At Last (The Idle Point, Maine Stories) - By Barbara Bretton Page 0,61

you. I know I'm not really your biological daughter... They both knew that nothing he could do would ever be enough to erase the years of neglect. If only she knew how to tell him that she understood more than he could imagine.

Funny the way things sometimes worked out. Simon Chase had destroyed her future with Noah on that long-ago afternoon, but his revelation had made it possible for her to understand Ben in a way she had never before been able to do. Simon had given her the gift of compassion. So much about her life made sense now to Gracie. The way Ben had kept her an arm's-length away from him. His reluctance to talk about her mother. The deep hatred between him and Simon. The cloud of bitterness and despair that seemed to surround him.

She wondered sometimes if he knew the truth or only suspected. It wasn't something she could bring herself to ask him. Her mother and Simon Chase were long dead. Gramma Del was gone. Her father—and that was who he was to her; Simon's words would never change that—was finally making some sense of his imperfect life. What could be gained by derailing him now? Let the past stay where it was, buried beneath old newspapers and discarded photographs where it belonged.

Over the years she had grown very good at burying the past.

That night he told her the trees were nearing peak. She told him it was cold and rainy, but not that she had just been suspended from the hospital. She kept her life just out of his reach. Some habits were difficult to break. He asked for Gramma Del's macaroni-and-cheese recipe. She waited while he found a pencil then recited it to him from memory. Then he hit her with the reason for his call.

"I'm getting married again, Graciela."

"Congratulations," she said, sifting through the stack of mail on her hall table while Pyewacket sniffed the closet door with great suspicion. It wasn't like she hadn't heard those words a few times before but she was still a little surprised. He had, after all, been single for over nine years. "Anyone I know?"

"Darnell and Rachel's daughter Laquita."

A copy of Cat Fancy slid to the floor at her feet. "Laquita Adams?" she asked, aware that her voice had climbed an octave-and-a-half.

"Ay-up," he said, never more the New Englander than when put on the spot.

She moved the phone away from her ear and stared at it the way they did on bad sitcoms. Please tell me there are two Laquita Adamses in Idle Point. "Not the same Laquita I went to school with." The quiet little girl who lived down by the river. The quiet big girl who knew every motel between Idle Point and Boston.

"The same," he said to the sound of profound silence from Gracie. "Two weeks from yesterday at the old church near the harbor."

Gracie's silence deepened. She wanted to say something but the thought of her father marrying Laquita had struck her dumb with shock.

Her father cleared his throat, a noise like rocks scraping over concrete. "I'd like you to be there."

She leaned against the wall. She must be oxygen-deprived. The room seemed to spin around her axis. "Would you say that again, please, Dad?"

"The wedding," he said and she knew the effort each word required. "Will you stand up for me?" He knew she had a big important job down there in New York City and more responsibilities on her shoulders than half the men in Idle Point but he and Laquita would be glad to put her up for a few days, even longer if that was what she wanted, it would mean a lot to both of them if she could be there, and the next thing Gracie knew she heard herself saying yes to everything he suggested. The wedding, the visit, everything.

She regretted it the second she hung up the phone. She hadn't been back to Idle Point since the day she walked out on Noah and their dreams of happily-ever-after. Going back would only remind her of everything she had lost, all the things that could never be.

"I must be crazy," she told Pyewacket as she pulled Sam the Cat's old bed down from the hall closet and rummaged around for suitable food and water dishes. She had missed having a cat around the house. You could tell a cat things and be fairly sure they would never end up on the front page of the