The Curator's Choice

I turned fifty-two on a Thursday, and that Friday night my boyfriend of three years asked me to pretend we had never met. That was his birthday present to me, or mine to him, depending on how you counted it, because the plan had been his idea and the wanting was all mine.

Let me back up. My name is Deirdre, I am fifty-two, and I run the history museum in Millbrook, the little inland town where I have lived most of my adult life. Collin runs the feed store on Depot Street. He is forty-eight, tall, quiet, the kind of man who fixes things before you mention them. We met at a town council meeting three years ago, when I was forty-nine, over an argument about whether the old grain elevator should come down. I won the argument. He asked me to dinner anyway. We have been together ever since, and somewhere in those three years I had started to feel like a fixture, like one of the butter churns in my own exhibit hall. Comfortable. Dustable. Not exactly seen.

I told Sharon about it, because Sharon has waited tables at The Welcome Plate for twenty years and we have been friends since we both volunteered at the church fair, and because you have to tell somebody. She agreed that Collin was a good man but that a woman likes to be pursued once in a while, and she said it with the authority of a woman who has watched a whole town's courtships from behind a coffee pot. Then I told Collin, carefully, on a Sunday, and he did not get defensive or hurt the way I had half feared. He listened. He rubbed his jaw and looked out the window at the yard for a while, and then he said, all right, let's do something about it.

What he proposed was this. On a Friday evening, we would arrive at The Welcome Plate separately, fifteen minutes apart. I would be a stranger. He would be a stranger. He would have to come over and introduce himself and win me over from nothing, from scratch, the way nobody had to do anymore because we already shared a bathroom and a mortgage. Sharon, who knows about the plan and is delighted by it beyond all reason, would play along and seat me like any customer. He picked Friday because the diner is quiet then, the farmers market crowd not yet arrived from the church fairgrounds, and the weekend people not in yet.

I want to note here that this was all agreed to ahead of time, plainly, both of us sober and clear about it, and that either of us could have called the whole thing off with no hard feelings. I say that not because anyone would doubt it but because a scheme like this only works when both people actually want it, and we did. It was not a fix for anything broken. It was a game we chose, and choosing it felt like the point.

So on that Friday I got ready the way I had not gotten ready in a long time. I put on the burgundy dress I bought two birthdays ago and almost never wear because it is too nice for the museum. I did my hair properly. I wore the little earrings Collin gave me our first Christmas together. I looked at myself in the mirror over the dresser and thought, well, would you pick you? And then I decided that was his problem for the evening, not mine, and I picked up my coat.

I parked around the corner from the diner, because part of the fun was that nobody else in that building could know whose car was whose. At five minutes to seven I stood on the sidewalk in the cold and made myself breathe. It is ridiculous how nervous I was. I have given talks to two hundred schoolchildren. I have stood in front of the town council with a microphone and a slideshow. And here I was, fifty-two years old, palms sweating outside a diner I have eaten in a hundred times, because a man I love was going to pretend not to know me.

I went in at seven exactly. The bell over the door did its little jangle. The Welcome Plate looks the way it has looked since before I moved here, red vinyl booths, a long counter with swivel stools, a pie case glowing near the register. There were maybe four tables occupied. Collin was in the back booth, and I spotted him the way you spot anything you love, instantly and against your will, and then I made myself look away and un-see him. He had a menu up in front of his face, pretending to read it, and he had worn a blue button-down shirt I had not seen on him before, which I suspect he bought for the occasion, and his hair was combed different. It was a small, foolish, wonderful effort and it made my chest hurt a little.

Sharon was working the counter. She saw me and her whole face did a thing, a wink folded inside a professional smile, and she said, real loud, the way waitresses talk, "Evening, hon. Counter or booth?"

"Counter, please," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I expected.

She walked me past the register and parked me on a stool about halfway down, which I understood was stagecraft, because it put me squarely in the sightline of the back booth. She set down a napkin and silverware and poured my coffee without my asking, because of course she knows how I take it, cream, no sugar, and the familiarity of that almost broke the spell right there. I had to remind myself that to Collin, back there behind his menu, I was nobody. A stranger in a burgundy dress. It was a strange feeling, being unknown in a place where everyone knows me, and I found I liked it more than I should have.

I sipped the coffee and looked at the chalkboard menu even though I could recite it. Turkey club. Meatloaf on Fridays. The lemon meringue that Sharon always pushes on Thursdays because it has to move. Behind me I heard the menu in the back booth come down and set on the table. I heard boots on the linoleum. I did not turn around. That took discipline. The boots came closer, slowed, stopped.

"Is this seat taken?" he said.

I turned on the stool, slow, the way you do when a stranger asks and you are deciding about them. Collin stood there with his hands at his sides and a nervous smile that was half acting and half real, and I knew that smile, I have known it for three years, and it still worked on me. That is the thing I had forgotten. It still worked.

"It's a stool," I said. "Stools don't get taken. They get borrowed."

