The Barefoot Believers Read online

  She watched a mom kneel in front of a small boy, spit on a tissue then clean a smudge from his cheek. He endured it, but fidgeted the whole time, dancing up and down in his sneakers with the busted seams along the side. And it dawned on Jo. They weren’t dressed this way out of lack of respect for the chapel.

  As was her habit, she looked at the woman’s shoes. They made her son’s ragged sneaks look good. Suddenly even Jo’s modestly priced shoes seemed a silly extravagance.

  “Surely there is something I can do,” she whispered.

  “You want something to do? Check the ice chest at the end of the table and make sure there is plenty of milk and juice boxes.”

  Jo took a peek into the chest then at the crowd. “Just barely enough. If you’ll tell me where to get more, I’ll restock it.”

  “More? There is no more, Jo. Just tell people as they go through not to take anything they won’t use at this meal. That usually works.”

  “And on the days when it doesn’t work?”

  “Somebody goes without,” he said softly and she could see in his eyes it troubled him.

  Not that mother, she wanted to say. Not that child. Instead she licked her lips and thought of how much she had in life. How much she had taken for granted. “Meals, food banks, clothes. What else do you do? Support groups?”

  “AA.” He kept working away.

  “What about a women’s group?”

  “For…?”

  “Women?”

  A slow smile crept over his face. He shook his head. “We don’t have a woman on staff to lead that kind of thing.”

  “I could.”

  “You?” He looked her over, up and down and up again, his last glance resting on her crazy-expensive shoes.

  “Yes, me. I could lead a class. I know the Bible. I have the ribbons from Sunday school to show it.” She would have slipped those shoes off on the spot but thought better of it since they were essentially in a makeshift kitchen preparing food. “In fact, we could…we could meet on the beach. No shoes required.”

  “A regular group of barefoot believers, huh?”

  “Why not?” That question burned itself into Jo’s head then and there. “Barefoot Believers. Kick off your shoes and walk awhile with the Lord.”

  His mouth quirked up on one side.

  If he said yes, he was saying yes to more than just her help and they both knew it. He was saying they were a team, of sorts. She held her breath and waited for his answer.

  “Almost have the first round ready, folks. Why don’t you line up and get your plates? I’ll stop long enough to say the blessing in just a sec.” He motioned with the spatula to the people closest to them, then turned to Jo. “It won’t be easy. It sure won’t be glamorous.”

  “I know.”

  He smiled. A real, warm, genuine smile.

  But he didn’t say any more. He didn’t say yes to her wanting to be a part of his work.

  Jo wanted to cry and she didn’t know why. Pettiness? Travis cared about all these people as individuals, not just her. Had that realization made her overly emotional? She searched her heart and shook her head slightly. No.

  Jo watched an older woman being helped ahead in the line by a young man. They both had plain white plates in their hands and Jo couldn’t help wishing she knew their story.

  Everybody has a story; it dawned on her then. She certainly did. And Kate. And Travis. He had one that people all over the country had once wanted to learn. These people had their stories as well and those stories mattered. They mattered to the man making them breakfast to make sure they got a meal today and they mattered to God. Each of these people mattered because of God, because His Son had died for all of them.

  Jo blinked and to her surprise found tears in her eyes. She never thought like this. She never got all spiritual about, well, anything.

  It certainly wasn’t the kind of thing that ever came up in the Monday-morning motivational meetings at Powers Realty. The message there was always “Sell. Sell. Sell. Money. Money. Money. There’s a boom going on out there. Which would you rather do? Ride the explosion or get caught in the fallout?”

  Jo had ridden that explosion and gotten caught in the fallout. She had come to Santa Sofia trying to hop on whatever firepower the boom had left, and suddenly she felt ashamed of herself for it. She had a home. She had an apartment in Atlanta, but she also had a home here in Santa Sofia. A home she no longer wanted to sell off for a quick fix.

  She had a family who loved her.

  And plenty to eat.

  And clothes on her back.

  And shoes on her feet.

  She shifted her heels over the old linoleum floor. Her gaze dropped down to the footwear that had cost her more than Travis had probably paid out to feed the small cluster of folks here this morning.

  Why not? Why not the Barefoot Believers? She wasn’t doing it to be a part of Travis’s team; she would do it to be a part of God’s team.

  And in that moment, she knew He wanted her.

  She waited for Travis to lift a short stack of pancakes onto somebody’s plate, to share a kind word, then to wipe off his hands and turn back to the griddle before she asked, “How do you do this?”

  He poured some batter then grimaced. “I put the first two aside for the dog.”

  “What?”

  “You wanted to know how I make such perfect pancakes. Right?” He grinned at her.

  “This is your idea of perfection?” She pointed to the griddle bubbling with things that looked like paint splatters more than circles, in various shades of barely beyond-batter to burned-beyond-belief.

  “I suppose you can do better?”

  She took the spatula from his hand without saying a word and went to work. “My question, by the way, was how do you do this, early mornings, hard work, for people you may never see again?”

