Two years ago, Chris and his boyfriend left the city to settle in a small town at the US-Canada border. Eager to start a new life, Chris bought the Frontier Café, but a year later, his boyfriend dumped him, leaving Chris the only openly gay man in town. Nowadays he's resigned to a life of romantic solitude.<br><br>Hank spent the last years traveling through the country for his job as a water plant engineer. Deeply closeted, he's careful about the men he meets. Like the rivers he studies, he runs fast through the land.<br><br>In town only for a few weeks, Hank is intent on getting the job done and returning home out west to take care of his father. But Chris’s warm manner and decadent desserts are no match for Hank’s defense mechanisms. For the first time in his life, he finds himself wanting to go with the flow.

No River Wide Enough

He glanced over at me and frowned. “Is that guy, the water plant guy, your boyfriend?”


I tensed a little. “Yeah…you could say that.”


I didn’t feel comfortable discussing my love life with a seventeen-year-old boy. Yet, I also knew how thirsty Donnie was for knowledge. For sharing a moment of truth with another gay man. “Hank’s father needs him and so he had to go back home to Washington State to take care of things.”


Donnie seemed to be mulling this over. “I’m getting out of here. Gonna go to Montreal or maybe New York. There’s no way I’m staying in this shitty place.”


That was the first reflex of any gay man living in a small town. I wasn’t going to rain on his parade. “Okay, but trust me, if you wanna enjoy the metropolitan life, you’re gonna need a little more than a kitchen salary.”


“Yes, but I was an analyst for the city. I have a bachelor’s degree in finances.”


Chapter 41