The Barefoot Believers (25 page)

“Great.” She took off her hat, tossed it aside and began searching step by step.

“Save yourself some trouble and check really well in the carpet by the door and in that crack where the carpet meets the steps,” Kate cautioned. “I can't help thinking that if it had hit the steps, I'd have heard it and recalled that.”

“Okay.” Moxie plonked her bottom down on the second step up and began running her fingers along the edge of the carpet.

“Did you hear that?” Jo called from the kitchen. “I thought I heard a car door.”

From the stairwell, Moxie couldn't hear anything going on outside.

“It's probably from across the street.” Kate's tone gave no doubt that she had no intention of looking and confirming that.

Moxie could hardly blame her. Kate had told her about the scalding Vince had given her for getting involved with Gentry, Esperanza and the baby. Correction, Moxie thought, the
undeserved
scalding. Of all the good people in Santa Sofia who had seen the way Vince had spent his life trying to protect Gentry from, well, pretty much every unpleasant or difficult thing in the world, Moxie alone had been the one to take him to task about it. Moxie and now Kate.

“No. I think I heard something outside.” The clatter of silverware and plates came from the kitchen. Then the rush of water in the sink. “I'm going to go out and see—”

“Bring me that sandwich first. I can't take this medicine until—”

Whomp.

The front door came swinging open and banged against the wall.

Moxie jumped and bumped her head on the doorknob. She put her hand to the throbbing spot and closed her eyes. “Ow!”

“Praise the Lord you girls haven't fallen off the face of the earth!” A woman's voice boomed through the whole of the quiet cottage.

Moxie still had her head bent when she felt a hand cradling the top of her head.

“I know you're always on the move, Scat-Kat-Katie, but you really should be in bed!”

Moxie looked up.

“Oh!” A chubby woman with a bubble of pale hair loomed over her, her green eyes flashing with surprise. “You're not my Katie!”

“No, I'm—”

“Mom! What are you doing here?”

Mom?
That was Dodie Cromwell? She looked so…familiar. Moxie stared, and not a subtle stare, either. A big open-mouthed, “what gives here?” kind of stare that, if Mrs. Cromwell were her mother, the woman would have scolded her for and told her to mind her manners. She thought of stepping forward and introducing herself but the woman looked right through her as if Jo and Kate were the only people in the house. In the whole entirety of her universe, even.

“I had to come. My girls didn't answer my phone calls.” She went to Kate, pushed her hair back off her face and planted a kiss on her forehead. “I had to come and make sure everything was all right.”

The sight made Moxie look away. And in doing so she noticed light bouncing off something metal. She reached down and plucked it up. “I, uh, I found the key.”

Kate batted in the air, making her hair fall back into place. She didn't acknowledge Moxie's news, just narrowed her eyes at her mother and demanded, “Where are your friends? How did you get down here?”

The older woman put her hand to her mouth when she said, “Can we discuss this later when we don't have, um, company?”

It couldn't have felt more awkward if the older woman had called her an outsider in Pig Latin. Which would have been super awkward since it would be achingly obvious and imply that she didn't think Moxie still wouldn't be bright enough to piece it together.
Outsider-ay.

Moxie felt as if she now had the term so firmly imprinted in her brain that it probably looked like a stamp across her forehead. It didn't help that the whole hand-to-mouth thing actually had the effect of amplifying Dodie Cromwell's brush-off instead of hiding it, as she must have thought it would. Moxie stared at the woman some more.

Something about her made Moxie want to smile. Maybe it was the soft, motherly figure or the hairdo that must have taken a couple hours and at least one can of hairspray to construct. Or the funny little shoes that almost went with her outfit, but not quite, that almost fit her feet, but…no.

Moxie winced at the way the woman's foot looked crammed into the shoe and at how the heel seemed to thrust her forward at an odd angle. Dodie Cromwell looked, well, a bit dotty.

And still, Moxie wished with all her heart that the older woman would like her.

For a moment she thought if she introduced herself it might ease the tension in the room. But a glance at Kate, and then at just the back of Jo working in the kitchen, made her realize that the woman had generated her own tension by just showing up today.

She thrust the key out toward Kate. “I'll leave y'all to talk.”

“Don't run off.” Jo touched her shoulder as she came into the room with Kate's sandwich. “Go. Try on shoes. I know you want to. It's not like we don't see our mom every few days.”

