“How’s your daughter, by the way?” I asked.
He glanced at me, seemed to assess his answer, then took a swig of beer. “Fine.”
You’d never know that Ben and I had known each other for, oh, thirty years, that he was Dad’s surrogate son, that he’d eaten at our house at least once a week when I was a kid. Or that we’d been in a horrible accident together. That might have bonded some people. Not us.
Our food arrived, and I fell on my fried calamari like a ravenous shark, and we didn’t talk much till we were done. Dad and I played a round of pool （I won）， and Ben talked with some guys at the bar.
“Walk my daughter to her car,” Dad instructed Ben. “I’m gonna have another beer and talk to Danny. He owes me money.”
“I don’t need a chaperone in Provincetown, for God’s sake,” I said. It truly was one of the safest places in America.
“Walk my baby to her car, Ben.”
“Okay. Thanks for the help today,” Ben said.
“Bye, Daddy,” I said. “Thanks for dinner.”
“Thank Ben. He paid.”
“Thanks, Ben. I don’t need you to walk me to my car,” I said. “It’s not even a thousand feet away.”
“I have my orders,” he said.
“My father is still the captain, eh?”
“Absolutely.”
It was more crowded now that darkness had fallen. Lots of happy people, lots of couples, gay and straight. Cars inched down Commercial Street, the cheerful neon of the Lobster Pot sign bathing everything in red light. Folks were sitting on the anchor, eating ice cream cones, or standing in line to get lobster rolls or hot dogs.
Once we got out on the wharf, the crowd cleared, as the recreational boats were in for the night. We passed the gangplanks for the whale-watching boats, the big wooden sailboat that took tourists out at sunset. There was the storefront where the Whydah museum had been. The Whydah was the only pirate ship ever recovered from the deep. A wicked-cool find. Dylan used to be terrified to go in there; they’d recovered some bones from the ship, and the image of them sitting in a fish tank had given him nightmares for months.
I wondered how he was sleeping these days. It was so hard not to know.
Then we were in fisherman’s territory, and there was virtually no one, aside from the harbormaster inside his office.
My car was just beyond. “Thanks again,” I said.
“No problem.” Ben watched me open the door, as if there might be a kidnapper lurking in the back. “By the way, she left me.”
“Who?”
“Cara.”
His wife. “Oh.” Rumor had been that he’d cheated on her, which, given his tawdry escapades as a youth, was easy to believe.
“No cheating involved.”
“Sorry, Ben. I thought . . . Well.”
He gave a nod, then turned away.
Divorce bonding over.
As I drove back to Wellfleet, though, it was nice to think about someone else’s marriage. Cara and Ben had been high school sweethearts, married in their early twenties, sometime after the accident. I wondered if she’d found someone else, too, or if she’d just gotten bored, or if Ben was a raging alcoholic or a bully. He didn’t seem to be. I’d never seen him drunk, anyway.
In a way, it was comforting, knowing that someone else, someone who’d once been so in demand as Ben, could be left, too. That it wasn’t just me. Besides, the idea of Ben suffering a little . . . it made a small, ugly spot on my heart flare with a malevolent glow. My father had never blamed Ben for what happened to me, for what he’d taken from me, accident or not. It bothered me that my father had never said a bad word against the man who’d caused me to lose a spleen and break so many bones and, worst of all, scar my uterus so badly that the poor thing couldn’t hold my tiny daughter inside.
It wasn’t fair to blame Ben for that. I did anyway.
CHAPTER 10
Lillie
When I was seventeen, I was already aware of Ben Hallowell. Not in a good way.
Ben was four years older than I was, which, at that time of life, made him practically a different generation. He was from Brewster, so we didn’t go to elementary school together, and by the time I started at Nauset Regional High School, Ben had already graduated. But he had played soccer the year Nauset won the state championship, scoring both goals, and his fame still lingered in our hallways.
His father had been a fisherman, like mine, but Mr. Hallowell had died at sea, gone overboard Ben’s senior year, and his body was never found. Suicide, maybe, or just bad weather and bad luck. Ben started crewing for my father after that. This made me a little bit of a celebrity in high school—yes, he’d had dinner at my house. Yes, I spoke to him from time to time. Yes, he worked for my dad.