At Last (The Idle Point, Maine Stories)(52)

"You're trying to buy me off."

"Yes," he said, "I am. Take the money and go back to school. I'll take care of the rest."

"And what about Noah," she asked. "Doesn't he have a say in this?"

"Not in this. This, Graciela, is between you and me."

She took a step back. She hadn't meant to; that step betrayed too much. She had the sense of being at the edge of a cliff and the only way was down.

"I really think you should leave now."

"I haven't finished what I came here to say."

"Yes, you have, Mr. Chase. I shouldn't have let you say as much as you did."

He was sweating. My God, the cool, calm Yankee patriarch had broken into a sweat around his hairline. Somehow that scared Gracie more than anything he had said so far.

"There are things you don't know about the past."

"I know everything I need to know."

"You don't know about your mother."

Her breath caught. "Noah told me you dated my mother in high school."

"I loved her." His voice sounded different, softer and laced with pain. For a moment he almost sounded human to Gracie.

"D-did she love you?"

He smiled but the smile wasn't meant for Gracie. It was meant for someone long gone, never forgotten. It was meant for the love of his life. He didn't have to say a word for Gracie to know that and more and she turned away.

"She loved me," he said, his words finding her as she walked toward the kitchen. "She loved me the way a man dreams of being loved: heart, soul, and mind." His footsteps followed her. "Is that the way you love my son? Would you follow him anywhere, do anything, be all that he needed you to be?"

"Yes," she whispered, keeping her back turned to him.

"I see Mona in you," he said. "Your walk, the way you carry yourself."

"I look nothing like her."

"I didn't say you did. Your mother was beautiful—"

"Thanks," she snapped. "How kind of you to remind me."

"You have your own charm, Graciela. More subtle, perhaps, but it's there."

The need to slap back at him was undeniable. "She left you, didn't she. She fell in love with my father and dumped you." She felt dizzy, disoriented, as if bits and pieces of her essential self were being torn from her.

"That's not how it happened."

"Yes, it is. That's exactly how it happened." She spun around. She wanted him to see her face, to be reminded in some small way of the woman who had walked out on him. "She didn't love you anymore and she left you for my father."

"She didn't leave me, Graciela, I left her."

"That doesn't make sense. You loved her. You said so yourself. Why would you leave her?"

"Because I was young." He braced himself against the kitchen table, fingers splayed against the scarred wood. His left arm trembled slightly. She could see every spot, every vein, every bone clearly. "I wanted more than she could give me... she was like quicksilver, your mother... she was so beautiful and the men—God, how they followed her, sniffing like hounds. I was always looking over my shoulder, watching... wondering. I needed a solid foundation, a woman I could lean on while I rebuilt the Gazette."

"So you married Ruth."

"I married Ruth," he said, "but I never once stopped loving your mother."

The story was taking shape in front of Gracie, cryptic comments from Gramma Del, Ben's despair, Simon's anger that had seemed so hard to understand.

"But my mother didn't love you any more, did she. She loved my father."

"She loved me."

"No!" The water was running in the sink. Why hadn't she turned it off? "That's not true. You're lying. She loved my father and he loved her. They were happy together."

He rode over her words. "We found each other again. Our marriages were both barren. We were both lonely and then suddenly we weren't. The love we'd had as teenagers was still there, still burning..."

"Shut up!" Gracie screamed. She kicked at the chair in front of her, knocking it on its side with a crash.

"... we decided to run off together. We were still young, barely forty. We still had many years ahead of us. We would divorce our spouses. I would sell off the Gazette to one of the conglomerates hammering at my door. Then we would disappear from Idle Point forever." Paris, he said. London. Rome and Florence and Cairo and Tokyo. He would show her the world.