The Barefoot Believers Page 18

  It wasn’t the same as having a family, but it was something. A place where she would belong.

  If the Cromwells would sell their house to her.

  But what if they didn’t want to sell? Then Moxie might be perceived as self-serving, opportunistic, out of line. What if they did want to sell but had some starry-eyed nostalgia-fueled view of the nigh-onto- ram-shackle cottage’s worth? They might see her as…well, the same things. Either way, Moxie would look bad.

  She hated looking bad.

  She had always worked hard to make sure people thought the best of her because, well, first of all, she thought she was a good person, even if her adoptive mom had never really warmed to her. Then there was the Billy J factor. She loved her dad. Everybody loved her dad. But Moxie strongly suspected that if you hit the Web on one of those universal encyclopedia sites and keyed in the word curmudgeon, the last words in the entry would read: see Billy J. Weatherby.

  That was a lot for a girl to overcome. Moxie did it by working hard to keep people from calling her callous like her mother or crusty like good ol’ Billy J.

  She put the back of her thumb to her lips as she weighed her options and the consequences of them one more time.

  Neither of the sisters seemed to know what they wanted.

  It wasn’t her place to push them one way or another.

  She brushed her fingertips over the offer. It was very low. Making an offer this low now was pushy. It also might be seen as callous to their feelings and showing a lot of crust.

  She whisked the paper with the offer on it out of the folder. Hastily she raised her knee so that she could fold the contract in half then into quarters.

  “Just a sec,” a woman’s voice called.

  Moxie stuffed the folded page under the nearest flowerpot, thinking she would grab it on the way out.

  The door swung open and there stood Jo Cromwell. “Hey! We thought you were the pizza delivery guy.”

  “Pizza?” Moxie should have thought of that. Brought a pizza or an assortment of sub sandwiches or…She glanced down at what she had brought, then at the contract that left the empty pot slightly off-kilter.

  For the first time in her life, Moxie found herself empathizing with a flowerpot.

  “Sorry, no pizza. But I did bring by some information for you to chew on.” She thrust the file toward the bright-eyed blonde.

  It was the kind of thing she’d done dozens of times in her line of work but today it felt different. Risky. Exciting. Bold.

  She tugged her hat down low over her eyes, imagining herself engaged in some kind of espionage. Moxie Weatherby, girl spy. “I have an estimate on fixing the porch and a schedule for when work can begin. Also a few things I thought might help you out.”

  “An estimate? A work schedule? So fast?” Jo flipped open the file, glanced down, then gave Moxie a big smile, stepping back to wordlessly invite her inside. “I love how people with the right connections can make things happen in a small town. How’d you do it?”

  “Like you said, the right connections.” In other words, Moxie’s behind had connected with the chair in the contractor’s office and refused to budge until he’d given her an answer. But seeing how pleased Jo appeared with her, she decided not to divulge that.

  “Come on in, I can’t wait to show these to Kate.” Jo motioned her inside to the kitchen, where people had just begun to take seats.

  Jo, her bright blond head bent over the file, didn’t seem to notice Moxie’s hesitation as she took it all in. Kate sat on the couch, a throw over her legs but with her purple cast peeking out from the soft tangle of fringe. All around her, precarious towers of old games and puzzles, and some large, plain cardboard boxes made her look as if she had secreted herself away in her own pretend fortress.

  Vince sat himself down in the bright kitchen and plopped a cooing Fabiola on his knee. Moxie felt a pang of guilt over that.

  It was Saturday, and gloomy. No actual rain forecast but Moxie’s dad had decided to post this sign on the door of the Bait Shack: The Management of this Fine Establishment Reserves the Right to Chase Through Town any Sorry Soul who Overstays his Welcome or Takes More than his Honest-to-goodness Single-meal Stomach Capacity.

  He’d even gone so far as to add to the window under the words All You Can Eat, When I Say You’ve Had All You Can Eat, That’s ALL You Can Eat.

