened the van door for her, and she tapped the brim of his yellow ball-cap.
“Are you trying to score points by copying the director?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.
“No, ma’am. Just trying to keep my head warm.”
“I know how that feels.” Letty pulled her own maroon beanie down a little further on her forehead. “I’m so glad Mom brought me this when she came to visit.”
Letty crawled into Bessie as he walked around to the other side. She strapped herself in with the brand new belt they installed after Ben destroyed the old one. The sleek black material was in direct contrast to the shabby, threadbare condition of everything else in the van.
Ben climbed in the driver’s side and gave his own grandpa moan as he sat behind the wheel. “Even a ten minute nap sounds like Heaven to me.”
He rolled his neck a few times and buckled his own seatbelt. Letty pulled her legs up under her and stuck her hands in between them and the seat to block the cold as Ben started the engine and revved it a few times before putting it in gear. Other production vehicles pulled out around them and Bessie joined the end of the caravan as they headed for home.
Letty reached over to turn on the radio, but all she got was static. The dashboard boasted an impressive cassette player just waiting to be used, but there wasn’t much chance of that, unless someone had left an old tape in the glove box from 1980. She checked to be sure, but there was only a car manual, a flashlight, and a half-eaten package of crackers that may have also been there since the 80s.
“It’s hard to believe we finish the show in two days.” She settled back in her seat and turned her body toward Ben as he drove.
“This project sped by. Do you think you can be satisfied with normal everyday life after this adventure?”
“Parts of it, most definitely!” Letty stretched her hands up to the ceiling. “Maybe not the sitting at a receptionist’s desk for eight hours a day part. But having time to talk to my friends again, sleeping a full eight hours, having dinner with my parents? Don’t get me wrong. I’ve loved every minute of this. But it really does teach you that the simple things are what matter most.”
“Food, family, and friends.” Ben nodded. “I have to admit I miss those.”
“And sleep.” Letty added.
“Yes! I miss sleep so much.”
“Sleep.” Letty sighed. “When everything is all over, I’m going to crawl into bed and stay there for at least 36 hours!”
“Has the show and your beloved Ki Tae fulfilled all your romantic fantasies?”
“No need to sound so sarcastic when you say that.” Letty tugged her coat a little closer as she checked the heating vents. Not much air, hot or otherwise, was coming out. “Ki Tae has kept my fangirl heart in a constant state of inner squealing as we watched the sunset, danced on the beach, and he serenaded me with his guitar. The needle on my romance barometer is spinning like a carousel. But more than that ...”
Letty nibbled on her lip as she searched her brain for the right way to explain.
“The show and Ki Tae helped me see there’s a difference between romance and love. All these heart and flower setups we acted out together felt fun and amazing, but ... a little empty.”
“Empty. How so?” Ben asked.
“Red roses and fancy proposals with diamonds hanging from dog collars are nice, but I think, at the end of the day, love is really about the things you said. Having a special place with someone, even if it’s just an ordinary food truck. Feeling like your day is wasted if you don’t see their face. Knowing there’s one person in the world who is unconditionally on your side, even when you’re acting like an idiot.”
Ben didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. They sat in comfortable silence as Bessie puttered down the road. The decrepit old van couldn’t keep up with the rest of the cars, and the equipment truck that started out in front of them was already a speck in the distance. At three in the morning they had the two lane highway all to themselves.
Letty felt her eyelids drooping and slapped her face lightly to stay awake.
“Did you ever call your mother like you said you were going to?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“The woman gave birth to you!” Letty poked him with a finger. “The least you can do is let her know you’re still alive.”
“I know. I know!” Ben leaned away to avoid her probing finger as he drove. “I want to. It’s just ...”
“Just?” Letty urged him on.
“I think sometimes it’s harder when I hear her voice. It’s been way too long since I’ve seen my family in person, and the homesickness gets pretty bad. Sometimes it’s easier just to get caught up in my work life and try not to think about it.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a life.”
