At Last (The Idle Point, Maine Stories)(61)

Sometimes he thought about his own father and tried to figure out where Simon had made his mistakes but his memories were so caught up with adolescent loneliness and hero worship and anger that he didn't know where truth ended and fantasy began. His father loved him. His father was indifferent. His father controlled his every move. His father wouldn't have noticed if he'd vanished off the face of the earth. His father was proud of him. His father thought he was a failure. It was all true and none of it and he didn't know how to piece it together.

"Your father did the best he could," was all his mother would say on the subject. "Never doubt that he loved you, Noah. Never ever doubt that."

But he did. Now that he had a child of his own he understood how love should feel. Sophie's very existence had made him feel like his chest was three sizes too small for the size of his heart. He knew that the thought of sending that tiny scrap of humanity out into the world alone was enough to bring him to his knees. Had he been that small at five years, that vulnerable? How in hell had his father been able to push him out of the nest a year later and send him off to St. Luke's?

He had been drifting before Sophie. She anchored him in time and space. Losing Gracie had been like losing an essential part of himself. Without her by his side, his dreams of Paris meant nothing at all. It was nothing more than a city by a river. He had been waiting for a sign from God, a bolt of lightning, something to wake him up and turn him in the right direction. He had never thought that sign would come in the form of a little girl with the face of an angel.

He had spent the last eight years bumming his way through Europe, trying on different personae for size, pretending he hadn't left his broken heart in the hands of a serious young woman with better things to do than spend her life with him. He finished his degree in London then found himself a job writing ad copy for an international publishing concern. He had learned all about deadlines during his summers at the Gazette and he wrote quickly and well and was rewarded handsomely for that ability.

If he ever had the sense that he could be doing more with his gifts than hawking the next best-selling how-to book, he did his best to push that thought from his mind before it had a chance to cause any trouble. If he ever missed that sense of community he had enjoyed on the staff of the Gazette, he refused to acknowledge the fact. He had discovered that you could have a fine life without ever breaking the surface. Gracie had been wrong about that. Not everyone needed to dive deep.

In the end it was both the Gazette and Sophie that brought him back to Idle Point. His mother Ruth was in failing health and she wanted to sign over the management of the paper to him.

Ruth had come into her own with Simon's death. She had surprised everyone in town when she took over the reins of the Gazette rather than sell it off to one of the conglomerates that had expressed more than a passing interest in the paper. She had quietly watched and learned a lot over the years and her hand on the reins was sure and gentle. She understood that selling to one of the conglomerates would mean putting a lot of loyal employees out on the street and she steadfastly refused to do it, thereby gaining the undying loyalty of her staff and the unending exasperation of her accountants.

Noah knew all of this because the accountants had told him so last month when he returned to Idle Point. He also knew that the Gazette was hemorrhaging money like a severed artery and that if they didn't sell soon, there would be nothing left to sell. He had home come to introduce his mother to her granddaughter, to give Sophie a sense of family that had been missing in her young life. And, if he was being honest with himself, he came home because he had been everywhere else and the emptiness was still deep inside his heart.

He wanted to see his daughter walk the streets he had walked as a kid. He wanted to see his mother's face when Ruth realized that Sophie's eyes were his eyes, were her eyes, were the eyes of who knew how many dead relatives reaching back into yesterday. And, damn it, he wanted The Gazette to stay in his family's hands. A year ago none of this would have mattered to him.

Now it meant everything.





Chapter Eleven





Gracie supposed there was a certain ironic symmetry to the fact that she ran out of gas thirty yards away from Eb's Stop & Pump. Of course, it wasn't Eb's any longer. Eb had died a few years ago while on a whale-watching trip out of P-town. She liked thinking of her old friend out there on the ocean with a pair of binoculars and a lot of curiosity. It made her feel good to know he was adventuring when his time came but his loss was deeply felt.