At Last (The Idle Point, Maine Stories) - By Barbara Bretton Page 0,4

reason Gracie's heart hurt as she watched them. That couldn't be his mommy. A mommy would hold your hand and ask you about your day and look happy to see you again, like Gramma Del did but better.

Gramma Del was daddy's mother. Gracie knew she did the best she could, because that's what Gramma Del was always telling her. "You should have better than an old woman taking care of you," she liked to say when she was giving Gracie her bath. "Things aren't meant to be this way." She lived out back in the small cottage behind the house and mostly minded her own business when it came to her son's comings and goings. She looked the other way when her son rolled home smelling like beer at all hours of the day or night and only spoke up when he didn't come home at all.

"This child deserves better," Gracie had heard her grandma say more than once. "She deserves a real family." Sometimes Gramma Del came into the house very late and carried a sleepy Gracie out to the cottage to spend the night. "I had a bad dream," she liked to say as she made room for Gracie in her narrow feather bed. "Glad you could visit." Gracie always laughed, even though she knew that wasn't the reason at all.

Maybe that was why daddy had brought home that skinny red-haired woman at Christmastime and said, "Graciela, meet Vicky. She's your new mother." Gracie had burst into tears then run from the room as fast as her new sneakers would carry her. Daddy had yelled at her to come back and apologize—"right this second, young lady!"—but Gracie didn't care. She threw herself on her bed and sobbed until her eyes hurt so bad she couldn't see. She didn't want some stranger coming in and pretending to be her mother. She wanted her real mother, the brown-haired woman with the gentle smile who looked down at her from the photograph on her nightstand.

Gracie wasn't sure how she knew this but somehow she understood that she wasn't supposed to talk about the nights when her daddy fell asleep on the floor with an empty bottle beside him or how the redheaded woman walked out one day at the beginning of the summer and took everything that wasn't nailed down along with her. Gracie had been in her room, pretending to be sound asleep, but she'd really been watching through a crack in the door while the woman and her squeaky-voiced sister took money from daddy's pockets and the bottles off the shelves.

No, she'd never talk about any of that. Not with anyone. People whispered enough about the Taylors anyway, about how her daddy couldn't seem to hold down a job and how he should be ashamed to have his mother working as a cook to keep a roof over his lazy no-good head. She hoped Noah wouldn't stop liking her once he found out about her family because if he did, she would never go back to school again and nobody, not even Gramma Del could make her.

But then maybe Noah already knew. If Gramma Del worked for Noah's daddy, maybe Noah knew all about her family and liked her anyway.

She hugged that thought close all the way home.

#

"Change your clothes before you have your snack, Noah." Mary Weston took off her hat and placed it neatly in the center of the hall table with the red feather pointing toward the door.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Your parents will be home from their trip sometime this afternoon. We don't want them finding you looking like a hooligan, do we?"

"No, ma'am." He didn't have any idea what a hooligan looked like or why they wouldn't want him to look like one. Hooligan. The sound of it inside his head made him smile. Hoooo-li-gin. Somehow he'd bet hooligans had more fun than he did.

"Is something funny?"

"No, ma'am."

Mary's sour face puckered even more. "Then why aren't you upstairs changing clothes?"

Noah didn't have to be told again. He turned and raced up the steps two at a time, putting as much distance between himself and the housekeeper as he possibly could. He wished school could last twice as long. It was a lot more fun playing with the other kids than being alone in this scary old house. He ran down the second floor hallway, making sure he didn't catch sight of the pictures on the wall. His mother said these were his relatives, the people his father