  “And a few I see every day even though we are supposed to supply temporary help only?”

  “Yeah. How do you face that every day?”

  “The simple answer is with faith.”

  “Faith? It sounds like anything but a simple answer to me.”

  “It’s all I’ve got.”

  She looked at him over her shoulder, studied his honest, open expression a moment, then finally said exactly what she had wanted to say since the moment he’d walked though her door. “Do you ever regret it? You gave up so much.”

  “I guess this is where I say look at all I’ve gained.” He spread his arms. The noise of people chatting, scraping forks over plates, of chairs scooting over the dingy floor and of complaints about the coffee being too hot and the syrup too cold rushed at them. Not a single person looked up.

  “I have to ask you again, how do you do it?”

  He opened his mouth.

  “And don’t just say faith,” she cautioned. “Faith is why you do it. I’m talking about how. How do you get up day after day and look at this life over the one you could have had and not become bitter? How do you keep at it when nobody seems to even notice? How do you pay your bills?”

  “Some days, I don’t.”

  “Which? Bitter? Ignored? Bills?”

  “All of them.”

  Jo could not understand this man. “So…?”

  “You want to talk impossible? Living up to an image that has nothing to do with you, with the real person. With my goals and hopes and even my actual abilities. That was impossible.” He handed out another breakfast plate then turned to her, looked her over and began unwinding the big apron from around his neck. When he got it free, he held it up to her.

  She ducked to allow him to slip it over her head. “Don’t even try to tell me about that. I have lived with that all my life, only the image was a walking, talking, becoming a doctor perfect sister.”

  He reached around and nabbed the apron strings, brought them around front and tied them together for her. “You have to learn to accept yourself. Be yourself. God didn’t make any other person more qualified for the job.”

/>   “Ugh.” She clucked her tongue. “Where’d you get that? From some sign in front of a church?”

  “Actually from a book—” he folded his arms as if to say yeah, I read a book, then stole a sideways glance toward the crowd before he bent down and whispered “—of sayings that have been used on signs in front of churches.”

  She laughed.

  “So it’s corny. That doesn’t make it less true.”

  “For you maybe.” She slid the spatula under a fluffy golden pancake and moved it to the pan waiting to be served. “But what if the ‘you’ that you are stuck being is a person nobody else wants?”

  Travis frowned, his arms wound not quite so tightly now. “Could you put that in quaint cliché church signese, please?”

  “My mom chose Kate.” She poured a pancake. “My father chose my baby sister.” Another pancake. “Nobody chose me.” No more room for more batter. “Ever.”

  He shook his head. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “It’s true. When I was five years old, my father left my mother, taking my baby sister with him. We never saw either of them again.”

  “And you wished he had taken you with him?”

  “No. I wish…” Jo paused with the spouted mixing bowl of batter still in one hand. “I wish he’d have at least tried to take me with him.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Really.”

  “Year after year for all this time you’ve looked back at what happened in your family and wished that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jo—”

  “Because in the aftermath I became invisible. Like a toy on a shelf the day after Christmas.”

  “You’re breaking my heart.” It could have sounded cruel but somehow in the midst of the families just trying to get a meal for their kids, it didn’t.

  “Mom clung to Kate. For the rest of our lives, she depended on Kate. And Kate never failed her.”

  “Is that why Kate didn’t marry Vince?”

  “I don’t…” She moved to the second portable griddle and started to pour again, then stopped. “I never thought of that.”

  “Did you ever think that maybe if Kate could do it all over she would wish she wasn’t ‘chosen’?”

  Jo set the batter down with a clunk. “I just wanted to be somebody.”

  “Believe me, I’ve been somebody. It’s not as great as everyone says it will be.”

  “I know that, too. I was something of a hotshot with my company until…”

  “Until you let your vanity over getting that Powers guy’s interest push you into a deal, that not-so-hot deal, huh?”

  “It was all false pride and poor self-esteem, wasn’t it? And now I have this half-finished house in Atlanta with a payment due in a couple weeks and…” She looked at him. The old Jo would have used this moment to press her case, to ask for help, to close the deal.

  Instead she turned to the pancakes. To the simple task before her and found comfort in doing it. She turned them, poured more on the second griddle then checked the serving pan and the crowd to see if she should be slowing down production.

  She looked out at all the people. She thought of all their stories. Then she looked at Travis.

  At this moment, she felt a tug to choose. The life she had once thought of as her only way to “be somebody” or to stop living a lie and start actually being herself.

  It was not as difficult a choice as she would have thought a few days ago.

  “If I can’t raise the cash quickly, I am going to take a huge financial loss on it.” She spoke honestly, and without embarrassment. She’d messed up; it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. She sighed. “Then I will go broke, have to move out of my pricey apartment and have to start over somewhere else.”

  Please ask me to start over here, she thought, looking up into his kind, understanding eyes.

  “If all that’s going on, why are you here?” He asked a question he had posed once before. “Why aren’t you back in Atlanta trying to fix things?”

