The Barefoot Believers

by Annie Jones

  Of course to get to that answer, she just might have to go through her sister.

  R-r-r-i-i-n-n-g. The phone cut through her scheming, um, musings and jarred her into reacting.

  “I’m not here!” she shouted, even as Kate thrust out her own hand in the “get thee away from me” position and said the same.

  “I’m not here.”

  Jo raised her head and met her sister’s eyes. “If you’re not here then where are you?”

  R-r-r-i-i-n-n-g.

  “Florida?” Kate ventured meekly.

  Jo smiled and signed off the Internet with a decisive click. This was it. The answer to her prayer. And all she had to do to achieve it was convince her sister to dump the family home, the only thing besides the whole foot-recovery situation still holding their family together. “By this time tomorrow we’ll be sitting on the veranda and sipping sweet tea, in Florida.”

  Chapter Three

  “The porch is gone, Daddy.” Moxie Weatherby, cell phone to her ear, climbed back into her almost-restored old red-and-white pickup truck sitting in the drive of the cute little rental cottage—correction, make that once cute little rental cottage—on Dream Away Bay Court.

  “What do you mean the porch is gone, Moxie, honey?” The seventy-two-year-old man that everyone in town called Billy J rasped out a laugh. “Did it get up and move to greener pastures?”

  “Well, it’s green all right.” She craned her neck to survey the scene she’d just left and in doing so caught a glimpse of her bloodshot, brown eyes and pink-tipped, turned-up nose in the rearview mirror. She wondered if she’d brought her allergy spray, because if she stayed, she was going to need it. “But I think the green part is mostly mold.”

  “Aw, a little mold never hurt nothing.”

  Moxie sniffled, swiped away a blob of runny mascara then pulled back her thick hair, glad it had grown out enough to allow her to wad it into a knot at the nape of her neck again. That and/or a ball cap or simple round sunhat usually took care of hiding the drab mess of light brown, with copper and almost white-blond streaks she liked to call beached blah-nd. “Daddy, this is not a little mold. A little mold I could handle. We live in Florida, after all. This is a mold factory. The columns look like moss-covered trees from a primeval forest.”

  “You lived your whole life in Santa Sofia, girl. What do you know about forests?”

  “I know those big, burly lumberjacks who work in them usually use chain saws to make any headway. I sure do wish I had one of those now.”

  “Chain saw?”

  “Lumberjack.” Moxie sighed.

  “What would your fella say about that?”

  “He’d probably tell me to put the lug to work and keep busy because he won’t be able to see me again tonight.”

  “That Lionel Lloyd’s just like his daddy, a hard worker.”

  “If he were just like his daddy, Daddy, he’d be a daddy himself,” Moxie joked.

  “Accept his proposal and he’d be halfway there.” Her father snorted.

  Moxie promptly sneezed. “Let’s tackle one aversion at a time, please. The porch?”

  “A little bleach, little elbow grease, you’ll have the front of the old place shipshape in no time.”

  “Only if it’s a sunken ship.” She shook her head at the task before her.

  “You trying to tell me that the house is taking on water?” Another raspy laugh, this one degenerating into a slight coughing fit.

  Moxie waited it out. She always had, ever since Billy J and his wife—now ex-wife—had taken her in as a young child. She knew what brought it on and she knew what would follow.

  A long, moaning kind of sigh. Another chuckle. A thump to the chest, one last sputtered cough and the promise that never quite came to fruition. “Got to see a doctor about that.”

  At that point she realized she had two choices. She could launch into her speech for the millionth time about the old man needing to stop smoking, start exercising and take care of his health. Or she could say a prayer that the Lord would keep the man she had called Daddy for most of her life alive and kicking a while longer. She opted for the second.

  It was a reasonable choice. The Lord, after all, would at least listen to her petition whereas William Jay Weatherby would most certainly turn a deaf ear. And since he actually had a deaf ear, that made it all the easier for him to block her concerns out entirely.

  “No, the house is high and dry as far as I can see. But the porch has seen better days.” And she meant that.

  A vacation spot, a home away from home, a refuge, even more than once a honeymoon haven. The little cottage had a happy history that stretched back to the days just after Pearl Harbor, when a soldier had built it for his beloved bride before going off to war. Years later they had built the smaller cottage across the way for their daughter and her husband so the families could always stay close.

  Family and close. Two words that Moxie no longer had any reason to use together. Not with her mother off pursuing a new life and no siblings, and just the rumor of distant cousins living somewhere north of Florida. A picture of her aunt holding her as a baby hung behind the cash register in her father’s business, but they had not made contact in the nearly thirty years since it had been taken. Families were hard, Moxie figured, and her father made them harder than they had to be. Which made it all the more important for her to show the old man she wasn’t the kind to cut and run.

  “Some of the floorboards are warped and split but serviceable. Maybe sometime next week, if the owners will spring for the paint, I can come by and spruce them up. The railings that are still standing are missing spindles but the railings that have fallen down look to be intact. No quick fix there but easy enough.”

  “How about the steps? Them fancy store-bought steps still there?”

