Chapter 6: The Loan

Lasse's POV

The tow driver came Tuesday at seven, and he would not touch my trailer.

He stood by his flatbed in the gray light with his cap in his hands.

"I took the call, Lasse," he said. "I looked at the order. Then I thought about my mother, who ate on that dock Saturday."

"You've got a job to do."

"I've got a mother to go home to," he said. "Tell the mayor's office I couldn't find the hitch."

He drove off and left me standing there with my coffee going cold.

It was a small thing.

It was also the third small thing in four days, and I knew what they added up to.

Nobody in Gunflint Bay was going to stop the mayor.

Plenty of them were going to stand next to him and not help.

I went into the smokehouse and looked at the books.

I had them by heart already.

Nine years ago Torvald Lindholm had lent me thirty-eight thousand dollars to buy the building and the first smoker.

I had paid it down for nine years.

Twenty-two thousand was left, and the note had a clause in it that I had signed because I was twenty-seven and stupid and grateful.

He could call the whole balance on thirty days' notice, for any reason he liked.

He had never needed to, until a girl with a gray-eyed stare took a microphone at the Lodge.

I had stood in the back of that room on Friday night with my arms folded, ashamed.

I had been ashamed for eighteen months.

I had handed Arne Fjeld's keys to the man who wanted them because I could not afford what saying no would cost.

Arne had taught me to plane a keel.

He had let me sleep in the loft over his shop for two summers, when I had nothing, and he had never once asked what I owed him.

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Best Friend Took My Wedding, So I Fed the Whole Town from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.