  “Because Kate needed me to come here.” The answer surprised her. She thought she had come to sell the house, but even more than that, she had come because…“Kate needed me.”

  “Perfect Kate? Needed somebody?”

  “Well, maybe she’s not exactly always one-hundred-percent perfect.” In saying that, something broke free inside Jo. She felt lighter.

  “And when she wasn’t perfect, you were the one she wanted to help her.”

  Jo thought of their struggle the first day just trying to get from the car to the apartment building. “Wanted might be a bit strong.”

  “Well, she chose you.”

  “Yeah, she did, didn’t she?”

  “Who else could have done what you have for her?”

  Not their mother. In fact, their mother had done this to her. Kate had no real friends, only staff that she had not wanted to get too close to because she knew she might have to let them go. “You are very good at this.”

  His eyes twinkled. “Maybe I should be a minister.”

  “Maybe.” She looked at the huge mess he had made around them before she’d taken over. “Because you are never going to make it as a short-order cook.”

  “Well, maybe the Lord will send me somebody who can do a better job at this kind of thing than I can.”

  “Somebody?”

  “Not just anybody. A real somebody,” he said softly.

  Jo’s heart swelled. She flipped a pancake with ease and expertise she hadn’t realized she possessed, then smiled at him. “You know, as services go, this might have been one of the best ones I’ve ever attended.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The nurse on duty had taken one look at the flush-cheeked child and listened to Kate’s brief summary of symptoms before she’d shuttled them straight back to the examining room. Kate wanted to think they could thank her credentials, which she’d all but shouted as they’d rushed in through the automatic glass doors, for the quick response. But after a moment’s reflection, she realized the nurse had recognized the small family and had pulled their file, probably when she’d seen them hurrying through the parking lot.

  That left Kate and Gentry alone for the first time in sixteen years.

  Sixteen!

  She didn’t feel that much older, really, but he had grown into a tall young man with brown wavy hair, a closely clipped beard and watchful, wary eyes. He stood in the entryway, jangling his keys in a way that suggested he might be using them soon. Very soon.

  Kate recognized that restlessness, that urge to bolt when life got too overwhelming, too real. She also knew that if the kid ran now, he’d regret it and so would she.

  She put her hand on his arm, just barely at first, then when he did not withdraw, more firmly until she had given his forearm an encouraging squeeze. “I am proud of the way you stepped up and took care of Esperanza and the baby, Gentry.”

  “Stepped up? I can’t own that, Kate.” He gave her a sly look and in his lopsided smile she could still see something of the kid she had once known and, to her surprise, still cared about. He twirled his key ring around his index finger. “I didn’t step up so much as I was given a verbal kick in the pants to get me moving.”

  “It was more of a nudge to your conscience,” she said.

  “No, trust me, from my end of the phone conversation, it was not a nudge.”

  “Fine. Whatever. It got you over to the house.”

  “Yeah.”

  Suddenly Kate felt all maternal—and a bit ornery and in need of lightening the mood. “And what do we say when someone gives us a kick in the pants to jumpstart us in the right direction?”

  He grinned and looked all of six again. “Thank you, Kate.”

  “I knew you’d do the right thing.”

  “I haven’t so far.” He dropped his head and looked at her from the corner of his eye. “But I guess you figured that out.”

  “I don’t think I have anything figured out anymore, Gentry.” Kate pat
ted his arm then moved around to put herself squarely before him. “But I wouldn’t have called you at all if I had thought for one minute you didn’t have it in you.”

  He stood quietly.

  She had heard it said once that we would be amazed at what would pour out of people’s hearts if we weren’t all so anxious to fill every silence with words.

  So Kate waited.

  Finally Gentry lifted his head, gazed off in the direction of the exam room and whispered, “We got married without really knowing each other. Her folks didn’t approve. Dad didn’t approve.”

  “But you were in love.”

  He nodded, glanced down, then nodded again. “Everyone told us that if we were really in love, it would wait. We would still be in love in another year, even two. Give her a chance to get her certification as a dental assistant, let me get my degree.”

  She felt a swell of pride and relief to know his life had taken that positive course. “You went to college?”

  “For three years.” He held that many fingers up and peered at her just over the tips of them. “Got the basics down but then couldn’t choose a major. I thought changing schools would make me focus but, well, you probably can guess that the schools weren’t the problem.”

  It would have been so easy to lay blame then, but Kate held her tongue.

  He shrugged. “I always meant to do better. To try harder but then things got tough and…”

  “And your dad rushed to your rescue?”

  “He meant well. And let’s not pretend I’m not responsible for my part of it. I knew my dad carried a lot of guilt that I didn’t have a mom. And because he moved me down here to this place where I had to make new friends every season. He only did what he did to try to make up for all that. And it was easy to let him do it. At least at first.”

  “Then the cost of always being rescued got pretty steep, didn’t it?”

  He gazed steadily down the empty hallway, his eyes intense. “I do love them, you know.”

  “I could tell that the second I saw you all together.”