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

We’d rehearsed our story over the phone. Hank and I had met here in St-Clovis County, after Hank had stopped for coffee at my café and we’d discovered that we were both avid fishermen. I’d showed him around Forked River Creek and we’d become friends. Of course it was a flimsy story shot full of holes like a fishing net indeed, but close enough to the truth to sound true. One thing we hadn’t discussed though, was fish.


I raked my mind for the creatures we’d caught and released that day we’d spent by Salmon River. But it couldn’t be salmon, no. Trout? “Brown trout, mostly,” I said, the name coming back to me. “Yeah.”


“Uh-huh.” Herman smoked and sipped his gin. “Right.”


Chapter 64