Barefoot Brides Page 16

  He still had on his hospital gown and the little plastic band around his wrist with all his vital information on it, but today for the first time since he’d been here, he had on his captain’s hat with the parrot feather in it. Plus, the old twinkle had returned to his eyes.

  Still, he had to pause for a few abrupt coughs as he announced, “I’m ready for a little lively company.”

  “Okay, I sent them to the cafeteria because I needed some space.” She came in and plunked down on the empty bed beside his. “And by the way, if you said that to make me feel guilty, it won’t work. I visited you every day you were in here.”

  “I know that, honey.” He waved off her bad mood with one meaty hand then laughed. “So did Dodie.”

  “She did?”

  “Didn’t she tell you?”

  “We, uh, I haven’t seen her all week.”

  “All week? How much more space do you need than that?”

  Moxie squirmed. “I just…It’s this whole instant family thing. It’s just overwhelming. I’m used to my independence. I’m used to having to rely only on myself.”

  “That’s my doing.”

  “I didn’t mean it as an accusation.”

  “I know, sweetheart, but still…”

  “And you weren’t the only parent involved in making me who I am, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Oh, I noticed.” He reached out to her.

  She got up and came to him.

  When she laid her hand in his, he engulfed it in both of his. “All through that first year after Linda left, you probably felt like I didn’t notice anything but my own anger and humiliation and grief. I tried my best to hide it from you but now I realize that probably only made things worse.”

  He had thought he’d done her a favor by doing that. Sparing her having to see and perhaps share in his emotional turmoil after his marriage fell apart. For the first time in years she saw her father in a different light. A more human light. More vulnerable.

  “It was a tough time for both of us,” she said softly. “But that actually wasn’t what I meant when I said I learned to rely on myself alone.”

  “What do you mean then?”

  “I meant that I was right here all the time.” She found herself putting the pieces together as she talked it through. “You came and went. The Cromwells came and went, even though we didn’t know who they were. Linda just went. And I stayed here. I was always right here. In Santa Sofia.”

  “Where anyone could have found you.” Her father’s mouth puckered into a pensive frown.

  “If they had only looked,” Moxie whispered.

  If they had only looked! It was the first time Moxie had ever said, out loud, anything even remotely akin to blaming the Cromwell family for their prolonged separation.

  “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?” Billy J tipped his hat to the back of his head and let his hand rest on his beet-red forehead. “You’re not really all that overwhelmed by Dodie and the girls trying to get close to you now. This is about all the years up until now.”

  Moxie had reached the very same conclusion moments before her father gave it voice. For that she was glad, as she found, when she tried to speak again, her own voice had grown thin and quavering. “They were close to me all those years, Dad. All those years when I was so unhappy and our home life was so strained.”

  “I know, sweetie.” He held his hand to her again.

  “All those years when I needed a mom and would have loved having sisters. They were so close.” She ignored his hand and went to the bed and crawled up beside him as though she were six years old and scared by lightning. “They didn’t come for me then but now they want me to come running with open arms whenever they feel like acting like one big happy family.”

  “They tried, honey. They tried to find you. You’ve seen the garden.”

  Moxie thought of the odd garden behind the cottage on Dream Away Bay Court. Souvenirs from all over the country told the story of every place Dodie had tracked down stories of where her husband and kidnapped child might have gone. Not a single one of those artifacts reflected the obvious—not a one of them was from the local area.

  She laid her head on his large, rounded shoulder and shut her eyes. “They didn’t try hard enough.”

  “Oh, Molly Christina, my sweet little lost lamb, you think a day goes by that I don’t tell myself that exact same thing?”

  Moxie’s eyes flew open and she bolted up. Her lips pressed together preparing, automatically, to call the stricken-faced woman standing in the doorway Mom. She caught herself before the word got out. “Dodie! I didn’t mean for you to hear that.”

