The Reunion Visit

There's a joke in here somewhere, me standing in the same hallway where Hamish Wilton left me sitting on a cold stone bench twenty-one years ago, and now they're paying me four figures to fill this building with balloons and name tags. I was twenty-one that night, he was twenty-two, and I sat outside the library for almost two hours with my jacket buttoned wrong because I'd dressed in such a hurry to meet him. He never came. I found out three days later from a girl in my dorm that he'd told people he didn't even know who I was talking about. That one stuck, the way small cruelties do, like a splinter you can't reach with the tweezers.

Now I'm forty-two, I run Danforth Events out of a converted garage in Raleigh, and I've got a van full of folding chairs, sixty centerpieces, and a printing error on three hundred name tags that says Class of 2004 in a font that looks sterile and dated. My knees make a sound when I squat that didn't exist at twenty-one. I'm stacking boxes outside the lecture hall door when I hear footsteps on the linoleum, that squeaky-dry campus footsteps sound I'd forgotten completely until right this second, and I look up and there he is.

I want to tell you I said something devastating. I did not. I said, "You're early. Registration's at ten tomorrow."

"Harper." He said my name like he was testing whether the floor would hold his weight. Hamish Wilton, forty-three now, gray coming in at the temples, still built like someone who carries his own lumber, which I happen to know he does because I looked him up at two in the morning three weeks ago when the alumni office sent me the guest list and I saw his name at the top of it. Divorced. One grown daughter. Architect in Asheville. I closed the laptop and felt like an idiot and did it again the next night anyway.

"That's me," I said. "Harper Danforth, professional balloon inflator, back on the scene."

"I heard you were doing this event. Kim Mensah mentioned it at the dentist's office, of all places." He shifted a leather portfolio from one hand to the other, and I watched him do the thing he used to do, this little adjustment he makes when he's stalling, like a man straightening pictures on a wall that are already straight. "I've been hoping I'd run into you, actually. I wanted to say, well. I wanted to say I'm sorry. For back then. The way I handled things. It was gutless and I've known it was gutless for twenty-one years."

Well. There it was, delivered in a dark hallway at seven at night, twenty-one years late with no interest accrued. I felt a few things at once, and I'm not going to sort them for you, because I couldn't sort them for myself. There was the old hurt, which turns out doesn't die, it just moves to a smaller apartment and stops answering the phone. And underneath that there was something newer and better, which was the flat, calm knowledge that I am not twenty-one anymore, sitting on a bench with my jacket buttoned wrong. I'm the one holding the master key to this building.

"Gutless," I said. "That's a good word for it. You know what's funny, I had a whole list of words I'd picked out for you over the years, and gutless wasn't even in the top three."

He laughed, one short uncomfortable breath of a laugh. "I deserve whatever the other three were."

"You do, and you're not getting them. They're mine, I paid for them." I hoisted a box off the dolly, banner materials, heavy as sin, and he reached for it automatically, and I let him take it, because I'm not so committed to a grudge that I'll throw out my back out of spite. "You can make yourself useful if you want. I've got sixty centerpieces and a bad back, and the custodian left at six."

"I'd like that," he said, and I swear his shoulders came down an inch, like he'd been braced for me to have him arrested.

So we carried. Boxes of programs, the welcome banner, the goodie bags stuffed with pens nobody will keep and koozies everybody will fight over. He didn't talk much while we worked, and neither did I, and the hallway smelled like floor wax and old radiator heat, that specific Briarwood smell that hit me like a photograph when I'd walked in this afternoon. I got the lights on in the lecture hall, half of them, the ones that work since the renovation that everybody hated. Tiered seats, the big chalkboard they kept for sentimental reasons, and up top the row where it happened.

