I Joined My Dead Sister's Curling Team, and Her Widower Joined Me novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Ice-Out
The lake went out on Thursday, and by Saturday afternoon the whole dock was ours.
Mille Lacs lay open in front of us, gray-blue and loud, with the last plates of ice grinding against the pilings.
The April sun was warm on the boards.
Gunnar had spread two wool blankets over them, and Dale had come down the path with a box under his arm.
"Before anything," he said.
I sat up on the blanket in my sweater, with my belly round and hard under it.
I was twenty-two weeks along, and I had stopped being able to hide it in March.
Dale opened the box.
Inside lay a team jacket, black wool with leather sleeves, and the letters were stitched in white across the back.
BAKKEN.
Underneath, smaller: LEAD.
I put my hand over my mouth.
"There's more," Dale said.
He turned the left sleeve toward me.
Sewn there, faded and soft, was a round patch with a red toque in the middle of it.
Annika's old patch.
He had cut it from her jacket in November and kept it in his shop drawer, and he had never said a word.
"She threw the first stones for six years," he said.
"You throw them now. She stays on the sleeve."
I could not speak.
Leif sat down next to me on the boards and took my hand.
"I didn't cry once during the stitching," he said.
"I want that noted."
"Your eyes are red," I said.
"There's a lot of wind."
I laughed, and I cried, and I put on the jacket.
I zipped it halfway over the sweater, and it fit.
Then I pulled the sweater off underneath and sat in the April sun in the open jacket and nothing else.
"Okay," I said.
"Now."
Four men looked at me.
The patch on my sleeve caught the light.
"Lie back," Dale said.
I lay back on the blanket with a folded sweater under my head.
My belly rose in front of me, tight and brown in the sun, and I felt their eyes go over it.
"Gunnar," Dale said.
"You first."
Gunnar lay down on the blanket beside my hips and looked up at me with his blue eyes wide.
"Here?" he said.
"In daylight?"
"Get under me," I said.
He understood.
He slid between my knees on his back, with his head in the hollow of the blanket.
His big hands came up to my thighs.
I rose on my knees and moved above his face.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of I Joined My Dead Sister's Curling Team, and Her Widower Joined Me are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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