Love Is a Canoe: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

said. “I am not going to the doctor today.”
    “Okay, we won’t go. You’re stubborn. Do you remember how stubborn you are?” he asked. They’d had forty happy years. Fifty, if smudged, and why not smudge a bit? Smudging the truth had been the smartest thing he had ever learned how to do.
    “No, you,” she said now. “You’re stubborn. Stop petting me down. You … Who called you?”
    “Someone from Ladder & Rake.”
    He was testing her. Mentioning Ladder & Rake used to make her glare and flare her nostrils. She would be angry that the royalties weren’t right, worried that they might want to take him away for some event or another, reminded again of the world just beyond their little town encroaching. But now she had no reaction. How lost you are, he thought, as he appraised the uneven work he’d done on her braid.
    “Come downstairs with me,” he said. “There’s Triscuits. And cheddar from Pantomime’s. We’ll try eating that. Then we’ll see about the doctor.”
    She said, “People call you … Hubbell Gardner.”
    He shook his head no and watched her try to find other words. She made noises, looking for a tune to sing. But she was lost. Her voice turned into meaningless low notes that wandered into the corners of their bright bedroom at the top of the house, big as any country person could ever want, bay windows overlooking Lake Okabye, gray-and-green-striped carpet over oak floors and white plaster walls solid as stone.
    He held her hand and stared at her lips, the sheer pink of them. They didn’t age. No one besides her had ever called him Hubbell Gardner. A few weeks earlier they had watched a DVD of The Way We Were on the downstairs television because she loved Barbra Streisand. He hated the movie when he was young, and had even brought it up in interviews as a kind of antithesis to Canoe . Though he knew the reference was a clumsy one that had never quite worked. But his post-publication antics never hurt the book.
    “Do you say that because you remember watching The Way We Were with me?” he asked. “Are you making a joke?”
    “My funny valentine…” She tried to sing but lost her words. She smiled down at her hands. He took her in his arms and gently raised her to her feet. She would remember this hug, this same old awkward hug. She fell on him and he loved her for her trust. At the very least, she trusted him, still, as much as she ever had. And they had loved each other. So he had lost the stable love he’d had with Lisa and had it replaced with this lengthy goodbye.
    Peter did not enjoy listening to doctors. He wasn’t nearly as good as Lisa had once been at absorbing and analyzing the information they shared. But he did understand that, regardless of how he parsed out what he understood of Pick’s disease as it related to his wife’s brain, new options did not arise. Pick’s disease meant that their time left together was limited and everything that was wrong with Lisa was absolutely not going to be right again.

Stella Petrovic, July 2011
    “You say this year is the fiftieth anniversary of what?” Helena Magursky’s voice was both scratchy and strident. “I’m not sure I heard you.”
    Stella Petrovic frowned. She watched Helena Magursky, president and CEO of Ladder & Rake Books, lean forward, a half inch per second. They were twenty minutes into their weekly Wednesday morning nine o’clock, or whenever-Helena-wants-to-start-and-she’s-always-late-but-you-damn-well-better-not-be meeting, recently retitled “Free Thinking/New Billing.”
    The living legend that was Helena Magursky was why Stella had left Orange Blackwell and come to the far bigger Ladder & Rake, so called because of its origin as a press for home repair and gardening manuals born in the back of Olitski Brothers Hardware Store in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1907. And a middling regional press is what LRB would have stayed if Helena hadn’t been hired right out of City College as the secretary for the