Love Is a Canoe: A Novel by Ben Schrank Read Free Book Online

cheeks, and I frowned and shook my head, looked down at the shiny grass beneath my sneakers.
    “Never paddled a canoe?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Don’t call me sir! I’m your Pop. All right, what about fishing?”
    I could only shake my head.
    Pop laughed a big belly laugh and he smacked the back of my neck and I stumbled forward. I glared up at him when he did that, because I felt ashamed for not holding my ground.
    “That’s fine! First we’ll learn how to handle this canoe. You’ll see what it can hold and what it can handle and what it can’t. Then we’ll learn to paddle it, together, just like me and Bess did when we first met, so that someday you’ll know how to take a moonlit canoe ride with your sweetie. And then we’ll show you how to fish!”
    “Okay,” I said, and then lower, “thanks.”
    “Don’t thank me. You’re going to work this summer. You’ll do your share. And we’ll have you paddling and catching fish soon enough!”
    Good love is a quilt—light as feathers and strong as iron.
    A good marriage is a canoe—it needs care and isn’t meant to hold too much—no more than two adults and a few kids.

Peter Herman, August 2011
    Peter Herman leaned into the white picket fence that surrounded the front garden of the Lake Okabye Inn. He wore moccasins and had one foot up on a horizontal board, his forearms snug in the fence’s interstices. He set his chin on his knuckles and looked out at the traffic. Still as a bird on a wire, there in a pose that he hadn’t much changed since he’d gotten involved with the inn nearly forty years earlier.
    He raised his big head and smiled at a former cook, driving by the inn with her children in her pickup. When children looked at him now, he imagined they saw an old man with eyes that were placed far apart, like a fish. His ears had grown large and they were covered in white fuzz. When he was unhappy with himself, as he was now, he thought the world saw him as a sort of aged cartoon version of the handsome man he once was. He sighed and breathed in deeply. Thirty years ago, in the same spot, he would have been able to smell chickens baking in the kitchen off the restaurant. But they’d quadrupled the size of that kitchen, added a bakery, and moved it to the back of the property in the expansion of ’86. Now all he smelled was the newly blacktopped road and the end of the morning dew. He tilted his head back and listened to a screen door squeak open. That would be Henry. His old friend’s footfalls ended with a couple of squishes in the grass.
    “Actually, they don’t like a widower hanging around the place so much anymore! Those days are gone, windbag!”
    “Morning, Henry.” Peter didn’t turn his head, only reached out and clapped Henry Talkington on the back. “What’d Maddie say?”
    “You mean your girlfriend? ‘Oh, hell,’” Henry said. He leaned the other way on the fence, so he could look into the breakfast-room windows. Henry was short and round. He was puffy in the places where age had pruned and etched at Peter.
    “Now that doesn’t sound right. I’ve never heard her curse. Not once.”
    “With me, she curses. You’re asking about before she left for California? She’s back this week, I believe. She stopped by for lunch with me before she left. But you’d know that.”
    Peter rubbed his chin with his thumb. “I didn’t feel like making the trip,” he said.
    Henry nodded and said, “I know it.”
    Peter waited for Henry to say more. Lisa had been gone for nearly ten months and he was now involved with Maddie Narayan. She wanted him to leave Millerton and begin a new life with her in San Francisco so she could be near her daughter, Anjulee. He was not so sure he wanted that. He’d recently discovered that he wasn’t even quite ready for a weeklong visit.
    “Maddie’s trying to get a handle on what you two have, is all,” Henry said. “She can’t gauge it and you’re not helping. But she does know she’s loving the