  Moxie couldn’t help but think the old fellow was courting trouble, so she’d chosen to stay out of his way. That meant that he had needed Esperanza to come in to work, at least through the lunch shift.

  Travis Brandt sat at the table drinking tea from a tall glass. No doubt he had been called into service when Esperanza had had to leave. More guilt.

  Moxie paused. The mood seemed amicable. Relaxed. Warm. How she wanted to cross that threshold and soak it all in. But just as she knew she didn’t belong in the middle of a family rift, she didn’t know if she fit in any better in the middle of a family affair. “Wow, I didn’t realize…Did I come at a bad time?”

  Please say no, she thought. Fit in or not, this was suddenly where she wanted to be.

  When she’d seen Vince’s truck at the rental house and Travis’s car in the drive behind it, she had expected they’d gone over to do some work on the house. She had planned to go over there after she dropped her file off and, well, she didn’t know what she would do exactly. She did know she wasn’t going to pitch in and help with the unpacking.

  That sounded just awful, even in her own head. But it was a matter of principle. She did not agree with Vince sticking his nose into his son’s life this way and she was determined not to aid and abet any actions that made it easy for Gentry to avoid growing up and getting on with his life. So finding Vince and Travis and the baby here took that weight from her shoulders.

  “Bad time? Naw, I’d say you have perfect timing.” Vince grinned up at her from his seat at the kitchen table in a way that hinted that he had her all figured out. “Didn’t she, Fabbie?”

  The baby in his lap grinned, too, and clapped her hands.

  “Yep.” Travis took a sip of tea then held the tall glass away from his lips and gazed into it, not trying to hide his own amusement at Moxie’s well-scheduled arrival. “Too late to pitch in with the unpacking at Pera’s but not too late to pick through things around here before the girls have a yard sale.”

  “A yard sale, huh?” She eyed Jo, who had gotten as far as the second page in the stack of paper. “Great idea. One of my Realtor connections always has her clients have a big yard sale before she will put their house on the market.”

  Billy J was not the only one in the family with a knack for fishing, Moxie thought with no small amount of pride. She watched Jo, with her back still pressed to the open back door and her attention fixed on the file.

  She hadn’t taken the bait right away. Fine. A good angler knew all about casting and waiting. Jo might never stop and think things over or take action, but if she heard the notion, she might take it as her own and that might move the sister more swiftly along toward making a decision about the house. One way or another.

  “This friend says,” Moxie went on, “that yard sales not only clear away a lot of clutter but they also help people begin to let go of the place and to think in terms of starting fresh.”

  “Mmm,” the younger of the two Cromwell sisters said.

  Moxie stole a peek at Kate, making headway through the piles of junk surrounding her. The smart one and the pretty one. She wondered how many people had classified Kate and Jo that way? Or did Moxie have it turned around? They were both pretty after all, each in her own way.

  Maybe Kate was the pretty one and Jo labeled smart. Either way, people had probably distinguished them from one another in some way like that. She couldn’t help but wonder if the sisters resented it.

  Moxie was absolutely sure that she would not have. How could anyone resent being pretty or smart? Or having a sister, for that matter? A built-in friend for life who shared your history. Your DNA.
Your shoe size.

  She glanced down at her own fat feet, then at Jo’s.

  Whoa.

  They were remarkably similar in shape and size—and not just because one of Jo’s was still puffy and swollen.

  “You don’t happen to be selling any of your shoes, are you?” Moxie had to ask.

  “What? Shoes? I hadn’t planned to. Why?”

  “If she were smart, she’d sell them all,” Kate called from the couch without looking up from untangling a ball of yarn still connected to a half-finished knitted…something. “They are killing her feet.”

  “How dare you accuse my across-the- board-adorable footwear of murder.” Jo said it all dramatic-like, making sure every eye in the room would train on her and away from her sister.

  Kate—smart, Jo—pretty, she decided.