Ben didn’t respond right away. Had she gotten too preachy? Was she overstepping her bounds? They were friends, but how long had they actually known each other? Three weeks?
Sometimes she forgot that fact after all they’d been through together. It felt a lot longer than three weeks to her. The silence was just starting to get obvious when Bessie interrupted. A loud pop sounded from the engine and the van lurched forward like a bucking horse at the rodeo.
“Whoa!” Letty grabbed the armrests at her side and held on. “Houston, do we have a problem?”
Ben tapped the brake a few times with his foot, but the vehicle swayed and pitched from side to side.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” Ben said through clenched teeth. “Hang on!”
Letty checked her seatbelt and grabbed the handle on the door with both hands as the car rattled and jerked. Bessie shuddered and gave one last mighty jolt. The sound of the motor disappeared, and the tires skidded against the icy road as Ben hit the brakes. He steered the vehicle to the right and coasted to a stop beside the highway.
They both stared out the dirty windshield at the empty expanse of road stretching in front of them. There wasn’t a single headlight in sight. They looked at each other and Letty was the first to speak.
“Something tells me we aren’t getting home anytime soon.”
“Maybe we can get her running again.” Ben opened his door and hopped out as a frosty breeze blew in the cab. “Stay here and I’ll check the engine.”
He slammed the door, ran to the front and propped open the hood. Letty couldn’t see what was happening, so she settled back in her seat and waited for the bad news. With an old clunker like Bessie, of course it wouldn’t be anything good. Ben closed the hood, gave it a frustrated slap, and pulled out his phone. Letty watched the breath leave his mouth in cold, icy puffs as he talked with someone, followed by a second call, and a third. He finished the last call and climbed back into the van.
“It looks like the battery is dead.” Ben pulled off his ball-cap, ruffled his hair, and put the hat back on again. “I called the other production people but they don’t want to turn around when they’re so close to Seoul. They said to call roadside assistance, which I did. They promised to dispatch someone, but the unexpected drop in temperature made it a busy night for breakdowns and it might take up to an hour and a half.”
“Bummer.”
“To say the least.” Ben turned up the collar on his coat and buttoned it all the way to his neck. “Our best bet seems to be the resort. I called the front desk and they promised to send someone for us. At least we can wait in a nice heated lodge for the tow truck.”
“How long will that take?”
“We’re only twenty minutes down the road. They should be here soon.” Ben shivered and pounded his hands against his arms. “If we don’t freeze to death first.”
Letty pursed her lips and shook her head. “You keep telling me you’re from Ohio, but I find that very hard to believe. Your blood must have gotten thinner since you moved to South Korea.”
“I guess so. I remember growing up when my friends and I would go sledding in just a sweater and jeans. Those were the days.” Ben leaned back against the headrest and sighed. “I haven’t been home for a visit in three years. What I wouldn’t give for a giant plate of pierogies.”
“Don’t even mention them.” Letty’s mouth started to water at the thought of the tasty dumplings. “I know we had my mom’s when she came to visit, but those are long gone. It’s a good thing I’m flying back to Pittsburgh in four days. If I don’t have one soon, I might go into withdrawal. There’s this one Mexican-Polish fusion food truck near my office called Buenos Rogies that makes them with jalapenos. Whew! You need a big glass of water when you eat those.”
“Stop. You’re killing me.” Ben groaned. “You’ll have to take me there some time.”
Letty paused and then quickly replied, “Sure! Next time you come home you should swing by Pennsylvania.”
“Who knows when that will be. The industry here keeps me running like a hamster on a wheel. There’s never a good time to take a vacation.”
“If you grew up in Cleveland, how did you end up in Seoul?”
“My dad’s brother is a bigwig at one of the country’s major TV networks, and he offered me a job as an intern one summer.”
“What do they call that in the dramas? A parachute? I never understood why.” Letty remembered the term that Koreans used to refer to someone who got a job through connections. She started to laugh but stopped when she saw the look on Ben’s face. “I’m sorry! I was just joking. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“It’s okay.” Ben’s expression belied his words as he shifted in his seat. “I guess you just hit a sore spot. South Koreans look down on people getting a job because they know somebody. Even though everyone does it.”