  “You don’t have to say it out loud for me to get your message, Molly Chris—that is, Moxie, dear.” The woman stood in the doorway with her hands folded in absolute stillness in front of her flouncy blue dress. Shadow disguised the expression on her face but she did nothing to hide the raw edge of her pain when she spoke. “You’ve made your feelings about me quite clear.”

  Moxie wanted to protest that she didn’t even know what her feelings were, but she couldn’t. Even though she had not analyzed and named her emotions, she had made quite clear, and quite often, the fact that she wasn’t happy.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just…” She blinked and tears clung to her lashes. She tightened her jaw, willing them not to fall. “I just don’t know how to act, how to react to all of this. You always knew what was missing in your life.”

  “I knew,” Dodie said softly, placing her hand over her heart. “Heaven help me I never forgot it, not even for a day.”

  “But I didn’t know. I had no idea I had any blood relatives.” She turned to her father still looking pale and weak lying on the hospital bed. “Not that my foster family didn’t give me—”

  “A whale of a time?” Billy J joked, followed with a wheezing laugh.

  “All the love in the world,” she said. She laid the back of her hand over his flushed cheek. “Then that world fell apart.”

  Billy J’s usually jovial face went somber.

  “And I learned to cope with things on my own.” She glanced at Dodie, wanting to assert her independence. She turned to her father, wanting to make sure she didn’t come off haughty and ungrateful. “I never doubted how much you loved me, Daddy, but when the going got tough—”

  “I went fishing.”

  Moxie could only nod at that.

  “And I stayed out of your life far too long,” he admitted, his eyes downcast.

  “I managed. Thrived even.” She touched the brim of his hat then gave the parrot feather a flick to lighten the mood and help illustrate her own resilience. “It wasn’t an ideal situation but it made me who I am.”

  “Just like losing you made us who we are.” Kate stepped into the doorway, putting her hand on Dodie’s shoulder. “You aren’t the only one questioning how to cope with these new relationships, Moxie.”

  “I know that. Don’t you think I know that?” Moxie snapped at her sister’s intrusion. “It’s just harder for me because of my past.”

  Kate glared at Moxie.

  Moxie glared right back.

  “Mom always emphasized to Jo and me that sisterhood is not a competition. That we should be ourselves but never to forget to be sweet. I always thought she oversimplified things, but now I get it.” Kate limped around her mother, her eyes never leaving Moxie’s as she moved fully into the room. “Mom wanted us to always remember that no matter what we think we know about each other, underneath it all is a person who may be hurting to her very core. Who may feel lost, or scared, or so angry that it could affect the most significant choices she makes.”

  Some of the tension left Moxie’s body as she considered that.

  “She wanted us to love and cherish others because she understood better than anyone how quickly everything can change.”

  “I didn’t have the benefit of that guidance, though, did I?” Moxie shifted her focus from Katie’s defiant gaze to Dodie’s tentativ
e one. “I didn’t have you.”

  “You have me now, baby.” Her hand fluttered forward for only a second before she withdrew it again. “If you want me in your life, you have me now.”

  “And if I don’t want you?”

  “Moxie!” Billy J spoke with such force it set off a coughing fit.

  Moxie went to him to pat his back. “Daddy, I’m not saying that to be cruel. I sincerely want to know. Not every situation like this comes with its own fairy-tale ending.”

  He shook his head, his gaze empathetic.

  She turned to Dodie and Kate and asked the real question that had gnawed at her heart all this time. “What if I can’t find a way to accept a new mom and sisters?”

  Moxie did not know what she wanted Dodie to say, but she knew on a deeper level that it could well set the tone for everything that happened between them from now on.

  “I can only speak for myself.” Dodie stepped forward. She did not let her gaze waver from her youngest daughter, even when her footsteps faltered slightly and her voice trembled with emotion. “If you can’t find room in your heart to accept me as your mom then…”

  Then I’ll leave.

