At Last (The Idle Point, Maine Stories)

by Bretton, Barbara

  The doorbell rang again and she bit back the slightest prickle of annoyance. Some people had no patience, but not Ruth. She knew how to wait. She had been practicing for most of her life. She ran a quick hand through her hair, blessing Alma at the Idle Point Beauty Salon, then swung open the door.

  Ben Taylor stood there on the top step with the snow swirling around him. He looked almost violent and she took a step back.

  "Ben," she said in her most polite and controlled voice. She prayed Simon hadn't heard the doorbell ring. "Can I help you?"

  He tossed the sweater she'd picked out for Gracie at her feet.

  "Graciela isn't a charity case," he all but spat in her face. "You can shove your presents up your—"

  "Is there a problem?" Simon appeared at her side and Ruth's knees almost gave way.

  "Stay away from Graciela," Ben said, leveling a dangerous look at Simon.

  Simon's expression gave away nothing. He took in the man on the doorstep, the ruined sweater lying in the snow, the ashen look on Ruth's face, in an instant.

  "You have thirty seconds to leave," Simon said in a pleasant tone of voice. "If not, I'll call the police."

  "There's been a misunderstanding," Ruth said as she picked up the sweater and brushed off the snow with trembling fingers. "This was just a little token of friendship from Noah. Nothing more."

  "Stay away from Graciela," Ben repeated, "or I swear to God, I'll—" He stopped cold and Ruth murmured a silent prayer of thanks. She knew her husband. One more word and he would have had Ben Taylor behind bars before the next snowflake fell.

  "Fifteen seconds," Simon said, still sounding pleasant and in control.

  "She's mine," Ben said. "Remember that. Mine and Mona's."

  His words found their mark. Simon's mask slipped just long enough for his wife to see his pain. Not even death could break the hold Mona Taylor had on these two men.

  Ruth went back inside the house. She knew it would be a long time before either man realized she was gone.

  Chapter Four

  Noah had been away with his family all summer and Gracie counted the days until he school started and he came home again.

  "But where is he?" she asked Gramma Del when she heard he wouldn't be coming back to Idle Point. "Why isn't he coming home when school starts?"

  And Gramma answered the way she always answered, "Because he's going to boarding school in New Hampshire, missy."

  The answer made no sense to Gracie. Why would your parents want you to live far away at a sleepover school when you already had a gigantic room of your own and every toy in the Sears catalog. For a few weeks, Gracie badgered Gramma Del with the same questions about why Noah had to go away until Gramma Del finally said, "Because he's rich," then turned back to the dish-filled kitchen sink.

  She never forgot Noah. The years passed but the memory of those afternoons spent with the blue-eyed golden boy who lived in the big house on the hill never dimmed. Sometimes she would drive past the house on her way to Idle Point High and she could almost see herself and Noah running up the driveway with Mrs. Chase laughing behind them and Gramma Del waiting at the back door.

  She loved school and threw herself into her studies wholeheartedly, the same way she did everything. She was rewarded with straight As. She spent hours studying at the makeshift desk in her room with Sam the Cat draped across her shoulders. Sam was her best teacher. Gracie had filled notebook after notebook with her observations of Sam's behaviors and those notebooks were the first small step on the road to achieving her dreams.

  Gracie had a lot of friends at school but it was understood that she couldn't invite any of them home with her. The bad thing about living in a town as small as Idle Point was the way that everyone knew everyone else's business. The good thing was the way you never had to explain. Mainers never asked questions, mostly because they already had all the answers right at the tips of their fingers. Everyone knew that the only thing Ben Taylor liked better than liquor was marrying the wrong woman. Gracie didn't have to say a word. Her friends invited her to parties and clambakes and she went to as many as she could but her free time was limited.

  When she wasn't studying, she was working with Doctor Jim who owned the animal hospital. Gracie had started cleaning cages for him when she was ten years old. She'd always been more comfortable around animals than people. With the exception of Gramma Del, animals were more dependable. They didn't drink or yell or forget to pay the bills. They didn't run hot and cold with their emotions. If they loved you, they loved you all the time, not just when it suited them.

