But there was something I didn’t trust about him. As my grandmother would have said, he had pulga atrás da orelha—“a flea behind his ear,” meaning （for some unknown reason） that he looked . . . guilty. No, not guilty. More like he was plotting to do something illegal, and he couldn’t wait to do it. A secret smile, those downward-slanting, dark blue eyes. “You just know he’s an amazing kisser,” Beth had whispered one night during a sleepover. Ben had come for dinner, and Beth had blushed and blushed. “You can tell.”
“How?” I asked, still innocent thanks to my father’s overprotective ways.
“He’s . . . I don’t know.” Beth was more experienced, though she had not yet gone all the way with her boyfriend. “You can just tell he knows what to do. A bad boy in all the right ways.”
“Oh.” I had no idea what she meant, but yeah, I knew the stories. He had a past. Once, he allegedly broke into the high school at night and trashed the science lab. He’d had a fake ID when he was sixteen; he drove way too fast in his beater pickup. He always had weed, it was rumored, and this was long before it was legal in our state.
I knew women liked him, because I saw him in action. Ben Hallowell always had a sly smile for the female tourists who would walk out on MacMillan’s Wharf, eager to catch a glimpse of a real fisherman. He’d flirt from the deck of my father’s boat as they unloaded their catch. He might take off his shirt to thrill them, and he was lean and muscled and tan, a great advertisement for reasons to come to Cape Cod. Sometimes, the girls would wait for him to jump onto the dock, and they’d walk off to a bar or an alley and do God knows what.
He wasn’t exactly good-looking—sandy-brown hair, a slightly crooked nose from a fistfight, and an upper lip that stuck out just a little over his bottom lip. To me, he always looked a little sulky, a little broody. But when he smiled, the pheromone storm could be felt for miles. Even I, a virgin, felt it, and knew without being told that he was off-limits for a number of reasons. He was too old for me. He’d gotten around plenty. He worked for my dad. He had a girlfriend.
But now that Beth had opened that Pandora’s box of imagination, I knew she was right. Ben Hallowell would be incredible in bed, doing things to you that you didn’t know existed.
He was, of course, perfectly respectable around me. I was the daughter of his boss. He flirted with Hannah quite a bit when their paths crossed; they were the same age and had both worked at the Cooke’s Seafood in Orleans for a couple of summers. There was an affection there, and Hannah flirted back, much to my surprise. Then again, Beatrice had probably taught her how. Hannah had become quite sophisticated, living with the Moms, and I resented it.
On the other hand, I was completely invisible to our resident hottie fisherman. When Ben came to our house for dinner every month or so, he would say “hi” and “thanks” and “bye.” The flea-behind-the-ear feeling didn’t dissipate, even with my father there. I often cooked dinner, simply because I loved to, even back then. Ben would eat the meal and talk to my father, barely glancing my way. He and Dad would talk about the ocean, the market for scallops, the Goody Chapman, the weather. If my dad left the room, Ben said nothing to me.
Ben’s girlfriend, Cara, was studying to be a dental hygienist at Cape Cod Community College, or 4Cs, as we called it. Chances were high they’d get married, and soon . . . it was the Cape Cod way. You either stayed and worked in some kind of blue-collar or service job—fishing, construction, landscaping, hospitality and restaurants—or left for college, possibly to return, but most likely not.
There just wasn’t a lot of work out here. The hospital was the area’s biggest employer. The cost of living rose every year, and it was tough to make ends meet without a higher education or an inheritance or trust fund （and sure, we had those kids, too）。 If you stayed, you sucked it up and did your best to afford a little house . . . like Brad and I had.
Cara was beautiful and nice; Ben brought her to dinner once at Dad’s request, and I immediately liked her. She asked questions about my school and hobbies, unlike either man at the table—even my father was surprised to learn I was taking AP Chem. Cara was tall with red hair, clear green eyes and pale, lightly freckled skin. I felt like a peasant compared with her—my childbearing hips and significant boobage; thick, frizzy black hair; and brown eyes. My mother and Beatrice tried to take me to the posh salons of Provincetown and make me over, but I wouldn’t let them. （Unlike Hannah, I had my loyalties.） Obviously, I yearned to be beautiful, the way any teenage girl did, but I wasn’t about to let my mother gloat about how pretty I was under “all that hair” or dress me in floaty summery frocks like the kind she wore on the weekends. Hannah had been bought and paid for, but not me.