  “Yes.” She smiled at his jab at her insistence four years back that they replace the old steps with the prefab kind people now used for decks and mobile homes. “The steps are in great shape.”

  “And the front door?”

  “Still there.” Thanks to Moxie’s forethought in installing a glass-front storm door the year before she’d updated the steps, the original front door with the frosted oval window was still standing. “Though I shudder to think what’s on the other side.”

  “Only one way to find out. Go up them steps and through that door and clap your eyes on the situation. Size ’er up. Make a plan. Dive right in. Do that and you can get a lot done and get gone before the owners turn up.”

  “Gone? After all these years working for them sight unseen, I kind of want to hang around and meet them.”

  “And have them think you’d just wait around long as it took for them to show? That they could have you at their beck and call the whole time they’re here? Moxie, I raised you smarter than that.”

  “Daddy, that’s a pretty dim view of these people.”

  “Well, in my experience, most folks is pretty dim.” He chuckled, coughed, chuckled again. “Naw, girl, just a word of advice. These folks ain’t like us. They been contented for first me then you to look after their property without so much as a call to ask how’s it going or do we need anything. Then they decide to show back up, they don’t give more than a day’s notice?”

  As far as anyone in Santa Sofia could remember, no one had seen the actual owners of the place for years. Since at least a year before Moxie had taken over the upkeep of the place. All their interchanges had happened through the mail, a business account and later e-mail.

  “What does that say about them? You don’t want nothing to do with folks like that.” People often described Billy J as full of bluff and bluster, and that was exactly the tone he used now.

  It seemed odd in this context. Odder still when her father’s voice grew quiet, almost childlike in softness as he added, “Do you, Molly Christina?”

  Molly Christina. Her daddy had called her that her whole childhood and his just saying it made her feel all of ten again as she answered, “I…I
guess not.”

  “Good. Then you get to your work and get gone. The sooner begun, the sooner done.”

  “The sooner begun, the sooner done,” she echoed, barely audibly.

  “Then get gone. You done enough for these people.”

  “I have done a lot. For a lot of years I took care of the cottage and catered to the renters. These last two, of course, I’ve only had to keep an eye on it. Make sure we didn’t have any unwelcome guests.”

  “Squatters,” her father grumbled. Over forty years of dealing with the transient nature of things around here had not just made him ornery, but also a bit hardened toward people he didn’t know well.

  “I was thinking more of mice and snakes.” Moxie shivered. “But I confess that was more for me than them. I kept thinking we’d get a renter and I’d have to go in and deal with who knew what if I didn’t send someone in every now and then to give the place a going-over.”

  “There. Now see, you already know you don’t have to deal with any vermin.”

  “Or squatters.”

  “I was talking about squatters,” he groused.

  “Well, I’m thankful for that. As for what all this place needs to make it livable?” Another look at the sagging structure. Then a quick check of the clock on her cell phone before pressing it to her overheated ear and saying, “I mean, it was one thing when we had rental money coming in and I could take it out of their profits as a business expense. But with it sitting empty for two years now?”

  “Moxie, girl, you’d give a person the shirt off your back. When you work for someone, you give one hundred and ten percent. Time or two, I’ve known you to give certain folks a piece of your mind.”

  Certain folks? Moxie could only think of two, and she was talking to one of them.

  “But when it comes to money?” The old man did that familiar laugh-cough thing again but managed to stave off another prolonged fit. “Well, you didn’t get where you are today giving money away.”

  Where she was today? She exhaled and as the breath left her body, her shoulders slumped. “I hope they didn’t expect me to reach into my own pocket to make repairs on their property.”

  “It’s enough you giving them so much of your time and hard work. You should bill them for that.”

  “I am not going to bill them, Daddy.” Her father would have. The man hadn’t built up and maintained Billy’s J’s Bait Shack Seafood Buffet as a great spot to gather for both tourists and locals without being savvy about business. But sometimes business savvy was not good business. And it very often was not the way to get along with one’s neighbors. “In case you’ve forgotten, I have new tenants moving in across the street this weekend and I don’t want anyone to get off on the wrong foot.”

  “Tenants? I thought tenants paid rent.”

  “And I thought waitresses didn’t get paid on days they didn’t show up to work.”

  “That little girl is a single mom and it was just the one day. I’m sure things will turn around for her and I won’t have to do that again.”

  That “little girl” was the same young woman Moxie had made special arrangements with to rent out the second cottage on Dream Away Bay Court. At about half of what she usually charged.

  “Esperanza is not a single mom, Daddy. She has a husband and her baby has a father.” And that baby’s father had a father, a father who made it easy for the baby’s father to act like a big baby and not live up to his fatherly responsibilities. Moxie clenched her jaw to keep from blurting all that out, not that she was sure she could blurt all that out. “Anyway, on my end of the deal, you know I’m not just giving her a cut rate on the rent. She’s going to pay what she can in sweat equity.”

  “That don’t sound proper for a young mother.”

  Moxie chuckled at her father’s apprehension. “Just means doing yard work, upkeep, maybe help with my other properties.”