  Moxie braced herself. Everyone’s always left. Her birth father, her foster mother. She lived in a town based on people coming into your life for a very short time then leaving again. When she had finally found a man who she thought she could fall in love with, he did not plan to stay.

  “Go on,” she urged. “Say it.”

  “Then I will respect your feelings.”

  She knew it! Moxie exhaled and started for the door, needing to get some fresh air.

  When she came shoulder to shoulder with Dodie, the older woman turned, only slightly, and with her eyes still fixed on Moxie said almost inaudibly, “But it won’t change mine.”

  “What?” Moxie came to a halt beside Dodie.

  “Molly Christina…Molly…my sweet, sweet baby girl. I could no sooner stop loving you than I could stop loving Kate or Jo. You are my child. You always have been and you always will be.”

  Moxie was moved but it had only hinted at the answer she knew was coming. “I’m not a child. What if I can’t deal with all this as an adult?”

  She was pushing. She knew it but she couldn’t stop herself. She had to push. She had to know if Dodie would do what her birth father and foster mom had done—leave.

  “If you’d come back when I was a kid, maybe I could have made the adjustment more easily but you didn’t. And I don’t know if I can. If only…”

  “That’s enough of that.” Dodie held her hand up to cut Moxie off. “I love you too much to stand here and let you drag yourself down with that kind of talk.”

  “I just said…”

  Kate held up a finger and warned, with quiet compassion, “For once maybe you should listen instead of shooting off your mouth about what you want or what you think. This is one thing Mom knows a little something about.”

  Moxie pressed her lips together and glowered at Kate.

  “You may not have grown up with me advising you about sisterhood or understanding anyone you meet might harbor a hurting heart, but I can share this with you now. ‘If only’ isn’t going to help you, make you a better person or change a thing about the past.” Dodie took Moxie’s hand lightly. “I learned not long after you were taken that those are some of the heaviest words in the English language. Some people use them like an anchor to keep their lives always in the past.”

  If only my birth family had found me sooner. If only my foster mother had cared more about her family than herself. If only…

  Moxie felt the pull of the words instantly, weighing her down, triggering unproductive emotions as she thought of her own list of grievances.

  “I could not afford to do that,” Dodie went on. “I could not move forward and do what I had to do—be a mother to Jo and Kate and never stop searching for you—I couldn’t do any of that dragging ‘if only’ along with me.”

  Just as, moments earlier, she had seen her father—her daddy, her hero—not in those terms but in all his humanity, she now saw Dodie. Not as just another vulnerable, sometimes daffy older woman trying to push her own needs onto her newly found daughter, but as a single mom who put her own pain aside in order to do what had to be done. Not larger than life but bigger than the heartache life had dealt her.

  “What does that mean? I’m not sure how to—”

  “It means I only know how to live in the now.” Dodie gripped Moxie’s hand more tightly now. “If you tell me that you can’t accept me as your mother then I will deal with that.”

  “And leave?” If Dodie wasn’t going to say it, Moxie would.

  “Leave?” Dodie scoffed. “Oh, no, sweetheart, I would never leave.”

  “Even if I didn’t want to be a daughter to you?”

  “Even if you didn’t want to speak to me. Or see me. Even if you told everyone in town to shun me. I would stay right here.”

  “Stay?” Moxie didn’t know how to react to that. “And do what?”

  “I wouldn’t try to force you to change your mind, if that’s what you’re asking.” The older woman’s eyes were damp. “I guess I would just wait and hope and pray that time and love would change your heart.”

  “You’d…stay?” Moxie couldn’t get over it. Nobody stayed. Nobody just waited and prayed for her. They ran off. They went fishing. They did not…“Stay. But why?”

  “I lost you once.” Dodie raised her free hand to caress Moxie’s cheek. “I will never lose you again.”

  Moxie tried not to break out crying like a baby, tried to play it cool. But the second her lower lip quivered and Dodie brushed a tear off her cheek, she fell into her mother’s arms at long last and lost herself in a deep hug. “Oh, Mom!”

