The Cold Breakfast Bride novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Everybody Brings Something

By six in the morning the elk was in the dumpster and the whole pass knew why.

I hadn't told anyone.

The waitress had told the truckers.

Ruthie had told her entire first-grade class, standing on her chair.

At six-forty Abel walked in with a coil of new power cable over his shoulder and didn't order.

He looked at the cut line.

He looked at the dually tracks and the stake with the orange flag.

"I want to drive down to that lodge," he said finally.

"You can't fight off treaty ground."

"I know."

"And she'd love it."

"I know that, too."

He spliced the line instead.

The compressor coughed, and hummed, and the walk-in started to cool back down.

Empty.

At ten the first truck came up the hill road.

A hill pack's Alpha got out, an old woman in a barn coat, and dropped her tailgate.

Four elk quarters, wrapped in butcher paper.

"Heard you lost your meat," she said.

"I can't pay you for that."

"Didn't ask."

She looked up at the neon cup.

"Hunter's Moon supper's fed my family every October since my grandmother was a pup. I'm not eating at a resort."

She drove off before I could thank her.

By noon there were six more trucks.

A second hill pack brought two chest freezers' worth of venison.

The third brought potatoes and onions and carrots still crusted with dirt, a whole garden pulled up for us.

The packless brothers came back from somewhere I didn't ask about with a cooler full of trout on ice.

Abel's aunt came in the last truck with forty jars of chokecherry jelly.

She set them on the counter.

"For the rolls," she said. "Don't make that face. It's good jelly."

Every night for two weeks, they kept coming.

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