Nick Overby stepped off the train in Pine Rapids hungry, his knee hurting in the damp, cold air. He thought he could smell grilling hamburger, and as he straightened his khaki necktie, he licked his chops without knowing he was doing it.

He never could seem to get enough to eat, these past couple of months since he’d been back in the States, just waiting to be released from the Army. The mess they’d been fed at Camp Kilmer and Fort Sam Houston and Camp Campbell had been good, compared to the K-rations they’d subsisted on all those months in Europe, but Nick still salivated at the mere thought of hamburgers, steaks, milk shakes, hominy, white beans cooked with bacon, okra fried in butter with tomatoes, chicken and dumplings. He imagined he’d pay a hundred dollars for a pan of good fresh-baked corn bread.

So what am I doing here?

In Wisconsin, of all places. Where they wouldn’t know good corn bread from chicken feed. When he could have gone home to his mother, who would have given him her world-famous corn bread for free, as much of it as he wanted.

He was still in his uniform, with his duffel slung over his shoulder, though he’d been out of the Army now for approximately thirty-seven hours.

His mother was going to kill him for sure. He’d been out-processed at Camp Campbell and had not even stopped home in Dover, just thirty-some miles away. He’d taken the train to Chicago with his buddy Hastings, and transferred trains at Union Station. “Let me know how it goes,” Hastings had said when they’d parted, shaking hands. “I’ll be waiting. Don’t forget, it’s a hundred bucks if you don’t ask her. And don’t think I won’t come to Dover after it.”

“Don’t think I won’t come find you for my hundred,” Nick had replied, smiling a little.

The terms of the bet, worked out meticulously while the two were convalescing in the hospital in Belgium, were this: If Nick asked Elissa Mickelson to marry him within forty-eight hours of getting out of the Army, Hastings would pay him fifty bucks. If she said yes, Hastings would pay a hundred. (An embossed wedding invitation was required as proof.) If Nick failed to ask her within the prescribed amount of time, he would owe Hastings a C-note. If he asked her and she was already married, Hastings would buy Nick a beer and introduce him to his cousin Cherelle. But if she was just engaged and didn’t throw over the other guy for Nick, Nick had to pay Hastings fifty bucks. Hastings had written out the terms of the agreement and both men had signed it.