“In fact, I'm a little embarrassed we didn't realize she would do something drastic if we didn't answer our phones.” Kate took the plate with the sandwich on it then swung her gaze from her sister to her mother. “Or if she just
felt
like it.”

“You did not drive all this way alone, did you, Mom?” Jo demanded.

Dodie did not answer. She just clucked her tongue at the plate in Kate's hand. “Is that what you're having for lunch? Surely we can do better than that.”

“Mom?” Jo folded her arms.

“Just give me ten minutes in the kitchen. I think I remember where it is!” She went breezing by.

Moxie could not take her eyes off the woman.

“Mom, you haven't answered my—”

Kate held up her hand to cut her sister off. “If she's cooking, she's not stirring up trouble.”

Jo shut her mouth.

Moxie looked around and wondered how unsafe it might be to go out the front door. She could probably make it.

“Here, before she gets back in here, hand me my treasure chest. That way I can see what's in it without her sticking her nose in and…” She made a face at Jo.

Moxie supposed that was some kind of sisterly code for
and you know what.
Moxie did not know what the woman would do, however, and it piqued her curiosity. Enough so that this time when she tried to excuse herself she did it without any real enthusiasm. “Okay, then, I guess I should get going.”

“Here's the treasure chest.” Jo plunked it down in Kate's lap.

Kate inserted the key and wriggled it.

Neither of them said goodbye to Moxie, which she took as a casual invitation to stay.

Kate stuck her tongue out and concentrated, trying to get the old lock to budge.

“Maybe it's not the right key,” Jo suggested.

“No, I can feel it. I just need to use a little—”

Clank.

The metal lid flipped back and smashed into the body of the file box.

“Ta-da!” Kate exclaimed.

“What's in there?” Jo whispered, crowding in close.

“Which would you girls prefer—tuna salad or grilled cheese?” Dodie called from the kitchen.

“My retainer!” Kate's voice rang out.

“What?” Dodie asked.

Kate put her hand over her mouth.

“Anything you make will be great, Mom,” Jo replied, then pinched the pink-and-wire contraption between her fingers and held it up. “You got in so much trouble for losing this.”

“That's not the only thing.” Kate put her hand deep into the box.

“What? What have you found?”

Kate did not say a word but her eyes rimmed with tears. She held her sister's gaze and slowly, her hand trembling, withdrew an old photograph.

“Oh,” Jo whispered, her own eyes wide and her hand on her cheek as they all stared at a photo of two young girls in a driveway in Anytown, America, standing in front of a truck not unlike Moxie's with a brown-eyed man and a nearly colorless sky.

Moxie's heart stopped.

Her mind stopped.

Her ability to speak stopped.

But her feet did not. They carried her out the front door and to her truck as fast as they could.

“W
hat was that about?” Jo looked at the door Moxie had just slammed, then at the photo that had seemed to set her off, then at Kate.

“What on earth?” Their mother looked out the kitchen window then ran to the back door. “Give me a minute and I'll move my car!”

“Mom?” Jo hurried to the kitchen only to practically collide head-on with her mom coming back inside.

“Have you ever seen the likes of that? She just whipped that old truck over alongside my car and backed out without using the drive!” Dodie shook her head, then looked at a piece of quarter-folded paper in her hand. “And what is this?”

“What's what?” Jo touched the picture of herself and Kate standing beside their father in front of his new truck. The truck he had driven away in so many years ago. The truck that looks so much like…

She glanced up and the paper in her mother's hands grabbed her attention. She instantly recognized Moxie's handwriting from having pored over the list she'd made regarding improvements to the cottage. “Where did you find that?”

“Outside on the porch under a plant.” Dodie strained to read the page, holding it as far away as she could, then bringing it almost to her nose, then out again. “It looks like…Is this yours, Jo? It looks like your handiwork.”

Jo took the paper from her mother's hand and without reading the details recognized it immediately as a tentative offer to buy a property. She made a closer inspection.
This property.

It
did
look like her handiwork.

“Of course.” If the situation had been reversed and Jo had been in Moxie's place, she'd have done the exact same thing. Jo squinted to go over the bottom line a second time. “It's an offer to buy this house as is. A low offer, but fair.”

Dodie shook her head and went back to making sandwiches. “Why would anyone think we wanted to sell our house?”

“Because we do.” Kate came into the kitchen, her face drawn with pain and weariness. “Or, at least
I
do.”

“Scat-Kat-Katie wants to sell the house and move,” Dodie muttered. “Now there's a surprise.”

Kate scowled. “Jo had the idea first.”