  “Molly Chris—”

  “No, that’s okay. I kind of like it when you call me that.”

  “Molly.” Tears flooded Dodie’s eyes. “My Molly Christina. After all these years, you are finally really a part of our family again at last.”

  When Moxie pulled away she had one more question she had to ask. “Why? Why if I didn’t want anything to do with you, would you have stayed?”

  “Because that’s what families do,” Kate whispered as she joined her mother and sister in their hug.

  Moxie shook her head. “So families go and families stay?”

  “Families do what needs to be done,” Dodie said.

  “I think I’m going to like being a part of the family.” Moxie sniffled. “Now we just have one more issue to resolve.”

  “What’s that?” Kate wanted to know.

  “Now that we’ve worked out what being in this family means, how do we keep this family together? Mom, how will we stay close to Jo and Kate if they leave Santa Sofia?”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” Kate raised her hand as if giving her pledge.

  Dodie reached for her older daughter to hug her, too. “Oh, Katie, you don’t have to do that, not when you finally—”

  She shook her head. “No more Scat-Kat Katie.”

  “But Vince?” Moxie asked.

  “If Vince chases after Gentry then that’s where his heart is, that’s who his family is, and it won’t include me. I understand that. As long as he puts his grown child ahead of his own future and moving on, there won’t be any room for me.”

  Moxie reached out and put her arm around Kate. “I’ve known Vince a long time. Don’t give up on him too soon.”

  “I won’t. Not this time. But I won’t run away again—I have obligations to Mom and you and Lionel and my work and myself. I plan to stay here.”

  “So Mom is staying. You are staying. I am…” What if Hunt asked her to go away with him when he leaves? Moxie shook her head. Getting a little ahead of herself, wasn’t she? “I am staying.”

  “If only Jo…” Kate murmured.

  “Uh-uh,” Dodie warned.

  Moxie laughed. “I wouldn’t worry too much about Jo.”

  “But she seems
to have fallen so easily back into her old life in Atlanta. Why would she come back to Santa Sofia?”

  “Because Santa Sofia has one thing Atlanta never will.”

  “Us?” Dodie asked.

  “The Bait Shack!” Billy J proclaimed.

  Kate folded her arms. “Are you thinking—”

  “The one thing Santa Sofia has that Atlanta never will is Travis Brandt,” Moxie concluded. “And I think it’s about time Travis did a little outreach for the chapel, don’t y’all?”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about what we talked about Friday night.” Vince found Kate in what had become their usual Sunday-morning pew in the Traveler’s Wayside Chapel.

  “And?” She tipped her head back, her pulse picking up in anticipation that he would say he’d hashed out his issues and wanted to stay in Santa Sofia. Preferably with her as his wife.

  He paused, looked around the chapel, which had just opened its doors and wouldn’t start services for almost twenty minutes, then gave a half hearted shrug. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “And yet your lips are moving.” She rolled her eyes, finding it hard to believe he had stopped to speak to her just to say nothing.

  She flounced her full cotton skirt in an attempt to get it to lift perfectly over her cast and to let him know her interest in his uncertainty had waned.

  “I just…Can I sit?” He edged forward.

  She gave him a look but what could she do? They were in church after all. She tucked her injured foot out of the way as best she could and wedged herself into the corner created by the end of the pew to allow Vince to get by her.

  “I’m glad you’re here early,” he told her. “I was afraid by the time I got Fabbie settled in the nursery I’d have to take a seat in the back by myself.”

  He dropped down so close and so hard that the lace trim on the hem of her white, frilly skirt flipped up. She smoothed it down not because it had revealed even an inch of leg but because…because she wanted to. It sent a message. She wasn’t sure what message and she had no illusion that Vince picked up on it anyway, so it wasn’t really a clear or effective message. But then that seemed to be exactly the kind of message best suited for their relationship.