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MADDY

I walked along the bike trail, looking at the autumn leaves, and zipped my jacket to the top. It was already in the thirties and only mid-October in Wakan.

I couldn’t believe I was going to be living in Minnesota for the winter. My best friend Emma had told me we’d be here just for the summer, but now everything was all pumpkin patches and hay bales.

This place felt like the blueprint for Main Street at Disneyland. Caramel apples in the window of the fudge shop and mums in the hanging baskets off the light posts.

It was cute I guess, but kinda boring after a few weeks of staying with Emma’s brother, Daniel, and his wife, Alexis, in their big mansion by the river. Daniel said everything sort of shuts down after the summer. Half the restaurants had already closed for the season. There was nothing to do, and I was starting to get cabin fever. I wasn’t working right now, which I hated, but I was also afraid to get a job.

Alexis was the town doctor. She had a clinic by the pharmacy and she said she needed a full-time nurse. She could split the position into two and give me and Emma part-time hours if we both wanted to work. But Emma wasn’t ready. She was still withdrawn and crying most days so there was no way I was leaving her, not while she was in this state.

My best friend was going through it.

She just found out, after twenty-nine years on this earth, that her shit mom Amber had lied to her—about basically everything—and she had an entire family she knew nothing of.

Emma had spent the better part of her young life in foster care with strangers, so this revelation was not great. We came to Wakan so she could meet the relatives she didn’t know existed until three weeks ago. And she broke up with her boyfriend Justin so she could have the mental breakdown she needed without it affecting him or the three young siblings he was guardian of. Needless to say, she was not in a good headspace. She’d started talking to a therapist, but she was too depressed to go anywhere or do anything, and I was too worried about her to go anywhere or do anything either, so we’d just been squatting at the house doing nothing.

Fucking Amber.

I hated that woman. I hoped her next mugshot was a really shitty one that went viral.

I was in a mood today. Emma was in the greenhouse with Daniel, doing greenhouse stuff. She’d finally ventured out of bed. They needed bonding time and I didn’t get a lot of opportunities to be alone, so I decided to take a walk on the bike trail along the river. Listen to a murder podcast or whatever, just to do something that wasn’t sitting around being crabby, not making money. But when I got to the trail, a better diversion presented itself.

Someone had drawn chalk dicks on the bike path.

Every hundred feet or so—dick. They’d carved them into the bark of the trees too. It was a penis scavenger hunt and I was here for it. It was the most fun I’d had in weeks.

I was taking pictures of them to send to Emma. I’d just found one drawn in Sharpie on the back of a tractor crossing sign. This one had droplets spewing from the tip. Truly exciting. Then I heard a loud rustle in the bushes.

A deer? Maybe a possum or something? But a pig came out instead—wearing a reflective vest.

“What in the world?”

“Oh, hey. Sorry, I didn’t mean to freak you out,” a male voice said from the tree line. Then a large man stepped into the bike path.

Doug. Daniel’s best friend.

I’d only met him once, the day Emma and I came here the first time, and only for like five seconds before Alexis kicked him out.

Alexis and Daniel were keeping us sequestered from everyone. They didn’t let anyone come over. I guess Emma’s aunts and cousins wanted to meet her, but I think they sensed Emma wasn’t ready for anything beyond the immediate family, so they said no. Doug was also not allowed to come over, but this had something to do with a guitar?

I looked him up and down.

He wore a Carhartt jacket and had sandy blond hair, acne scars on his cheeks, deep permanent smile lines around his brown eyes, and crooked teeth. His work boots were muddy, and his pants had paint on them. He looked weathered and rough, like he lived full-time in a barn.

Conventionally none of this should have made him attractive, but he had a rugged sexiness about him. Like this was a guy who knew what to do with a carburetor. This was someone who could get a baby calf out of a birth canal. He could install gutters.

Maybe I was giving him too much credit, and he was completely useless—but I was usually pretty good at profiling.

Men like this were tough as nails. I’d nursed enough of them to know. They’d cut a finger off in a combine and finish working for the day before they’d come in to have it reattached. They had bodies made of solid muscle, hands so rough you could exfoliate with them—and pet pigs apparently because what the hell.

The animal grunted over to me and pressed his snout into my jacket pocket.

“Uh, excuse me,” I said, backing up.

“Sorry. Move it, Kevin, let’s go,” he said like he was talking to one of his buddies.

The pig looked at him like he understood everything he’d just said and backed up. Doug riffled in his jacket and gave the animal a mini Snickers.