At Last (The Idle Point, Maine Stories)(18)

Idle Point was home.





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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.