  Gracie was gentle with the animals and serious about her responsibilities, and it didn't take long for Doctor Jim to see that she had a gift for dealing with both the pets and their owners. He teased her about her ever-present notebook but he always gave her dozen new ones for Christmas every year. He said he'd never met a girl so young and so focused and it was true. Gramma Del never had to tell her to pick up her room or hang up her clothes or do her homework. It made her feel good to know that in the middle of chaos, she could create a small oasis of order and dependability for herself.

  Nobody was surprised when she announced that she wanted to be a veterinarian. Medical school cost money and Gracie had always known that the only way she'd be able to attend college was if she paid for it herself or won a scholarship. When the other kids were off swimming away their summers on Hidden Island across the harbor, she was at work.

  "You're early," Doctor Jim said on Monday morning. "I barely had a chance to start the coffee."

  "You're not supposed to start the coffee," Gracie said, slipping into the pale blue smock that served as her uniform "That's what you pay me for."

  "I wish I could pay you to take some time off, Gracie. You're only young once. You should be out there on the beach with your friends, not cooped up in here with an old coot like me and some badly spoiled house pets."

  "I like badly spoiled house pets," she said.

  "You like anything with fin, fur, or feathers," Doctor Jim said, shaking his head. "I don't know how I got so lucky."

  Gracie went about her business, opening blinds, checking for messages, making sure to feed the goldfish in the waiting room. She and Doc had been down this road many times before. She needed both the money and the experience working at the animal hospital afforded her, more than she needed beach parties and proms. This was her ticket to the future.

  "A woman needs her own," Gramma Del had been telling her since Gracie was a little girl. Her own home. Her own money. Her own future right there in Idle Point, working side by side with Doctor Jim one day as his equal.

  Doctor Jim didn't know it, but sometimes she managed to sneak away at lunchtime to her secret spot, a crescent of beach tucked away beyond the lighthouse where nobody but Gracie ever went. Her friends all rowed across the inlet to Hidden Island or drove up the coast to one of the fancy resort towns that dominated the economic landscape. The adults spread their blankets on the smooth sands of the town beach. Nobody bothered with the forbidding curve of coastline she'd claimed for her own. The current was strong there and the rocks were so slippery and forbidding that Gracie always had the place to herself. She'd perch on an outcropping of rock, wrap her arms around her knees, and look out toward the horizon. Sometimes she brought a book with her or a sandwich. Most times she brought nothing but a deep sense of belonging.

  Idle Point was home.

  #

  The last time Noah Chase spent a summer trapped in Idle Point he was five years old and too young to know any better.

  He was seventeen now. He'd spent summers in Florida, Arizona, Paris, London, Los Angeles, Hawaii, Montana, and that was just for starters. If his father hadn't had a second heart attack in May, Noah would have been on a ranch in Colorado right now instead of heading over to the animal hospital to pick up his mother's brand new furball.

  Some welcome home. He wasn't in the house five minutes before Mary Weston sent him out to play driver for a mutt. Not that
he had anything against mutts. He'd spent most of his childhood praying for a dog of his own. He would have settled for anything—a cat, a hamster, a ferret—but a dog was special. There had always been some reason why he couldn't have one. His father's allergies. His mother's concerns for the help. The fact that by the time he was six years old, he really didn't live there anyway.

  He didn't like thinking about those first few years at St. Luke's Boarding School in Portsmouth. Back then he'd been smaller than the other students and scared of his own shadow, a mama's boy who didn't know his butt from a hole in the ground. He'd spent grades one through three getting the crap beat out of him until he finally got smart and learned how to fight back.

  Maybe he'd learned too well.