“It's a sisterhood, not a competition,” Dodie advised for about the umpteen-millionth time in their lives. “It doesn't matter who wanted to do what first.”

“She wanted to fix this place up for a fast sale,” Kate went on. “Had the idea we needed to do that to keep you from the wild notion of trying to live down here. She might have had another agenda, though. And after a few days down here, she might have changed her mind, I can't say. Jo?”

Jo gazed at the paper again. A low offer but one that left her with a share big enough to make the first month's mortgage payment on the house in Atlanta and finish off the upgrades so it would sell for enough to keep her from further debt. Then she looked at the picture, the two innocent faces and her father, proud of only his truck. Then she stared at the shoes that after a morning at the chapel in the company of a man whose priorities she greatly admired now represented the frivolity of her life.

It was as if her whole life were now laid before her and she had to choose. Could she ever go back to the way she had been just a few short days ago?

“No,” she murmured.

“No?” Dodie frowned. “No to me living down here? No to another agenda? No to changing your mind?”

“No.” Jo took a deep breath then went from not looking at anything in particular to focusing on her mother's expectant gaze. “No, I do not want to sell the house. No, I do not want to go back.”

“Not go back? I didn't know that was on the table.” Dodie sliced through a freshly made tuna sandwich from corner to corner then set it, on a plate, in front of Kate. The whole while she never took her worried gaze from Jo. “But you have a full, exciting life in Atlanta. You have your work and your…all those business deals you've told me about. And, uh, didn't your boss—”

“Listen to yourself, Mom.” Jo paced the length of the kitchen then pivoted. “My work. My deals. My boss. That's hardly a
whole
life, is it? Coming here made me realize that.”

Kate reached out to touch the photograph with two fingers then looked up at Jo. “Meeting Travis Brandt had nothing to do with that?”

“Travis?” Mom's eyes lit up. “A
man?
You met a man?”

“A
minister,
Mom,” Jo emphasized.

“
Travis Brandt,
Mom.” Kate waited a moment to allow that to sink in.

Dodie looked at her daughters, the photo, the offer, then at Kate again. She shook her head.

“He's a sports guy? On TV? Really cute. All-American type. Dated supermodels. I know you saw his picture in magazines.”

“Not the magazines in your office, Scat-Kat, those things had to be at least five years old.”

“Don't be so quick to look down your nose at my outdated magazines, that's probably about the time this guy's picture was everywhere.”

“What happened to him? Not some sort of scandal, I hope.”

“No. I get the feeling a scandal you would have remembered.” Kate lifted her leg to rest her foot on the chair across from her. “He just walked away from it all. The girls, the money, the fame.”

Dodie shook her head.

“That doesn't matter, anyway. That's not who he is anymore.” Jo held up her hand.

She got it now. In this instant, almost two grand worth of shoes lined up before her and the meaninglessness of her life spelled out by her mother moments earlier, she got it.

Standing here, hearing people talk about who Travis had been as though he had no more dimension than the photographs they had seen him in, she got it.

Looking at the picture of her father and herself and her sister and seeing in his eyes that he had not chosen their baby sister and rejected her but that he had chosen himself, he had chosen an unfilled life and to cause pain to those he should have protected, she got it.

Thinking of all the possibilities still open to her, knowing the man Travis had become, Jo got it. Got how he could walk away from the emptiness of money, fame and, yes, even adoring supermodels just to end up flipping flapjacks in the fellowship hall. “What matters is that he is a good guy.”

“And you like him, this good guy?” Mom asked.

“Yes. But that's not the reason I don't want to go back to that life in Atlanta.”

Kate scoffed.

“Okay, it's not the whole reason.”

“But if you don't go back, won't that nice Mike Powers be angry with you?” Dodie wrung her hands.

“In the first place
Paul
Powers is not nice. And furthermore I no longer feel the need to impress him at all costs.”

“But you were doing so well,” Mom said softly.

“Don't you see? My work is not enough anymore.” She thought of the chapel, of the needs she could help meet there. She thought of bringing together women throughout the community to form a worship-and-action team that would meet on the beach. With their bare feet in the sand and their hands ready to serve the Lord. “Mom, I am feeling a pull to do God's work.”

“What does that mean?” Kate sat up straighter than before. Her intense features echoed the expression of their father in the photograph before them. “How could you possibly know for sure what to do? People spend their whole lives trying to do good, to do the right thing when faced with life's monumental questions, Jo. How can you be here in Santa Sofia a matter of days and presume you know what you should do with the rest of your life like that?”