  “And in the future if you want to participate in our conversation, please do us the common courtesy of addressing us from the same room, not merely shouting out random intrusive remarks whenever you feel like it.”

  Or maybe the other way around on the smart/pretty thing. Of course, both women had both attributes, which made Moxie like them all the more and herself just a teeny bit less.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t…It really does seem like a bad time.” Moxie started to step back out the door when something caught her eye. “Is that a homemade Wa Hoo board I see?”

  “It’s not for sale.” Jo stood back and folded her arms over the closed file at last. She had a sly smile, not mean-sly but more self-assured-sly. “But if you think you can handle it, I’ll play you a game.”

  It was that smile as much as the actual challenge that brought Moxie across the threshold. The “if you think you can run with us, then prove yourself” nature of Jo’s expression. It was, at its heart, an invitation to be one of them, if just for a while. How could Moxie refuse that?

  “Be warned. I am the undisputed Wa Hoo champion of the greater back booth area of Billy J’s Bait Shack Seafood Buffet.”

  “Well, bring it on, sister.” Jo pointed to one of the two empty seats at the kitchen table. “Because you have just entered the domain of the Dream Away Bay Court Big Cottage Wa Hoo master herself.”

  “I’m greenies!” Moxie said, plunking down at exactly the same time Jo shouted her own version, “I call greensies!”

  Vince pointed a finger at his old friend. “Moxie called it first.”

  Jo slapped the file down in front of the man. “Just for that, you get to go over these estimates and tell me how you can beat them when you take this place on for us.”

  “Take this place on? Am I still doing that?” He leaned forward, baby and all, and turned his head so that everyone could see him looking at Kate on the couch.

  Seemingly oblivious, Kate held up a jigsaw-puzzle box and shook it by her ear.

  “You can’t tell if there are any missing pieces that way, Kate,” Travis called out, his eyes on Jo and not the woman he spoke to.

  “I’m not looking for missing pieces,” Kate snapped back, also not making eye contact. “I’m listening for my key.”

  “You sing in the key of jigsaw?” Moxie had no idea where that came from, it just came out.

  Jo snorted out a quick laugh, then nudged Moxie in the arm. “Unless you’ve actually heard her sing, you have no idea how funny—and accurate—that is.”

  Moxie blushed. “I, um, was just kidding.”

  Kate did not respond. “The key to my treasure chest.”

  “Oh, like that makes a lot more sense to these nice people,” Jo called out, then she leaned in and lowered her voice. “She found a metal file box under the stairs—”

  “Marked Important Documents or something like that?” Moxie had found that box years ago when she had made a quick inventory of the contents of the whole house for insurance purposes. “I almost sent that to your mother the first year I began looking after this place.”

  “Thank you for not doing that!” Kate set the puzzle box down, picked up another and shook it.

  “Yeah, well, after careful study of the printing—”

  “And the misspelling,” Jo rushed to point out.

  “And the misspelling,” Moxie agreed. “After looking that over I decided to leave it. I was a kid once myself.”

  “You weren’t much more than a kid back then yourself,” Vince chimed in.

  “Well, back when I was a kid, I kept all my valuables in there. I think it’s mostly postcards and seashells. I was twelve, tops. It couldn’t be much. Anyway, I hid the key and now I don’t remember where.”

  Travis leaned in now, too, his hand just inches away from Jo’s. “And you don’t know, either?”

  “I hid it from her,” Kate interjected.

  “And even without having known her long, that’s precisely why I can imagine she knew, at least once upon a time, precisely where to find it.”

  Lowering her eyelids and giving a delicate quirk of her lips, Jo sent Travis the message, “You have me pegged, and then again, there is so much more you have to learn about me,” in a look.

  Moxie didn’t think she’d ever sent out such a flirtatious and yet confident message in one fleeting glance in her entire life. Maybe if she stuck around here, she could pick up a thing or two from this Jo. Not that Moxie’s boyfriend’s work would ever slow down long enough for him to look at her, even fleetingly.

