The Barefoot Believers Read online

  “Yeah, he wants some nights and weekends off for a change so he can try to convince you to marry him. That man is anything but commitment phobic.”

  “Commitment phobic? That your professional diagnosis, Doctor, or more along the lines of it takes one to know one?” Moxie couldn’t believe her boldness.

  Kate did not appear one bit put off by it, though. She gave a wry laugh and a nod. “Hey, I am what I am. But you? I don’t really think you are afraid of commitment. Something else is holding you back.”

  Moxie nodded. “I keep telling him it’s the name.”

  “Lionel?” Kate crinkled up her nose.

  “No. My name. If I married him I’d have to go through life as Moxie Lloyd.”

  “Not so bad.”

  Moxie’s turn to scrunch up her nose. “It sounds like a chemical ingredient in a fake dietary supplement. ‘Now with moxielloyd for fast-acting results.’”

  Kate chuckled.

  “The only thing worse is how it sounds with my real name.”

  “Real name?”

  “Molly. Molly Lloyd. That sounds like a fat nodule you have to have removed from some part of the body you don’t want to discuss in public.” She rolled her eyes.

  Kate shook her head. “And that’s the best reason you can give for not wanting to marry that very nice, very cute Dr. Lloyd?”

  “Just trying to keep it light. Nobody listens, anyway.” Moxie raised her shoulders and looked away. “They don’t usually believe I’m the holdout. You know, adorable single doctor with more business than he can handle. Why would he want to tie himself down to one girl, especially one like me?”

  Kate turned and latched her green-eyed gaze onto Moxie’s eyes. “Maybe because he wants what most people want?”

  To be happy. To have a purpose. To be loved.

  Moxie’s words hung in the air unspoken.

  She cocked her head. She’d never thought of that. While she had dragged her feet fearing that her mother might prove right about the discontent of marriage and life in Santa Sofia, she’d never thought she might be keeping Lionel from realizing his own dreams and desires. She knew he wanted a family. And a home. “But I just haven’t been able to make that leap of faith.”

  “Faith?”

  “Oh, not ‘faith’ faith.” Moxie pointed heavenward. “It’s not a God issue. It’s a human one. Much as I want to be loved, I don’t have a lot of faith in it. I don’t have a lot of experience with the people I love hanging in there.” She thought of her mother’s note and of the Weatherby family motto. “How can you believe a person will love you for a lifetime if nobody ever has?”

  “People are just flawed, Moxie.” Kate touched her shoulder.

  “I know. Maybe I expect too much. And I pray a lot about it. Some people think that’s corny, I know.”

  “Not me.” Kate took a look at the backyard, her eyes squinted but her face serene.

  “Yeah?”

  “In fact I’ve given a lot of thought to my spiritual life since I came to Santa Sofia, seeing how much I’ve neglected it and feeling a strong tug to change that.”

  “I’ll add you to my prayer list, if you like.”

  “I would like that.”

  “Consider it done.” Moxie smiled and nodded. “Now, I have doctor’s orders to see through. So let’s get that foot up.”

  She held the door open for Kate, who took one step inside and shouted, “Tell me you did not get up first thing this morning to go shoe shopping!”

  “Wow.” Moxie crowded in behind the woman to find a small pyramid of shoe boxes stacked neatly on the kitchen table.

  Jo’s head popped up above the stack. “I’m not shopping. I’m selling.”

  “Really?” Moxie had to take another look. This time, in a pair of inexpensive flip-flops, she marveled at how much Jo’s feet resembled her own. Except Jo clearly indulged in regular pedicures and had allowed herself the small luxury of a simple toe ring, something Moxie would never try. “You brought all these shoes down here and now you’re willing to part with them in a yard sale? Do you mind if I…?”

  “Help yourself. But keep in mind, the money you give for them is going to the Traveler’s Wayside Chapel, so don’t try to talk me down too low.”

  Moxie flipped the lid off the first box.

  “I’m going to sit down.” Kate lumbered past.

  “I’ll help you.” And by help, Moxie meant stay out of her way until she got to the couch, where, if she had to, Moxie could easily grab Kate’s cane, give her a push and whisk her cast up onto the table before Kate knew what hit her. “Then I’ll come back and try these on.”

  “Jo, will you get my meds?” Kate called out, not even looking behind her. “And some water.”

  Jo hurried to comply.

  Kate plopped down, covered her eyes with one hand, then propped her leg up and sighed.

  “Here’s your water and medication.” Jo set them on the table by Kate’s elbow. “Did you eat any breakfast?”

  “No. Esperanza came over with the baby before I was even out of bed this morning.”

  “Hang on a sec while I make you a peanut-butter sandwich so you’ll have some food in your stomach.”

  Moxie stood and watched the sisters roll with the moment, each interaction a study in effortless ease that only came with blood ties and a very long history. It made Moxie feel like a fifth wheel. A third wheel?

  Basically, she felt as if she didn’t belong.

  She hated that feeling.

  “If you’re all situated, then, I guess I can go,” she said.

  “Wait!” Kate’s hand shot out. “I had a key.”

  “The extra house key? I brought that over with the paperwork the other day.”

  “No, this morning. I found the key to my treasure chest and I had it in my hand when I came down to answer the door.”

  “Where did you put it?”

  “I don’t remember. Would you mind looking around to see if I laid it someplace in here?”

  “I’d be glad to.” Moxie looked around in all the obvious places in the room. “Could you have left it in the kitchen?”

  “No. I had the baby in my arms by then. But I might have dropped it on the stairs.”

  “Okay.” Moxie threw open the door to the enclosed stairway. The midday sun had not begun to shine through the windows in the front room so she couldn’t see well. She glanced up at the lone bulb at the top of the staircase and shook her head. It was on the list. Put new lightbulb in staircase fixture.

  “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.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “What 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 sh
e 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?”