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

That was the reason I’d been put on this earth, I knew that now. To love Hank Clift.


And even Herman, as tough as he was, couldn’t scare me away from his river-dreaming son.25


When I slipped back out, Herman was walking around my backyard, puffing on a cigarette, his face hidden under the cover of darkness. I stepped down to him and stopped close. I glanced at Shirley’s house, but her windows were all black. For a moment, I wondered how her date with Roy had gone. Then I remembered that I was standing next to Hank’s father, in my yard. It seemed that we were from different worlds he and I, but were we really? I hadn’t known my own father, but maybe he’d been a little like Herman?


“Debbie used to have a garden,” Herman said, not looking over at me. “It was a thing she did. Spent her summer days fussing around in it. Those are my memories of her, her face under a big ol’ straw hat.”


Chapter 65