With a hand to my chest, I innocently guess again. “Me?”
Love? No. Deep infatuation, maybe.
She shakes her head. “No, Bennett.” Turning back into the kitchen, she lets the door slip between her fingers, cutting us off from one another.
What does she mean Bennett’s in love?
“Tabitha! Come back here.” There is no way she gets to make that comment and then walk out without explaining.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Another minute flicks past on the digital readout in Bennett’s truck. We’ve been driving for well over two hours, and the conversation is light and easy. The two of us are swapping stories of different memories in our lifetimes. Bennett’s mostly revolve around the foibles of learning to raise his son and mine more often than not include a baking mishap. It’s perfectly us.
It’s a steady flow of chitchat back and forth, but now as Bennett’s truck turns off the expressway and he peers out the window, obviously looking for our final destination, the cab goes silent. Dead bug carcasses dirty up his front window, but one particular gushy one is driving me insane. I want to lean over and turn on his windshield wipers to wash the green slime away.
“Are we there yet?” I ask in a totally annoying-child-on-a-long-car-trip voice, but it saves me the embarrassment of turning on his wipers when he isn’t looking. Bennett is not ready to know how crazy I am about being clean. I’m doing both of us a favor. I follow his eyes out the window to catch where he looks, but all I notice is a bunch of trees.
Bennett shakes his head. “Maybe.”
“Where are we going?” I mean, come on. He asked me to wear hiking boots. Granted I haven’t been on a ton of dates, but none of them have ever had that particular requirement.
He laughs, never taking his eyes off the road. “I’m still not telling.”
At first I thought we were headed to Arcadia National Park. It’s on my list of places to see while living in Maine, but after getting on the highway, we quickly turned in the opposite direction. We traveled south from Pelican Bay along the coast. It’s been a beautiful drive, but it hasn’t given me any help as to where we are or where we’re going.
An unknown object pings off the windshield diverting my attention that way. There are so many dead bugs it’s impossible to tell which one is new.
“Ah, here we are.” Bennett turns the truck into in an area full of overgrown weeds and small trees saplings.
“A canoe launch?” I ask, reading the sign as we drive past it.
I don’t know why I ask. There’s a canoe in the back of his truck. I asked about it when he picked me up this morning, but now that I think about it Bennett never answered me about why it’s back there. I suppose in my excitement of getting to wherever we are, I decided it was normal for men in Maine to drive around with canoes. My cousin, Roy, drives around with piles of sandbags in his truck’s bed during the winter months. Who am I to judge?
“What did you think we were going to do with the canoe?” Bennett asks popping his tailgate down.
I spend longer thinking about my next question than I probably should. “… Canoe?”
Bennett laughs. “Yes, we’re going canoeing.”
“For real?”
This time he looks at me as if I’ve completely lost my mind. One side of his face pinches together while the other is high in surprise, and has a whole Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson feel to it. “Have you ever been canoeing before?”
Bennett pulls the canoe from the back of the truck, the front-end jarring when it hits the ground.
I tap my nails on the side. “No.”
One time in high school my best friend, Stephanie Jackson, and I got drunk in a canoe. But the long boat never actually left the ground.
“You’ll love it.” He slams the tailgate shut after flinging a backpack over his shoulder.
With one end of the canoe in his hand Bennett walks to the water. I follow behind much more tentatively than when I first got out of the truck. “Do you need my help?”
“Nope, you just keep looking pretty.” Bennett drags the canoe behind him, plopping it on the ground on a weedy section of land I wouldn’t even call a beach, but it’s an area where the ocean meets sand. “Okay, hop in.”
“In the canoe?”
Just the tiniest part of the front sticks in the water. If I get in now, will he have to push the canoe and my body into the ocean? He’ll figure out exactly how much I weigh!
