BECK
“What time you heading out?”
Cole sat at the kitchen island, drinking coffee, looking every bit like the history professor from Columbia that he was.
“About an hour.”
“You should stay. Classes are over for the semester, right?”
“Technically, yes. But I have some things to wrap up. I’m also co-authoring a paper and am meeting with a colleague about it Wednesday morning. It’s a big one, so I want to be there in person.”
“Any word on tenure?”
Making tenure at an Ivy League school, like his father, had been Cole’s goal as long as I could remember. His family had moved from Cedar Falls to New Haven when we were twelve when his dad was offered a job at Yale. Not long after that, Cole started talking about doing the same when the rest of us were still toilet papering houses on Halloween.
I poured myself a coffee.
“Not yet,” he said, tapping his mug. “But the committee’s reviewing my file this summer. This paper could tip the scales.”
“Do you ever wish you could stay?”
We’d asked him before. It was a question Cole typically evaded.
He rubbed the back of his neck. “Sometimes I wonder what it would’ve been like if I’d stayed here. Opened a history tour business or something ridiculous like that. But then I remember I’m two publications away from tenure…” He trailed off.
Someone must have spiked his coffee. It was the most I’d gotten from him in a long time, and it felt… important.
“Why is a history tour business ridiculous?”
He pushed his glasses up, as if needing to see to answer.
“In a place like Cedar Falls?”
“Or anywhere.”
Cole shrugged. “I don’t have any desire to move… anywhere.”
“But you would come back here?” I pressed.
Sighing, as if the conversation bored him, even though that was just one of his tactics that signaled he was uncomfortable with the conversation, he didn’t answer.
That was more like it.
For a second I thought I’d fallen down the rabbit hole and would see a tiny door appear any second. Maybe I was the one whose coffee was spiked. After last night, I didn’t know up from down.
“I get why people move out. But for me, this town has everything I could need,” I pitched. “The guys. Good beer. Good fishing. Good place to raise a family.”
Cole’s head popped up.
“What the hell has gotten into you?”
It was true that raising a family had never really been on my radar.
“Mae,” I said. “This is going to sound like some Hallmark movie?—”
“Oh, man, you’ve got the wrong guy to spill your guts to.”
I forged ahead, not giving a shit if Cole wanted to hear it or not. “But I want to be a better man for her. That there’s any possibility to be with her… she’s just worth it.”
