Love Is a Canoe: A Novel Read Online Free

bed. He felt her spittle on his chest and was reminded of thirty-five years ago, just after Belinda was born, when they would go to sleep holding each other and he would wake in the morning with his undershirt drenched from her breast milk.
    He said, “Wait. What are you doing?”
    “Going to bed. Bedtime.”
    “No, no,” Peter said. “Can’t you feel the sun? It’s nearly lunchtime.”
    “Bedtime.”
    “No.” Peter bit back the catch in his voice. “Please don’t.”
    “At least kisses, then.”
    “Yes to kisses!” Peter quickly took her in his arms and kissed her, her thick braid flopping onto his shoulder.
    “Now what?” she asked after half a minute of quiet. He knew she would, by then, have forgotten that she wanted to go to bed. But the phone call would have penetrated somewhere else, into some more emotional place in her mind. In a different voice, she said, “What was the call? More stupid stuff about Canoe ?”
    “No, no,” he said. “Nothing for you to even bother thinking about.”
    He stroked her neck and shoulders and she closed her eyes. His life had always been one way with Lisa and he had never imagined he’d have to relearn her. He had become fairly good at taking care of her, but she had never needed him before and nobody had prepared him for this reversal of roles. There had been no time for her to explain how she managed him. When they were younger they had never bothered to delve deeper into the meaning of their lives together than what could be found in the passages of his book. He watched her now. Had she ever even read it? Really read it? She must have, he had to believe that, but now it was too late to ask.
    No one seemed to understand how much he was struggling with the loss of her. They thought he was full of wisdom. After all, he had created Canoe , remembered and recounted and celebrated for coming up on forty years in print. Really, it was just a bunch of simple life lessons, none more complex than what was found in greeting cards or country songs. He was the main character. The oracle! The book had meant a hell of a lot to the multitudes. Marriage Is a Canoe helps people! Peter Herman, you can’t deny it! When he’d tried to deny it, people wouldn’t let him, even if they made fun of the book in the next breath. He had come to understand that when people decide a thing you made is part of them, you shouldn’t dare try to change it. They’ll think you’re trying to take it away from them. It was yours once, sure. But now it’s theirs. After some years of wrestling, he had given up. His little book belonged far more to its readers than to him.
    “Let’s go get you some lunch,” he said. “We’ve got the doctor later.”
    She shook her head no, and her turned-down mouth was a reminder of how she’d been for so many years. She made her way and wasn’t pushed around by anyone. Certainly not him.
    “Fine, no lunch. Then at least kiss me.”
    Again, she shook her head.
    He pouted his lips and tugged at his big ears and kissed her. This new version of her laughed and forgave him.
    And why shouldn’t she? He was still tall and handsome, with a wild thatch of gray hair. He had begun to hope that this new levity in her personality had in part come about because she had begun to see him as he had been forty years ago. What was coming true now was a product of the hard work from back then, when he had tried to fool the world into thinking he was kindhearted gentry in his green tweed blazer and pale blue button-down shirt, with a dream backstory of one great book and an endearing inability to outfox anyone, ever. He was distinguished, like Gregory Peck but with softer edges, a small-town Gregory Peck. By the time Reagan was president, Peter fit in as well as anyone in the Hudson Valley. If the fact that he’d written Canoe demanded that people see him as a study in contrasts, then they invariably concluded they were not especially sharp contrasts.
    “Not going,” Lisa