Because that's the thing I haven't said yet. We met in this room. October of our junior year, some department mixer where the wine came in plastic cups, and I was twenty-one and he was twenty-two and we ended up alone up in the top row because I'd gone up there to escape a boy named Hugo who would not stop explaining his thesis. Hamish followed me up, sat down one seat away, and asked me what I was reading, and I said a menu, and he laughed so hard he had to put his head on the desk. Two hours later he kissed me, and it was a good kiss, an actually good kiss, and then over the next three weeks there were three more, and then the library bench, and then nothing, forever, until tonight.

He set the last box down by the podium and looked up at the top row, and I watched him figure out where he was standing, watched it land on his face.

"You remember," I said.

"Harper." Same tone as before, careful, like the floor again. "I think about it more than I should admit."

"Do you." I hopped up and sat on the edge of the stage, because my feet hurt and because I wanted to be looking down at him for once, just literally, just this once. "Here's what I remember. I remember you were good at kissing and terrible at phone calls. I remember the bench outside the library, which by the way has been replaced with a plastic one, they've ruined the whole aesthetic. And I remember a girl from my dorm telling me he'd never heard of me, which was a real impressive trick, since he'd had his tongue in my mouth the week before."

"That wasn't..." He stopped himself, took a breath, started over. "That was cowardice stacked on cowardice. I'd decided I was too young to be that happy, which is a stupid thing I believed for about a decade. I've got a daughter who's nineteen, and I've told her the story, without names, as a cautionary tale. What you don't do to people."

"Look at you, rehabilitated." I pulled a centerpiece out of the box and started fluffing the fake eucalyptus, mostly so my hands had a job. "For the record, you don't get forgiven in a hallway on a work night. That's not how it goes. You get forgiven when I say so, and I haven't decided."

"Fair," he said. "I'm not asking for a decision tonight. I'm asking if I can help you finish setup, and then maybe buy you a drink at the inn, and then leave you alone if that's what you want."

The air in that hall had gotten thick, I don't know when exactly. Maybe when he said happy, maybe when he looked up at the top row and didn't pretend not to know why. The heating system clanked somewhere in the walls, and the half-lights made the chalkboard look green-black, and I sat there on the stage edge with eucalyptus in my hands doing arithmetic I already knew the answer to. Twenty-one years is a long time. I've been married to my work, he's been married to somebody else, we're both grown now, grown past grown, and he came back to say gutless and mean it.

"Top row," I said, standing up. "If you're going to help, you can start where the good work happened. That's where the banner goes, and I'm not climbing that ladder twice."

He got the ladder without being told, which was something, and as he climbed I looked at the back of his neck and thought, well, Harper, here's a night you didn't plan in the spreadsheet.

He got the banner hung crooked, which I fixed from the bottom of the ladder by yelling directions like a foreman, and when he came back down we stood there in the half-light with the thing done, sixty centerpieces boxed, three hundred name tags stacked in their wrong-font glory, and nothing left between us but the obvious. He adjusted his portfolio under his arm, which I'd already learned was his tell, his little security blanket, and I decided I was done letting him hide behind it.

"Put that down," I said.

He set it on the stage edge like it might bite him. "Harper, if I've overstepped, the drink offer stands and so does the leaving alone."

"You haven't overstepped. That's the problem. Twenty-one years ago you understepped, and I have never once forgiven it, not really, not all the way, and I want you to know that before anything else happens tonight." I was sitting back on the stage edge again, boots swinging a little, forty-two years old with knees that creaked when I squatted and a garage office in Raleigh and no ring on my finger, ever, and I looked him dead in the eye. "I've carried it. Every date where I flinched when a guy went quiet on me. Every time somebody's phone went to voicemail I felt twenty-one again, standing at that bench for two hours in the cold like an idiot."

"I regretted it before you'd even gotten back to your dorm that night," he said. "I want that understood. Not as an excuse. I called your hall phone and hung up twice. That's the level of gutless we're dealing with."

"Two hangups." I laughed, and it came out meaner than I meant. "Should I count those as the fourth and fifth kiss? Since they were from you and all."

He didn't laugh. He just stood there at the bottom of the stage looking up at me, and his hair had silver in it now at the temples and he was still the only man I'd ever let see me nervous, because he was