“That’s how I got my job at the law firm.” Letty nodded. “I went to high school with one of the attorneys.”
“I never planned to make this a permanent thing.”
“You mean you didn’t want to be in the entertainment industry?”
“No, I did. I was getting a degree in Film and Television Studies at Boston University when my uncle called. I had already completed my first year. This was supposed to be a summer internship and then back to school for the fall semester, but I was gaining such great hands-on experience in Korea that I stayed.”
“I can see how that would be hard to give up.”
“Yes, the practical production value is enormous, but I still miss the other side of it. I loved the theory, and screenwriting classes, and studying the works of great directors. Sometimes I feel my lack of education and think that maybe I am just a parachute.”
“Don’t be silly!” Letty swatted him on the arm. “I’ve seen how you are on the set. You keep track of a million little details, direct some of the scenes, and play translator for a clueless American. All without breaking a sweat. That takes talent.”
Ben didn’t look at her, and she could tell she had embarrassed him. They grew quiet and a gust of winter wind rattled the van as it blew by. Letty noticed a tingling in the tips of her fingers.
“So what are the first signs of frostbite?” She turned to Ben, glad to change the subject.
“Sorry!” Ben pulled out his phone. “I don’t know what’s taking so long. I’ll call the resort again.”
Letty couldn’t understand what he said as he talked to someone in Korean, but she noticed his volume rise. He hung up the phone and dropped it in his pocket.
“They sent someone to come for us but he got a flat tire on the way,” Ben said. “Now they have to send someone else to rescue us and him. It will be at least another twenty minutes.”
“Alone in the dark for that much longer?” Letty put her hands up to her cheeks and faked a thick Southern accent. “My reputation will be in shreds after tonight!”
Ben laughed but his eyes focused on her hands. “Where are the gloves I gave you earlier?” He reached out and took her fingers between his own.
“Huh?” Letty glanced down at her hands. “I must have lost them. I took them off when Ki Tae and I filmed the fireplace scene, and I’m not sure what happened after that. I’m sorry! I’ll buy you another pair.”
“The gloves don’t matter. But your fingers feel like tiny popsicles.” Ben rubbed them between his own cold hands.
How could one word make her so happy?
Tiny popsicles made her feel small and delicate and cherished somehow.
Ben stopped his life-giving massage and cleared his throat. “I know this is going to sound like a bad pickup line, and I’m running the risk of being accused of being a player yet again, but do you want to sit in the back seat?”
Letty raised her eyebrows at the question.
“I mean that we could cuddle together for warmth. No wait!” Ben corrected himself. “Huddle together for warmth. That sounds less provocative. We can share our body heat. Just by sitting together, of course. Nothing beyond that! I mean—”
Letty’s lips twitched as she listened to him dig the hole deeper and deeper until she decided to take pity on him.
“Can you please stop talking before we freeze to death?” She interrupted his nervous rambling. “I’m all for a huddle right now.”
They climbed through the cramped space between the two bucket seats in the front and sat on the long middle seat right behind them. Ben dug out Letty’s fuzzy pink blanket from the back of the van, and they wrapped it around both of their shoulders as they pressed their sides close together and waited for help to arrive.
“This would be perfect if we had some popcorn and a movie,” Letty said.
“Only if we could agree on what to watch. I’m not a rom-com kind of guy.”
“How about a classics kind of guy? The golden age of Hollywood: lavish technicolor musicals, dramatic book adaptations, gritty black-and-white film noir.”
“Now you’re speaking my language. Anything made before 1963 gets an automatic yes from me. The amount of work that those old Hollywood directors cranked out is staggering. In some ways it reminds me of the Korean industry, right now. When you’re just starting out, everybody has to work harder to establish themselves.” Ben cast a guilty glance her way. “I started talking about work again. Didn’t I?”
