At Last (The Idle Point, Maine Stories)(81)

He had no right to do this. All they had left between them was the secret of the love they had shared. They had been apart for over eight years now. He had taken lovers. He had a daughter to love, while she had a cat name Pyewacket and a few memories. What more could he possibly want?

The storm had yet to turn into a full-fledged nor'easter but it was bad enough to keep her inside most of the day. Laquita had taped her ankle and after thanks to the ice and elevation, Gracie could get around with only the slightest limp. She ran out once to buy some more apples and brown sugar at the market and was forced to endure some very embarrassing comments from Raymond at register one and half the produce department. Despite the possibility of even greater embarrassment, she swung by the animal hospital to see Doctor Jim who greeted her warmly.

"So you're back," he said as they grabbed coffee in his office. "How's the big city treating you?"

"Not too well," she said, suddenly tired of putting a good face on everything. "I screwed up royally and I'm on suspension."

She gave him the details, sparing nobody, and he nodded.

"What would you have done?" she asked him. "Would you have suspended me for saving a healthy animal from being put down?"

"Yes," he said, "and then I would have taken you out to dinner to thank you for doing it."

He didn't ask why she had left Idle Point but she did notice an open copy of the Gazette on his desk.

"Will I see you at the Adamses' Thanksgiving table tomorrow?" he asked.

"Absolutely," she said, hiding her surprise. She had had no idea that the Adamses and Doctor Jim were friends. "Please tell me that Ellen is making her famous candied yams." She remembered them fondly from church suppers when she was a little girl.

His face clouded and she instantly knew she had said something terribly wrong.

"Ellen died last year," he told her, his dark eyes welling with tears. "She put up a brave fight but in the end she lost."

She didn't know what else to do so she hugged him.

"Come back home to stay, Gracie," he said as she said goodbye. "You know this is where you're meant to be. Don't wait until it's too late."





#





Doctor Jim's words lingered with her as she pared apples and rolled pie crust. Don't wait until it's too late. She was barely thirty years old. Not even at the halfway point in her life.

"Doctor Jim said the strangest thing to me today," she said to Ben, who was putting together a window seat for Pyewacket. Pye watched the endeavor from atop the television set across the room. "He said I should come back to Idle Point before it's too late. Do you have any idea what he meant by that?"

Ben put down his hammer and considered her question. "He's still pretty raw from losing Ellen. That can make a man sit up and take notice of how quickly it all spins by."

"I'm not exactly AARP material yet," she said dryly as she reached for the cinnamon. "There's plenty of time."

"I thought that too, Graciela. I was only forty-one when your mother was killed in that car crash."

She stopped what she was doing. She all but stopped breathing. This was the first time in her entire life that he had directly referenced her mother's death.

He leaned back on his heels, hammer dangling from his right hand, and met her eyes. "You've probably heard some talk along the way about your mother and me."

She leaned against the counter for support. "Yes," she said. "I have."

"Most of it was true," he said. "We had what you'd call a difficult marriage but I loved that woman with all my heart and in the end I know she loved me too."

"I-I'm sure she did, Dad." You don't know what Simon told me, Dad. She was leaving you, taking me with her. She was going to run off with another man.

"We had our troubles, don't get me wrong. At one point we were going to throw in the towel and call it quits once and for all, but then out of the blue you came along and it was like God opened up the gates of Heaven and let us in."

She looked down at her hands, willing herself not to cry. For almost thirty years she had dreamed of the day her father would open up to her and now that he was, she wanted to turn and run. You're pretty good at that, aren't you, Gracie. You proved that Monday with Noah.

"I wasn't her first choice," he said. "She loved somebody else all through high school but I was always there. I knew what I wanted and I was willing to wait." The best-looking, most popular couple at Idle Point High. King and Queen of the Senior Prom. The ones most likely to elope on graduation night and live happily ever after. "Except it didn't happen that way," Ben said with a small laugh. "You see, the King of the Prom wanted more out of life than your mother could give him. He loved her but he didn't love her enough to look past her family and the fact that she lived in one of those shacks near Milltown. He tried, I'll give him that, but in the end he couldn't separate the girl he loved from the family she came from and he married somebody else."