The Off-Season Favor

Roland Dawkins was forty-four years old and he could tell you exactly what any given Tuesday was going to look like. Wake up at six-thirty. Coffee, black, standing at the counter because sitting down felt like a commitment. Walk four blocks down Harbor Street to the pharmacy, past the boarded-up clam shack and the arcade with the plywood over the windows, and let himself in at eight sharp to count pills until the town trickled in with its aches.

That was the entire rhythm of it. Filling scripts, answering the phone, telling Mrs. Petrucci for the ninth time that no, the generic was the same drug, it really was. Richard, the owner, had employed him for twelve years and in twelve years Roland had maybe called out sick twice. Richard liked to say Roland was the only man in Saltmire who had never once surprised him. Roland took it as a compliment. Some nights, alone in his apartment above the laundromat with the dryers thumping through the floor until ten, he wasn't so sure.

He'd been dating on and off since he was twenty-two, which was a polite way of saying he'd been going to dinner with strangers for over two decades and never found one worth keeping. Sensible men didn't keep people, he supposed. Sensible men kept ledgers.

Saltmire in late November was a town that had been turned off at the wall. The boardwalk was boarded up. The Wreck, the one dive bar that stayed open year-round, glowed orange at the end of the street like a pilot light. Everything else was shutters and salt rot and the wind coming off the water hard enough to make you walk with your chin down.

It was a Tuesday, ten minutes to close, when the bell over the door jangled and a man half-fell into the pharmacy.

Roland looked up from the counter. He knew the face, sort of. Young guy, maybe early thirties, one of the electricians who'd been rewiring the old Harlow house all fall. He'd come through the line a few times, cold medicine, bandages, that kind of thing. Darren, the name tag on his jacket said. Darren Young.

"Please tell me you're not closed," the guy said, leaning on the counter like the floor had betrayed him.

"We've got ten minutes. What do you need?"

"Steroid shot. Asthma's gone sideways, I've been breathing like a leaky tire all day." He wheezed a little to demonstrate, which was unnecessary and also convincing. "The clinic closed at five. Urgent care is in Rockport and I don't have a car tonight."

Roland was already pulling up his file. "You've got no insurance on file."

"Yeah, well." Darren gave a shrug that cost him a cough. "Job's cash work right now. So."

So. There it was. The co-pay on the injection and the admin fee came to fifty-eight dollars, more than a cash electrician probably wanted to part with two days before payday. Roland looked at the clock, looked at the guy bent over his counter trying not to wheeze, and did the least sensible thing he'd done in years.

"I'll waive it," he said. "Just this once. I'll write it in the log as a favor and Richard can chew me out Monday."

Darren stared at him. "Seriously?"

"Don't make it a habit. Sit down before you fall down."

The shot took four minutes. Darren flexed his arm and breathed like a man rediscovering air, and he grinned at Roland on the way out, a crooked, easy grin that did something unfair to the lighting in the pharmacy.

"You didn't have to do that, man. I'll get you back, I swear."

"Don't worry about it," Roland said, which was what sensible people said.

* * *

A week later, at eleven at night, somebody knocked on Roland's door.

Nobody knocked on Roland's door at eleven at night. The laundromat downstairs was dark, the street was empty, and he stood in his kitchen in his robe wondering if he should answer it at all. Then he looked through the peephole and there was Darren, hood up, shoulders white with sea fog, holding an envelope.

Roland opened the door on the chain first, because forty-four years of sensible. "It's eleven o'clock."

"I know. I'm sorry. I figured you'd be up, the light's on." Darren held up the envelope. "This is yours. And the thing is, it's not money."

Well, that was a new sentence. Roland unhooked the chain but didn't step back. "What does that mean?"

"It means I cashed my check today and I put what I owe you in there, but it's not what I came to offer." Darren shifted his weight, and up close he looked younger and more nervous than he did under the fluorescents at the pharmacy. "Can I say it out here or are you gonna make me stand in the fog?"

"You're not coming in," Roland said. "Just say whatever it is."

Darren took a breath. "The favor. I want to pay it back with a night. Me, my body, whatever you want, however you want it. That clears the debt."

"You're offering to sleep with me. To settle a fifty-eight dollar co-pay."

"Fifty-eight with the fee," Darren said, like that was the unbelievable part. "And yeah. I am. Say no if you want, that's fine, I'll leave the envelope in your mailbox and never bring it up again. But I've been thinking about it all week and I'd rather do it this way than owe you."

"No," Roland said.

Darren nodded, no argument, and turned to go.

And here was the stupid part, the part Roland would chew on for weeks after. He didn't shut the door. He stood there in the gap with the fog rolling past his ankles and the envelope warm in his own hand now, because at some point Darren had pressed it into it, and he watched the guy get four steps down the stairs before anything resembling a thought arrived.

The thought was this: nobody had offered Roland anything reckless in twenty-two years. Nobody had looked at him, a man who counted pills and wore a robe at eleven, and decided he was worth a bad idea. He had been sensible so long that sensible had stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like a diagnosis.

"Darren."

The guy turned around on the bottom step, hood dripping.

"Christ," Roland said, mostly to himself. "Get in here before you drown."

Darren came back up the stairs two at a time, and Roland had a wild moment of wondering what exactly he'd just agreed to, but the door was open and the cold was in and it was done.

Inside, it got awkward fast, the way these things do. Darren dripped on the mat and looked around at the apartment like it was a museum of a very careful life: the neat bookshelves, the one chair, the dishes dried and stacked. Roland hung the envelope on the hook by the door because he couldn't think of anything else to do with it, and they sat down, Darren on the couch, Roland on the arm of the opposite chair, an entire coffee table of nothing between them.

Silence. The dryers downstairs were off. A gull somewhere out in the dark made a sound like a rusty hinge.

"So," Darren said, then stopped.

"So," Roland said.

"You want me to say something first? Because I can, I just don't know what."

"Maybe you start by explaining why. Actually why. A guy doesn't offer what you offered over fifty-eight dollars."

Darren leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and studied the rug. "You want the honest version? Since September I've been coming through your line. You always say my name off my prescriptions, you remember the elbow thing I had last winter, you asked how the Harlow job was going.