  “You know that girl is not going to do any of that. Ain’t that she’s a bad girl, but, you know, with the baby and all.”

  She knew what her father was driving at, and all she could do was gaze at first one cottage and then the other, then sit back in the truck seat and shut her eyes. “It will get done.”

  “Well, not by me it won’t, so I guess it’s not my worry.”

  Translation: It’s your worry, girl. I hope you know what you’re getting into.

  “I’ll leave you to this, then,” he finally said when she did not come back with a reply. “You know Billy J’s famous words to live by—When the going gets tough, Billy J…”

  “…goes fishing.” She spoke the last line with him, with a practiced cadence and proper emphasis to match him syllable for syllable. “Thanks a lot, Daddy.”

  Not that she had expected to get any work out of the old fellow. It would have been nice for the company while she tackled the job, though.

  “Been the Weatherby family motto for generations. Who am I to break with tradition at this late stage of life?”

  “Who indeed?” she agreed with a puffy-eyed sniff and a soft laugh under her breath. Since she wasn’t a Weatherby, at least not by birth, the motto didn’t seem to apply to her. “So I guess I’ve run out of excuses. I’d better get after this mess and see what I can do before nightfall.”

  “See that you do.” It came out sounding like an order.

  Moxie did not like taking orders. “We’ll see. It’s a big job, after all.”

  “This job is only as big as you make it. Just do the basics and go,” her father reminded her as he hung up.

  She clicked the End button on her phone. “Do the basics and go?”

  Certainly her father knew her better than that. Nothing in the makeup of her personality or her history spoke of a person would could do the basics then go.

  Fifteen years ago, the year Moxie had turned sixteen, three momentous things had happened. That was not counting the getting her driver’s license thing, which she didn’t count because she’d been piloting boats and Jet Skis and zipping all over town via scooters long before she’d gotten a license to drive a car. And in Santa Sofia, who had anywhere to go, anyway, that having a car would mean so very much? So that wasn’t the big deal for her that some other kids might have thought it.

  No, when Moxie was sixteen her mom, the only mom she had ever known, ran off.

  She’d gotten up one day, made Moxie and Billy J a big breakfast, washed up the dishes and when she was done, she’d written a note, packed her bags and left. All the note said was “Isn’t there something better than this?”

  A few days later they had learned that her notion of “something better” had come in the form of a thirty-something college professor who had been coming down to Santa Sofia for spring break for many years. She’d sent divorce papers and started her life over.

  Billy J had gone fishing for the whole summer that year and had come back with a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit and a chronic cough.

  From that came the second momentous event. Moxie had changed her name.

  Goodbye Molly Christina, a name that she had always felt made people think of a chubby-cheeked girl in a pleated plaid jumper that never fit right and with the personality of porridge.

  Enter: Moxie. The girl who could take care of herself and rise to any challenge.

  She only learned later that she, in fact, sort of liked porridge and that while moxie did mean spunky and bold, it was also the name of an old, mediciney-tasting soda pop. But by that time, the deed was done.

  Lastly, she had asked, no begged, her father to allow her to take over the job of managing the cottage on Dream Away Bay Court for the absentee owners. She’d done it to ease her father’s burden as much as she could but found quickly that she had a knack for property management.

  Well, for people management, really, but she had discovered early on they were one and the same.

  The work was easy enough. Clean, prep, mend, book the rooms, handle the accounting. But mostly she loved the chance to meet all those new and interesting p
eople from all over. People who for a while—a long weekend or a whole season—pulled up roots, left their normal lives behind and came here. Some to get away from their problems. Some to seek out a whole new set of them—problems, that is. They didn’t call it that of course; they called it “seeking adventure.”

  After that year, she’d started saving her money and by the time she was twenty-one and the only other cottage, the smaller of the two, on Dream Away Bay Court came up for sale, she’d bought it. Not long after that, a highway project had made it possible for people to go zipping along to more popular sites. Still, they had their regulars and every year a new crop of travelers “discovered” the peaceful serenity of Santa Sofia.

  The town aged.

  It lost favor with the younger tourist set. The older people no longer wanted to take care of houses they didn’t live in year round.

  More and more houses came up for grabs. Year after year, investment by investment she built her own little empire and looked after her dad. She never pulled up roots or took a vacation, not even for a little while. She never went in search of adventure or found the answer to her mother’s question: Isn’t there something better than this?

  Not that Moxie wanted to leave Santa Sofia. She actually liked it here. She liked the way the town looked with its narrow streets, peculiar shops and mix of tacky beach culture and elegant old-world architecture. She liked the people, the quirky mix of native Floridians, Hispanic newcomers and people who’d come down to get away from it all.

  Not too close to the Gulf but not too far away, Moxie had the best of town and oceanfront life. Santa Sofia had the security and predictability of a small community peppered with the novelty and energy of a bona fide tourist trap. Moxie never felt bored here.

  Snowbirds in the winter.

  Family vacationers in the summer.

  With a brief respite twice a year while most of the rest of the country enjoyed spring and fall. Santa Sofia had spring and fall, of course. They just didn’t look or feel much different than the rest of the year.