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

“But hey, baby, the thought was nice.”23


Around three in the afternoon the next day, Shirley poked her face in my screen door. Dressed in a lovely purple blouse and a long flowing black skirt, she stood on my back porch with Troy. “Hello, hello,” she called out.


I pulled my oven mitts off and gestured for them to come in. “You look great. Going somewhere?”


“Well, it’s Saturday and Roy and I have a date. Troy is gonna spend the day with his cousins, aren’t you, little guy?” She was surveying the mess that was my kitchen. “You’ve been baking and cooking all afternoon?”


I wiped my brow and stopped moving for the first time in hours. “Shirley, I haven’t slept since I hung up with Hank yesterday afternoon. I’m a hot mess.” I winked at Troy. “Mister went a little crazy in here, didn’t he?”


“Yeah…” Troy went to the counter and stood on his tiptoes, clearly searching for the best thing to put in his mouth. He almost reached the counter now. He’d grown a few inches over the summer.


Chapter 60