Museum of Second Chances

I had exactly one glass of wine before I drove over, which I counted as a triumph of restraint. There I was, Amelie, thirty-four years old, recently divorced, standing outside the staff entrance of the Harrington Museum of Natural History at eight on a Thursday night, clutching her purse like it might fly off. The building looked bigger after dark. Older. The stone lions by the front steps had that smug museum lion look, like they'd seen a lot of bad decisions over the decades.

"I shouldn't be here," I told the lion on the left. It did not argue.

Here is how I got to this point. My sister Ellen took me out for my birthday in September, got me talking about the years after the divorce, which was finalized last October, and I made the mistake of admitting I hadn't been on a single date. Not one. Eleven months. Ellen put her fork down and got the look she used to get before report cards.

"You know who's back in town, right?" she said.

I knew. Kenneth Hale. My one great college disaster. We'd had one intense semester together when I was twenty-one and he was twenty-two, and then it ended the way a paper airplane ends, badly and into a bush. I never got a clean explanation. He graduated and left and I let him.

Then last week an email showed up in my work inbox, of all places. He was doing the opening gala catering for the new dinosaur exhibit at my own museum. He'd heard from someone that I ran the collections there. Would I like a private preview, just the two of us, before the public opening? He had borrowed keys from a catering contact. He signed it "Ken" like we were people who still knew each other.

I said yes, which I regretted immediately, and then spent a week regretting it less, which is basically how I make all decisions now.

The staff door opened before I could talk myself into leaving. And there he was.

He looked the same and completely different, which I think is what people mean when they say that. Thirty-five now, broader in the shoulders, chef's jacket unzipped over a gray t-shirt, the same crooked front tooth I used to tease him about. He smiled and the whole hallway got less scary.

"You came," he said. "I honestly gave it fifty-fifty."

"Fifty-fifty on what?"

"That you'd stand me up. I would have deserved it."

"That's a very convenient thing to say to someone who didn't," I said, and he laughed, and God, the laugh was the same. I hated how fast my chest unknotted. Thirteen years of grudge, gone in one laugh.

"Come on back. Exhibit hall's through storage. Fair warning, it's dark in there, I only turned on half the lights."

He held up a big brass key ring, fanned it out like he was doing a card trick, and selected one with real confidence. Then he dropped it. Right on the concrete, where it rang once and shot off sideways under a steel storage rack loaded with crated taxidermy.

There was a pause.

"Well," he said.

"Don't," I said, already crouching.

"I was going to say I'll get it."

"You'll get stuck. You've been a chef for how many years? Your knees are sixty." I folded myself down next to the rack, which had about four inches of clearance and a decade of dust, and reached in blind. My fingers walked along the concrete until they found the cold brass. I came up with the key in one hand and gray dust up both forearms.

"See, still the practical one," Kenneth said. He handed me a paper napkin from his jacket pocket, folded, like he carried them the way other men carried a handkerchief. Of course he did. He'd always been ready for messes.

"I'm a curator. Dust is my whole job. Getting some on me is ironic, not tragic."

He unlocked the double doors and pushed them open, and the exhibit hall opened up in front of us, half-lit, blue-gray, enormous. The skeleton hung from the ceiling like it was mid-dive, a long-necked thing with the room built around it. Spotlights pooled on the floor cases. It was, I'll admit, a very good room. We'd spent three years and too much of the budget on it and it was worth every argument.

"Okay," Kenneth said quietly. "That's worth the drive alone."

"You haven't seen it lit properly," I said. "Come on, I'll walk you through."

So I did the tour-guide thing, which is the safest thing in the world for me. I talked about the cast of the femur and the pneumatic holes in the vertebrae and how the mount was engineered so it could be taken apart like furniture if we ever moved it. He listened. He actually listened, asked decent questions, leaned in to look at the skull cast with his hands clasped behind his back like a well-trained visitor.

"The dining hall at my restaurant has a trilobite over the bar," he said. "Fake, obviously. Now I feel like a fraud."

"You should. That's adorable."

He pointed past my hip at a floor case, the one with the small marine reptile, and his hand brushed my hip. Just the outside of it, through my jacket, one knuckle's worth of contact. Neither of us moved. The hallway air conditioning hummed somewhere above us.

"Sorry," he said.

"It's fine," I said, too fast, and we both looked at the fossil like it had called a meeting.

I moved along to the next case. There was a cable running along the baseboard there, part of the temporary lighting rig the install crew had left coiled, and my shoe caught the loop of it. The cable jumped, the case cord jumped with it, and the little acrylic donor plaque mounted on the wall above came loose at one corner and swung out, hanging by one screw.

"Oh no," I said. "No no no!"

"Got it," Kenneth said, and we both went for it, which is how two adults end up chest to chest in a dark corner of a museum, his arm above my head braced against the wall, my hand flat on his sternum, the plaque safe between us in his other hand. He caught it. Of course he caught it.

Neither of us stepped back.

"Nice catch," I said. My voice came out lower than I planned.

"Thanks. You're standing on my foot."

"Sorry." I didn't move off it right away, which he noticed, because he made a small sound that might have been a laugh.

"This is going how I feared," he said, "and how I hoped. Simultaneously."

"That's not a real sentence."

"Nothing tonight's been a real sentence." He was still holding the plaque. His face was very close and the light from the case below us lit half of it. "Amelie. I owe you an apology from about thirteen years ago. Can I pay it while we're trapped in my corner of the room, or do you want to keep giving the tour?"

I looked at the skeleton hanging above us, patient as anything, and then back at him.

"You can pay it," I said. "But you're carrying that plaque."

He did carry it. He carried it down the hall like it was a live grenade and set it on a cart by the freight door, face-up, screw side out. "There. My debt to the donor wall is paid."

"You can bill me," I said.

He looked around. "Is there somewhere to sit? I've been on my feet in a kitchen since six this morning, and I want to tell you this properly, not while braced against a wall like a fireman."

"There's a break room behind the conservation lab. Chairs. A fridge nobody should open."

"Perfect," he said. "I love a fridge nobody should open."

The break room was fluorescent and ugly, which was honestly a relief after all that blue drama. He sat in one of the plastic chairs, which complained under him, and I got us each a water from the vending machine because the coffee pot had a skin on it that I wasn't willing to discuss. He apologized first, which I hadn't expected.

"I panicked," he said. "That spring. You remember."

"I remember."

"I was twenty-two and you were going to Barcelona for the summer, and I decided the kindest thing was to be a jerk about it so it would hurt less for me. It didn't occur to me that you might just come back."

"I did come back," I said. "For two weeks. You'd already sublet your apartment."

"I know." He turned his water bottle in his hands. "I'd like to say I've thought about it every day since, but that's not true. I thought about it about four hundred days since. The rest I was busy."

"Four hundred," I said. "That's specific."

"I'm a chef. I count things."

I laughed, and while I was laughing I gestured with the water