Kate the perfect didn't understand? A wave of forgiveness washed through Jo. Forgiveness for her sister, her father and even her mother. All of them had been seeking, she realized. Trying to find the right path. They had no idea what
they
wanted or how to find it.

They had not intended to make her feel unwanted, but how could they not? They, like far too many people in the world, felt unwanted themselves.

Jo marveled that somehow it had come to her. Through Travis. Through her own anxiety. Through service.

“It means that I feel that I can't serve two masters. I can't serve my own need to be the biggest and brightest and best in pursuit of money and recognition to assuage my own hurts and make me feel loved
and
serve the Lord and love others with all my heart.” Jo held up her hand to keep them from jumping in. “Some people can. But not me. It meant too much for me to try to bring the focus onto myself. I didn't put my clients first, I put my numbers first, my deals, my place in the company.”

Dodie set a second sandwich down. Through it all she had kept right on doing the mom thing, putting her kids' needs first. Even the ones she did not understand. “I want to support you, sweetie. But…you're giving up being a Realtor?”

“No. Yes. Maybe. I don't know. It's not the job that's the issue, Mom. I can do or be anything but whatever I do, I have to get my priorities straight or none of it matters. I do not want to go back to my life the way it was in Atlanta.”

“Jo, I can't believe I'm hearing this.” Dodie looked to Kate as if Kate were the final determining factor in whether or not this news would be true or not.

“Why? Mom!” Jo made her mother look at her and when she did, she reached out and put her hand on her mother's soft upper arm to anchor her attention. “You're the one who wanted to start life over here in Santa Sofia herself. You're the one always saying ‘If you're heading in the right direction, you have no reason to look back,' aren't you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, for the first time I am heading in the right direction, Mom. I thought you'd be happy.” For an instant the old insecurities arose. She wanted her mother to be pleased with her. To approve. But did she want it badly enough to waver on her new commitment? She thought of the chapel and the shoes and then of Travis and the talk they had had this morning. She took up Moxie's offer and held it out. “But even if you don't understand my decision, I'm sticking with it. If we're taking a vote, mine is not to sell the cottage.”

Dodie slid the paper from Jo's hand. “Kate?”

“If Jo stays here, I guess she can take care of you. I'm not going to do it.” The words had hardly left her lips when Kate gasped, put her hand over her mouth and sat there, blinking in complete shock at her own bluntness.

“I never expected you would, my little Scat-Kat-Katie.” Mom laughed.

Sure.
Jo announced a turnaround in her life plans and Mom gives her grief. Kate does it and Mom…

Jo narrowed her eyes at her sister, the way she had when they were kids and Kate had gotten all the attention. What she saw made her breath catch in the back of her throat. Where there had been pain in her sister's face before, Jo now saw hurt there instead.

There was a difference, Jo understood, and her heart went out to her sister for it.

Mom gave Jo grief, sure, but Mom also gave Kate grief. It just came in another form.

Jo looked at her mother, who had stuck out her lip in a half-teasing pout but whose eyes shone with concern and maybe a little fear as she looked from Kate to Jo and back again. Yeah, their mom gave them grief but they gave it right back to her again.

Jo spread out her arms, her hands making a slashing motion. “This stops now.”

“What?”

“This…This…This whole cycle.” Jo took the paper and snatched up the old photo. “This whole way we have of jabbing at one another, then retreating and pretending it never happened, or we didn't mean it, or somehow the other person is to blame for taking it wrong.”

“We never—”

“Mom, we
always,
” Kate corrected.

“And now that we know this, or rather, that we have acknowledged it, we cannot go back.” Jo took a deep breath and exhaled. It felt good.

“I don't—” Dodie wrung her hands.

“Sit down, Mom.” Jo pulled out a chair.

“And take off those shoes,” Kate demanded.

Dodie obeyed.

The chunky shoes banged against the old floor as she kicked them off.

Jo followed suit, even though tossing off her flip-flops did not have the same impact. What did she care? She wasn't going to rely on shoes to make her statements anymore, anyway. “Mom. We cannot go back. We are finally headed in the right direction. We've been honest.”

“O-okay,” Mom agreed. She didn't look as if she wanted to agree but there it was.

“I don't want to sell the house,” Jo went on. “Kate does. Kate doesn't want to take care of you and…neither do I.”

“Jo!” Kate and Dodie spoke in unison.