He laughed, and it came out higher than his real laugh, and I could tell the nerves were genuine. That did something for me, I will admit. A forty-eight-year-old man who owns a feed store and once talked down a loose bull at the fairgrounds, standing there nervous over a woman he already lives with. "Mind if I borrow it then?"

"Go ahead," I said, and gave him the stool next to mine, one up, which kept a polite little gap and made it feel like an overture instead of a given.

He settled onto it and put his elbows on the counter and looked at me sideways. "Collin," he said, and put out his hand.

I shook it. His hand is a working hand, calloused in the places feed sacks and fence wire put callouses, and I have held it a thousand times, and this time I held it like a fact I was just learning. "Deirdre," I said.

"That's not a name you hear every day," he said. "I'd remember it."

"Maybe you've heard it and forgotten," I said, and sipped my coffee, coy as anything, and he grinned at the counter the way a man does when he has been scored on and does not mind.

"I'm in town selling," he went on. "Agricultural supplies. Fencing, feed, that line of things. I'm passing through." This was the fiction we had agreed on, that he was a traveling man, and he delivered it with the smoothness of a boy at a school recital, meaning with visible effort, and it was charming. "I saw you come in and I thought, well. Somebody ought to buy that woman a piece of pie."

I looked at him over the rim of my cup. "That's a fast line for a stranger."

"I've been rehearsing it in the truck for twenty minutes," he said, and then looked stricken, because it was too honest, and I laughed, a real laugh, out loud in the diner, and Sharon down at the register turned around and pretended very hard to be counting straws.

"That was terrible," I told him.

"It was," he agreed. "Do I get points for honesty or lose them?"

"Undecided," I said. "Ask me again in a bit."

He flagged Sharon down and ordered a slice of the apple, two forks, because he had apparently decided that was the smoothest move available, and Sharon gave him a look of pure pretend-annoyance and went to cut it. And I sat there on that stool in my too-nice dress with my coffee going lukewarm, feeling watched and wanted and unknown all at once, and thought that three years in I had apparently never once been bored of this man, only of the shape our days had taken. The pie came. He pushed the plate toward the middle of the counter so it sat between us, an equal distance from both of us, which I took to mean he was playing fair.

"So," he said, and picked up his fork. "Tell me about Millbrook. I just got here. I don't know a soul."

And so I got to do the thing I like best, which is talk about Millbrook to a captive audience, except this audience was not captive at all, he was leaning in, elbow on the counter, fork resting on the plate like he had nowhere else to be in the world.

"Small town," I said. "About two thousand people if you count the outlying farms. Inland, so no tourists to speak of. The one thing we have is history."

"What kind of history?"

"The good kind. The kind nobody in town pays attention to." I told him about the grain elevator, which I could not help, because the grain elevator is always where I start. Built in 1911, tallest wooden structure in the county for thirty years, and the reason the town sits where it sits, because the railroad put a spur in for it and everything else grew around that spur like a vine around a post. "There's a fight about it right now, actually. Some people want it torn down. Says it's an eyesore."

"What do you say?"

"I say the people who call it an eyesore have never looked at it properly." I said it with more edge than a stranger warranted, and he noticed, and instead of backing off he leaned in a little more.

"You sound like somebody with a stake in it."

"I run the history museum," I said. "So yes. A stake!"

And here is where I have to be honest about the flutter, because he did not do what most men do when a woman says she runs the museum. Most men say something polite about it being interesting and then change the subject. Collin, playing a stranger, put his fork down and looked at me with full attention, the way he used to at that first council meeting, and said, "A curator. That figures. You've got knowing eyes. The kind that actually see a building before they have an opinion about it."

Knowing eyes. I am fifty-two years old and I have been complimented on my patience, my organization, my dedication to local archives, and exactly zero times in my adult life has anybody said anything about my eyes that made my ears go warm. I picked up my fork and took a bite of pie I did not taste and thought, well. Well, well.

"You think so?" I said, which was fishing, and I knew it was fishing, and I fished anyway.

"I know so," he said. "You looked at me like you were filing me somewhere. Cross-referenced."

"That's just how I look. I'm not filing you."

"Then what were you doing?"

"Deciding if you were worth the stool," I said, and he laughed his fake laugh again, the higher one, and I was starting to enjoy that laugh, the way you enjoy a child's drawing of a horse, technically wrong and completely winning.

Sharon came by with the coffee pot and topped us both off without being asked, which is her way, and gave me a look over his head that I pretended not to see. Twenty years she has waited tables here and she has never once in my memory been subtle about anything. Then she drifted back to the register and I heard her pick up a rag and start wiping a counter that was already clean, and I understood she was going to stay within earshot, and the strange thing is I did not mind that either. It felt like having a second set of eyes on me, witnesses to the fact that a man was buying me pie and calling my eyes knowing.

"So the elevator," he said. "Somebody ought to fight for it. You'd think."

"Somebody is. Has been. For years."

"Winning?"

"Lately, yes. There was a fellow at a council meeting, three years back now, wanted it gone. Big voice about it. I stood up and gave him the numbers. What it would cost to demolish, what it