  The puzzle-shaking began anew from the front room.

  “I don’t have any idea where she last hid the key,” Jo confessed. Then she turned to Vince. “Why don’t you go help Kate look for it?”

  Vince did not move right away.

  Jo kicked the leg of his chair under the table.

  He scooted back.

  A puzzle box hit the floor. “I don’t need any help.”

  “I thought you wanted me to go over these estimates.” Vince snagged the file and flipped it open.

  Moxie tried to hide her gratitude that she hadn’t stuck that offer in there.

  “Bring them out here. I can look at estimates while I search for my key.” Kate never lifted her head. “The sooner we get through with this place, the sooner we can go ourselves.”

  Vince sighed and stood. He started to give the baby to Moxie but Travis intervened with open hands.

  “I’ll take her, if you don’t mind.”

  Fabiola cooed and reached for Travis’s face.

  The sight tugged at Moxie’s heart. That baby needed her daddy so much. Where was he? Why was Vince here instead of Gentry? Moxie looked away.

  “You look good with a baby, Travis,” Jo said softly.

  “Yeah? I like kids,” he said. “Always wanted to have a couple of my own.”

  “Why haven’t you ever started a family?” Jo asked.

  “Just have to find the right girl, I guess.”

  Jo scootched to the edge of her seat, clenching the bag of marbles in both hands, probably to prevent her arm from shooting into the air with her fingers wriggling as she begged breathlessly, “Pick me, pick me.”

  “Keep your eyes open, Trav. She may be closer than you think.” Moxie pushed her chair up.

  “I’ll take that into account, Mox.” He put his lips alongside the baby’s neck and blew a raspberry.

  Fabiola squealed with delight.

  Jo emptied the marbles into her cupped palm then picked up a green one and handed it across the table to Moxie. “I think you and I could be friends, don’t you?”

  “Does that mean you’ll let me borrow a pair of shoes sometime?”

  Jo hesitated.

  She’d asked too much.

  To join the game. To tease the older sister. To take a place at the table and to borrow cute shoes? Too much.

  Moxie wet her lips to buy time and think of a way to kid herself out of overstepping her bounds.

  Jo dumped the rest of the marbles then raised her head and offered her hand to Moxie. “If a friend can’t walk a mile in your shoes, who can?”

  “Nobody could walk a mile in your shoes, littl
e sister.” To make it all official, Kate threw her two cents in. “But you are welcome here anytime you want, Moxie.”

  One firm, resolute shake. Moxie had done it a thousand times over countless deals, but this time felt different. Better. Bigger. As if she had just committed herself to an adventure she could not yet imagine.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The next morning, Kate awoke in the small bedroom instead of nursing an aching back on the couch. For a moment, no, just a sliver of a hint of a moment, all the years since she had last slept in this bed fell away. She was young. She was on the verge of something new and exciting. She was…

  She stretched her arms out. Her joints cracked. Her back ached. Every muscle in her body clenched, leaving her as stiff as the thin, unyielding mattress she had just spent the night upon.

  She was fooling herself.

  In more ways than one.

  She pushed herself upright, careful not to bump her head on the slanted ceiling of the dormer where her small twin bed sat tucked away beneath what had once seemed to her a window that framed her every hope and dream. She did not need to lean forward and put her face near the glass to know what she would see out that window.

  Dream Away Bay Court. The mystery house. And beyond that, a good deal of Santa Sofia.

  Kate did not want to gaze out upon any of it this morning.

  Why bother?

  It was not as if she planned to stay here much longer.

  With that thought, the image of Vince standing in his drive the other day, holding darling little Fabiola, overtook her. Overwhelmed her, really. The way a swift, deceptively powerful wave rolls in after its gentle predecessors and overwhelms an unsuspecting ocean gazer. Kate dragged air deep into her lungs but that did not chase away the sadness or the stab of pain that thinking of Vince brought on. Not just Vince. Vince and his new family.