The Cold Breakfast Bride novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Hot Breakfast
Abel didn't blink.
"Name it."
"Ruthie gets asked too."
He looked at me for a second.
Then he turned toward the door.
"She's in the truck. She was told to stay in the truck."
The bell rang.
"I'm out of the truck!"
Ruthie came across the tiles at a dead run in her purple raincoat.
She had a new front tooth coming in, half grown.
She climbed onto the stool next to me and looked at the box, and at the clean plate, and at her father in my apron.
"Did you ask her?"
"I asked her."
"Did she say yes?"
"She said yes if you say yes."
Ruthie rolled her eyes all the way up to the ceiling.
"I said yes in August," she said. "I smelled her first."
Hatty laughed so hard she had to sit down on the floor behind the register.
We were married on the pass on Saturday, May 16.
The snow was gone off the road, and the fireweed was coming up purple along the shoulder.
The long pine tables stood on the lot where they'd stood in October.
Twelve of them, end to end, and the Wilder carpenters had to build four more.
Every pack in the valley came.
The garden pack brought new potatoes.
The old woman in the barn coat brought a folding chair and a shotgun, which she said was for luck.
The venison pack's young Alpha brought his whole crew, and his hall finally had a roof.
The river pack came because the chair has to, and the chair cried before anybody else did.
Iron Ridge came too.
Three hundred of them, in their good shirts, at the tables nearest the highway.
The old cook from the lodge kitchen sat at the front.
The waitress had found the last survey stake in the snowmelt behind the diner.
KETTERIDGE LODGE. PHASE ONE.
She'd painted over it in cherry red and was using it to prop the front door open.
Hatty married us.
She'd got ordained online for twelve dollars and wore her pink uniform with a corsage of huckleberry leaves.
The night cook walked me out of the diner in a clean shirt and a tie he'd borrowed from a trucker.
"I've never done this before," he said at the door.
"Neither have I. Not like this."
"Don't trip."
"I'm in clogs."
"Don't trip in clogs."
I wore a white cotton dress, plain, with my hair down for once and a red bandana around my wrist.
Ruthie went in front of us throwing flour out of a paper bag instead of petals.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of The Cold Breakfast Bride are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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