“You can’t help it.” Letty rubbed her hands up and down her arms and scooted a little closer to him. “You’ve already admitted it’s taken over your life. It must be hard to think about something else.”
“Work mode is set to silent.” Ben made a motion against the side of his head like he was flipping a switch. He stretched his arms out with a loud yawn and yanked them back under the blanket. “Let’s talk about you instead. We’ve been living in each other’s pockets for three weeks now, but I know very little about you. Almost all of our conversations revolve around the show, or Ki Tae.”
“Of course they do. I’m a stalker fan, remember? So what do you want to know?”
“What’s your favorite color?”
“Kelly Green. Sky Blue. Sunny Orange. And Cherry Red.”
“Can’t you narrow it down to one?” Ben laughed as he asked the question.
“Why should I? Who decided you can only have one favorite color?”
“True."
“What about you? Do you have a favorite color?”
“Not really.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It never seemed that important.”
“I don’t know how you made it through elementary school without picking a favorite,” Letty said. “But I guess I’ll let it go. Anything else you want to know?”
“Favorite food?”
“Anything but octopus.”
Ben laughed again. “Favorite song?”
“Only for you. No, wait! Sarang Sweet Sarang. Except when I’m feeling blue. Then it’s My Yeoja.”
Ben rolled his eyes. “So basically any song Ki Tae has ever sung.”
“Exactly! Any man I marry will have to have a high tolerance for K-pop.”
“Poor guy,” Ben murmured. “Don’t tell me you’re going to make him walk down the aisle to Only for You after you already used it in your reality wedding.”
“Of course not. Only for You is all about unrequited love. That wouldn’t apply to me and him.”
“You said him.” Ben turned his body and leaned against the frosty side window as he looked at her. The blanket stretched between them, but a bitter cold pocket filled the empty space where he used to sit. “Do you have a real life boyfriend waiting for you back in Pittsburgh?”
“What kind of man would be okay with his girlfriend ‘pretend marrying’ someone else?” Letty scoffed. “And if he was okay with it, I wouldn’t be okay with him. I want a guy who wants me all for himself.”
“Ever thought you might have found Mr. Right?” Ben's long fingers played with the button on his coat as he asked.
You mean besides you. Letty thought it in her head but didn’t say it out loud.
“I fall for someone pretty quick,” she admitted. “I’ve been in love at least a dozen times by now.”
“A dozen!” Ben looked up with a start. “Have you got that many exes?”
“Far from it.” Letty pulled her hand crocheted beanie down to protect her stinging ears from the cold. “If you’re talking exes, there wouldn’t even be a line of one.”
“I’m not following.”
“No ex-boyfriends. Zero. Zilch. Nada.”
Letty enunciated each word. His skeptical look told her he wasn’t buying it.
“Look,” she said, “I think they have a word for it in Korean. Mossol? Single-since-birth? That’s me.”
“But you said you’ve been in love a dozen times by now.” Ben pointed his finger at her nose. “Your story doesn’t add up.”
Letty pushed the annoying appendage away. “Sure. I’ve been in love. But that doesn’t mean they felt the same way about me.”
“You expect me to believe that a gorgeous girl like you has never had a boyfriend?” He twisted his lips in disbelief. “You’re crazy if you think I’m going to believe that.”
“First of all, thank you for the backhanded compliment.” Letty punched him in the shoulder and grinned. “But it’s true! I have a terrible habit of falling for guys that aren’t interested.”
Letty turned her face away and looked out the windshield as she remembered her long history of failed crushes.
“There was the high school jock that everyone and their mother was crazy about who only dated cheerleaders. And the guy at my part-time job who made me feel like the only girl in the world.” She looked back over as Ben listened quietly and shrugged. “Then I found out he made the girl who worked the other shift feel the exact same way.”
Letty sighed at the distant memory which no longer held any pain, only regret.
“Jerk,” Ben muttered under his breath.
