I Stripped to Keep My Boyfriend in School, and He Sold Me to the Man My Brother Died Owing novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: Ice-Out
Iris's POV
The first freighter of the season came in under the lift bridge at dawn on the twenty-first of April, and I stood on the Canal Park pier with a thermos and watched it come.
I had never missed one.
When I was a child my father brought us down in the dark, my brother on his shoulders and my mother with a bag of pulla.
We stood with a few hundred other Duluthers in the cold and waited.
The whole town came out for a boat.
The pier was crowded that morning with parkas and stocking caps, children on shoulders and dogs on leashes.
The sky over the lake was going from gray to pale gold.
At the end of the harbor the lift bridge was rising with its great gears groaning, and a bell was ringing.
It rang twice, clear and steady across the water.
I stood now with my hands around a cup of coffee and listened to it, and it was only a bell.
"There," Toby said beside me.
The freighter came out of the haze.
She was a thousand feet long, rust red and black, with her name in white along the bow.
Her great flat deck rode high and empty.
She slid under the raised span of the bridge with her horn going, long and low and enormous, and the crowd on the pier cheered.
The sound came up through the planks and my boots, and I felt it in my chest.
I looked up at him.
He was not looking at the boat.
He stood in the black coat with his hands in the pockets, and his eyes were on me.
He looked as he had on the porch the morning I walked down to the gate and came back.
"What?" I said.
"I'm going to ask you something," Toby said.
"You can't."
"I know. I'm going to anyway."
My heart did something enormous.
I put the thermos down on the rail.
He took his right hand out of his pocket.
In it was a ring, a narrow plain gold band worn thin on one side.
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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