  He'd started last year on probation for being caught shoplifting from the school bookstore. "You have an unlimited account," the headmaster had said to him during one of those intense, we're-in-this-together chats he hated. "You don't need to steal." The headmaster had fixed him with a stern look. "You don't have anything to say for yourself?"

  "Nope," said Noah. He didn't have anything to say the time he disappeared for a weekend or the time he was caught driving the science teacher's car up and down the main drag.

  He'd been grounded, forced to work cleanup in the dining hall, threatened with expulsion. Nothing worked. All it took was another check from his mother and life at St. Luke's went back to what passed as normal among snotty rich kids just like him.

  This time, though, he had struck pay dirt. That party outside of town would go down in Portsmouth history.

  So would the arrests.

  They knew how to manipulate the system at St. Luke's. Cover up. Erase. Expunge. Until you finally pushed too hard that even St. Luke's of the Bottomless Benefactor Slush Fund had enough of you. Plenty of time to think about how to tell his parents he'd been asked not to return to St. Luke's. He had all summer to do that.

  It still bugged the shit out of him that his mother had finally decided to bring a dog into the house after all the years of telling him he couldn't even have a pet hamster. When he was little, he'd wanted a dog even more than he'd wanted to play quarterback for the Patriots. No, she would say. Your father doesn't want pets in the house. Noah cried and pleaded and made a pain in the ass of himself but she wouldn't budge, not even that time with the kittens. His father's wishes were law around there. Since when did his mother stand up to the old man anyway?

  Not that it mattered. He was only temporary around there, if he had anything to say about it. Hell, he'd been only temporary around there most of his life. Why else would they have shipped him off to boarding school when he still had his baby teeth? He'd give it a few weeks, let his old man settle back into his routine, maybe wait until he started showing up at the Gazette a few days a week, then Noah would tell them that he was heading west to finish up what was left of the summer on that Colorado ranch before they found out he'd been kicked out of school.

  They couldn't stop him. He was seventeen, almost a man. They'd have to give in. He wanted something different, a place where nobody gave a damn that he lived in the big house on the hill, where nobody cared that his father's great-great grandfather had founded the town and built it in his image.

  He followed the winding main road out of the heart of town. The place was old, tired, dead, even though they didn't seem to know it yet. Nobody in Idle Point ever did anything that hadn't been done before. They took pride in that fact. Ask them why and they said, "Because that's the way it's always been." If he had a buck for every time he heard that phrase...

  He rolled past lobster pounds, fish shacks, two marinas, the bank, the high school, the post office, and a store that seemed to sell nothing but lobster buoys, without seeing any of them. Most of the buildings were weathered to the same bleached grey color by the relentless wind off the ocean. Saltboxes and colonials and glorified sheds lined both sides of the road. Most of the large houses on Main Street near the water boasted No Vacancy signs. Hard to believe that tourists from New York and Boston and points beyond paid big bucks to crash in a room with no bathroom, no telephone, and no cable TV in a nowhere town. They flocked to Idle Point and other coastal towns from May to November, pretending they'd love to shrug off their urban lives and get back to basics. "I'd take a lobster roll over pate any day," he'd heard a well-manicured matron say one day at the lunch counter next to the Gazette.

  Like hell. He'd been around those types now for years, both at boarding school and now at prep school and he knew they wouldn't make it halfway through the first Maine winter before they went slip-sliding back to the big city in their spotless four-wheel drives.

  Not that he blamed them. He wasn't sure he could make it through this week.

  #

  No matter how hard she tried, Gracie had trouble imagining Ruth Chase with a pet. A perfectly groomed poodle maybe, or an aloof Siamese who rarely deigned to notice anyone's existence but her own, but definitely not this big-footed, slobbery Lab-Sheepdog mix Ruth had fallen in love with during one of the animal hospital's Adopt-A-Pet weekends. Gracie had been the one who let Wiley out of his cage to interact with Ruth and she'd seen the two of them bond like old friends with her very own eyes. Ruth had cooed over Wiley, telling him what a wonderful dog he was, how handsome and brave and strong, and Wiley had lapped up every last word. Even harder than imagining Ruth with this huge ball of fur was imagining Simon Chase allowing it to happen.