“Mmmmm.” Letty nodded in agreement. “Then there was the guy in college that I was sure was the one! We liked the same things, places, music. He was sweet, smart, good looking. Everything was perfect.”
“But?” Ben nudged her with his shoulder to finish the story.
“But then I find out he was crazy about my roommate.”
“Ouch!”
“Yep. To him, I was just a good buddy for hanging out with, but my friend was the one he wanted. And it turned out she liked him, too.”
“Did you ever tell him how you felt?”
“Why should I?” Letty wrapped her side of the blanket a little tighter around her. She could see her cold breath like a fog in the moonlight whenever she spoke. “He liked her. She liked him. They were both happy. It would have been selfish of me to try and get in the way.”
“So what did you do?”
Letty paused. “I listened to my roomie gush about what a great boyfriend he was whenever she came home from a date. I helped him pick out meaningful presents for her on her birthday. And I was the third bridesmaid standing to the left of the happy couple on their wedding day.”
“Double ouch.” Ben grimaced.
“Not really.” Letty smiled as she shook her head. “I was over him by that point, and I felt truly glad for them. They were meant to be together.”
“But there must have been guys who liked you,” Ben broke in. “Ones that wanted to date you first.”
“Sure there were. The men in Pennsylvania aren’t blind after all.”
Ben groaned and she giggled at her own audacity.
“Sometimes they approached me when I was in the throes of a crush on someone else, and I gently turned them down. Sometimes I would actually go out on a few dates with them, but nothing beyond that. The timing was never right.” Letty held out both hands as if she was passing the conversational ball over to him. “What about you? Anybody special in Seoul or Cleveland?”
She held her breath as she waited for his answer.
“Yeah, right. Who has time to date? My life is crazy busy. The Korean entertainment industry doesn’t know the meaning of the word weekend. It’s go, go, go from the break of dawn until the early morning hours. Whenever I do get the occasional day off, I usually spend it sleeping and binge watching all the American shows I missed.”
Letty was relieved that he wasn’t dating, but disappointed that he didn’t seem very open to the idea. “That sounds exhausting. But I guess it doesn’t matter if it makes you happy. Does it?”
“Happy?” Ben’s expression changed. “I guess I haven’t thought that hard about it. Too busy.”
“No time like the present,” Letty goaded him. “Think about it now. When you look back on this time in thirty years, will you be satisfied with how you spent it or will you wish you had done something different?”
Ben crossed his arms in front of himself. “I wouldn’t say I’m unhappy. It’s just ...”
“Just?”
“It’s like this. You know those mornings where you’re in a rush to get to work and you skip breakfast, thinking you’ll grab something on the way?”
“I call that every Monday of my life.” Letty nodded.
“You go through a drive-thru, and plan to unwrap your sandwich whenever you get to a red light. But every light between there and your job is green and you end up driving the whole way without eating. When you finally get to a parking spot and take a bite, your food is cold and hard as a brick.”
Ben paused and Letty waited for him to continue as he looked up at the ceiling and blew out a breath.
“In the past three years, my life has been one green light after another. I know I should feel grateful, and there are tons of people who would love to be in the spot I’m in. But I still feel so...”
“Hungry?”
Ben gave a short, humorless laugh. “Yeah. Starving.”
Letty shivered involuntarily and Ben turned to look at her.
“Are you alright?”
“I think we’re starting to reach my Northerner freezing point,” she admitted.
Ben moved away from the window, threw his arm around her and pulled her close as he used his free hand to tuck the blanket more securely around her neck. Then he pulled out his phone to look at the time.
“This is crazy! Why aren’t they here by now?”
Letty wished she could enjoy being cuddled by such a good-looking guy, but the cold and the exhausting schedule of the day was catching up with her. She let her head drop onto his shoulder and shut her eyes.
“I’m sure they’ll be here soon,” she said in between yawns. She felt Ben’s head rest on top of hers, and she sighed in contentment. No need for dreams tonight. There was no way the Sandman could beat this moment.
