I Stripped to Keep My Boyfriend in School, and He Sold Me to the Man My Brother Died Owing novel · Chapter 19 of 24
Chapter 19: Ice House
Iris's POV
I took him to the ice house on the last Saturday in March, and I did not tell him why until the door was shut.
The bay had frozen in January and held.
It stood three feet thick from the Duluth shore out to the ore docks, white and windblown, with a village of little shacks scattered across it like dropped dice.
My father had a house out there.
It was plywood, painted green, ten feet by six, with a propane stove and a bunk against the back wall.
I had not been in it since he died.
I drove us out on the plowed road in my mother's old Buick with the heater going.
Toby sat in the passenger seat, enormous, with his knees against the dash.
He had asked twice where we were going, and I had said, "You'll see."
I parked at the end of the road, and we walked the last two hundred yards with the wind coming off the lake like a slap.
The green shack stood alone with a drift up one wall.
I found the key on a nail, where my father had always left it.
Nobody in West Duluth ever took anything off a nail.
I opened the door.
Inside it smelled of cold plywood and old kerosene.
There were two little windows and the bunk with a wool blanket folded on it, and a rack of rods on the wall.
I lit the stove.
It caught on the second match with a soft blue roar, and the little room began to warm.
Toby stood in the doorway with the white glare behind him.
"This was your father's," he said.
"Yes."
"Matti told me about it," Toby said. "He said you used to come out here and not catch anything."
"I caught plenty," I said. "I just didn't tell him."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of I Stripped to Keep My Boyfriend in School, and He Sold Me to the Man My Brother Died Owing are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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