  "You must be on his payroll," she mumbled as she finishing combing out the last tangle in the dog's wildly abundant coat. The office was closed for lunch and she had used the time to finish grooming him.

  "You said something, Gracie?" Martin, Doctor Jim's technician, asked over his shoulder while he examined a slide.

  "I was trying to imagine old Wiley here planting a big wet one on Simon Chase."

  Martin laughed out loud.

  "I'm not joking," she said, inspecting Wiley's shimmering coat with satisfaction. "Can you imagine Wiley here having free rein at the Chase's house? It boggles the mind."

  "Mrs. Chase loves that dog." Martin removed one slide, placed it in its special container, then reached for another one. "Rumor has it she told Simon she'd leave him if he said one word against Wiley."

  "I doubt that," Gracie said, giving Wiley a hug before she helped him down from the grooming table. "Ruth doesn't look like the kind of woman who gets her way very often." The image of Ruth Chase standing up to her powerful husband was almost laughable.

  Still, Gracie had to admit that Ruth Chase had always been very kind to her. When Gracie was a little girl, she'd had a crush on the lovely older woman and for awhile she had fantasized that Mrs. Chase would invite her to come live with them in the big house on the hill, which was a bigger fantasy than anything Alice and the Mad Hatter had ever dreamed up.

  "I'd better get up front," she said, snapping a lead to Wiley's collar. The office re-opened in ten minutes and she was the receptionist this week.

  "Why don't you leave him back here with me," Martin suggested.

  "Thanks," Gracie said, "but he's good company. Besides, it's good for a dog to see how the simple people live."

  Martin was still laughing as Wiley led her down the hall to the waiting room. A guy stood near the window with his back toward her. He was tall and lean, dressed in the Idle Point summer uniform of cut-offs, t-shirt, and deck shoes. Wiley tugged hard at the leash but she held him back.

  "Excuse me," she said. "May I help you?" You might want to start by telling me how you got in here.

  "The door was open," he said, as if he'd read her mind. "I figured I'd—" His words stopped cold as he turned around. "Gracie?" He was the most beautiful human being she'd ever seen. He gleamed with an almost golden light. "Gracie Taylor?"

  Gracie's entire world turned upside down as she realized who he was. "Noah?" Suddenly she was five and a half years old on the first day of kindergarten and he was her guardian angel. He was more beautiful than she'd remembered. "What a
re you doing here?"

  He gestured toward Wiley. "Car service." His beautiful blue eyes twinkled as he said it and Gracie was afraid her heart was about to tear through her chest and tumble to the floor at his feet. Was it possible to fall in love at first sight twice with the same boy?

  She knelt down and nuzzled Wiley. "Can you believe it?" she asked. "I never thought I'd see the day the Chases—" She caught herself just in time. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"

  "Hey, don't apologize," Noah said, bending down to scratch Wiley behind the left ear. "I'm a Chase and I can't believe it either."

  She nuzzled Wiley again. Her face felt hot and she was afraid she was blushing. She never blushed, not even the time she tripped and fell up the stairs in front of half the student body during assembly. This wasn't like her at all.

  Wiley looked up at Noah with something approaching adoration and they both laughed.

  She looked at Noah over Wiley's ruff of fur. "You like dogs?"

  "Love 'em." He grinned as Wiley leaned into a scratch. "When I was a kid, I wanted a houseful of 'em."

  "Me too," said Gracie. "I used to look at that big house of yours and try to figure out just how many dogs and cats I could fit inside."

  "You work here." He said it as a statement, not a question.

  "Official dogsbody," she said, then wished she hadn't tried to be funny. What if he didn't get the reference? She didn't want to believe he was anything but perfect. Please, please, don't let him look at her with a blank expression on his face. He was already beautiful. Would it be too much to ask for him to be smart as well?