The breeze comes off the harbor with all the salt and brine of low tide, and Ned joins the crush of students winding through campus to their first day of classes. He needs a coffee. He needs a briefcase so he’s not hauling around his scuffed and worn backpack like he’s an undergrad. He also needs his phone to beep with the message he’s waited for all day, but when it finally buzzes in his pocket, he huffs out a sigh.
A favor, Chris has written in the newest email to arrive. Ned purses his lips, stepping out of the swirls of students under one of the quad’s towering maple trees. Definitely not what he’s waiting for, but he reads it anyway, Chris’s explanation of a professor out on emergency leave, an open course and Ned, if you could teach it, please.
He tips his head back and stares up through the branches at the blue, brilliant sky. The leaves are just starting to turn with the first blush of red and gold on the highest limbs. The fall foliage comes earlier in Maine than he always expects it to, no matter that he’s been on this campus for five autumns now.
A favor. It’s an intro course, one Ned can teach in his sleep. He did teach it in his sleep last year, those days when he’d roll out of bed after tossing fitfully all night, his eyes gritty and stinging. Do it, he tells himself. He can email Chris back, go get his coffee, and get on with his evening. Maybe even afford a briefcase one of these days. His thumb hovers over his keyboard, but he shoves his phone into his pocket instead of typing out a reply.
His phone doesn’t buzz again as he jogs across the street, lifting a hand in thanks to a sedan that slows for him. He pulls his shirt from its neat tuck into his slacks and shoulders open the café door. The bells hanging from the knob jingle their cheerful peal over the chatter of students and summer’s last groups of tourists with their beers and coffees. Ned’s stool sits empty against the bar, and he drops his backpack next to it, hiking his elbows on the bar and leaning over it to catch Patrick’s eye.
“Hey,” he says. And then louder, “Hey, Pat, your phone, man.”
“Jen didn’t send you anything?” Pat asks. He dumps an inch of foam from the top of a pint glass, bubbles sliding down into a pool of froth on the metal tray beneath the taps.
“Let me just see it for a second,” Ned says.
“What do we say?”
“And a coffee.”
“We say ‘please,’” Pat says, but tosses his phone over.
Leave it alone, she’ll text you if she texts you, Pat’d said that morning, batting Ned’s phone out of his hands, while Baxter snuffled at their feet, eager for his walk.
Now, Pat taps a finger on the bar to get Ned’s attention. “How was your first class?”
“Fine.” Ned types in Pat’s passcode. Half the students hadn’t shown up, and half of the ones who had will probably drop his course before it meets next. Ned will have a lecture hall full of new faces, and he’ll have to go over the syllabus once again, but it was fine—and fine’s been as good as it gets for so long that Ned’s learned to not complain.
