At Last (The Idle Point, Maine Stories) - By Barbara Bretton Page 0,20

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