The Barefoot Believers

by Annie Jones

  “Hey!” He grinned and gave a nonchalant little wave the way only a man like Vince Merchant could when finding the woman he had once professed to love tucked inside a dryer box outside the door of a stranger’s house. “What’s going on?”

  Kate looked to the crutch protruding from the box, just inches from the doorbell, then at the man. Then at the doorbell, then at the man, then…Then the momentum of her movement threw her off balance again. She pitched forward and tumbled out of her hiding place.

  At that point she could only look up, smile and say feebly, “Surprise!”

  “Not really.” Vince shook his head and helped her up. “In fact, I made a bet with Moxie as to how long it would take the two of you to come nosing around over here.”

  Kate got to her feet, brushing off the track pants with the side of the leg unsnapped to the knee—the only thing she had that she could get on over her cast that didn’t need laundering or wasn’t a dress.

  “Moxie?” Jo batted the leaves aside, looking a bit like Fay Wray or some other beautiful blond, black-and-white movie heroine emerging from the jungle. “Isn’t that…?”

  “Me.”

  “Oh.” Kate turned to find a young woman standing behind the smudged glass of the old storm door just a few feet away.

  She looked familiar. But not familiar.

  Kate thought of the time she’d seen a famous television actress buying underwear in a discount store in Atlanta and because the face felt so familiar, she had walked up and asked if they had gone to high school together. Like that. Someone she had never met, but knew by sight. Someone who felt like a critical part of her life, yet was a total stranger.

  “Excuse me, but have we met?” Jo asked the question that Kate had been too lost in thought—or was it imagination or emotion or memory?—to pose.

  “No.” The young woman shifted the baseball cap pulled low on her head, shading her eyes.

  Her eyes. They were bright and clear and brown. Kate focused in on them. “Are you sure?”

  “Y-yes. I know who y’all are, of course. The Cromwell sisters?”

  Jo nodded.

  Kate supposed she did as well.

  “I was just about to bring this dresser and lamp over to you.”

  “To us?”

  “Why?”

  “A dresser was stolen and a lamp broken in your house. Happened on my watch. Feel I owe it to y’all to make it right.”

  “Oh, no. No.” Kate didn’t want to insult their longtime caretaker but she didn’t want that junk in her home. Not now that she had decided on keeping the place. “You don’t have to—”

  “Great. Bring it on over,” Jo chirped up.

  “You two will want the place furnished, right? You’re going to stay a while?”

  “Yes.” The word shot out of Kate’s mouth.

  “Maybe,” Jo amended.

  Kate blinked at her sister, slow purposeful blinks she hoped conveyed the message: did you just say maybe? You with the car full of supplies from the home-improvement store, the clandestine meetings with a “friend of a friend” Realtor and the scheme to get Vince to fix the place up on the cheap so you can sell it for top dollar?

  Jo shrugged at her sister then turned to Moxie. “That is, we haven’t decided, yet. We do know the place needs some work.” She swung her sweet-faced gaze over to Vince. “For which we could certainly use a pair of expert hands.”

  Uh-oh, here comes some terrible pun about Vince and me. Kate could feel her face go hot and she imagined she must have looked like a cartoon thermometer with bright red surging up until the whole thing exploded.

  “I never said a word,” she blurted out.

  Everyone looked at her.

  Didn’t she feel like a big old clown all of a sudden? Except she wasn’t a clown. Far from it.

  “I’m a doctor.” That was probably pride rearing its ugly head, but Kate just felt the need to have something positive about herself, something that spoke to accomplishments, out there. She thrust her hand out to Moxie at last. “Dr. Kate Cromwell. You can call me Kate, of course.”

  “Oh. I’m, uh, I’m in property management. But I guess you both knew that already?”

  “Property management?” Jo came up the stairs as if drawn by a magnetic force. Her green eyes sparked with interest and before she even reached the top of the stairs she had her hand extended. “You work for other people or you own your own?”

  “Both.” The young woman took Jo’s hand and gave it one jerking shake. “Mostly own, but obviously I work for you.”

  “So you know a lot about property values around town?” Jo took the woman’s hand in both of hers, gripping her wrist the way Kate might latch on to a reluctant patient while extracting a splinter. “You know what people are looking for? What moves a property quickly?”

  “Are you looking to sell your place quickly, Ms. Cromwell?”

  “Call me Jo, please. And yes, we are.”

  “Not.” Kate interjected to finish the sentence more to her liking. “We are not looking to sell quickly or otherwise.”

  “Hmm?” Jo gave her a sharp look.

  “We are not selling.”

  “We may not be selling.” Jo did not release Moxie’s wrist or hand. “Probably not. Yet. But maybe. It never hurts to consider our—”

  “No.” Kate cut Jo off without so much as a sideways glance. Why would she want to do that anyway, to egg her sister on with a look? Naw, she’d matured past that kind of thing. Besides, not looking at Jo gave Kate the upper hand—nyah, nyah, take that you sneaky house-selling sister of mine—and it gave her a chance to keep her eyes on Vince.

  “But—”

  “No.”

  “Kate, we should at least—”

  “No. We are not selling the house. Not now.”

  Moxie wrenched her hand free at last. “In that case, I guess I should go over and get the furniture in place.”

  “I’ll be over to help you get that dresser off the truck and up the stairs in a minute,” Vince said.

  “Great.” Moxie eyed Jo’s lone crutch. “You want to ride over with me?”

  “I would love that,” Jo answered the other woman but she made sure she caught Kate’s eye as she did.

  Kate glared.

  Moxie disappeared for a second, then the truck came backing down the drive, stopping even with the walk that led from the porch to the drive. She popped open the passenger door.

  Kate handed her sister the crutch she’d used on the doorbell. “Don’t make any deals to sell the house on the way.”

  “It’s just across the street,” Vince noted.

  “Plenty of time.” Jo snapped her fingers.

  “You have to have mine and Mom’s approval, anyway, and you won’t get it,” Kate called after her.

  Jo glowered but made her way to the truck, climbed in and slammed the door. The whole thing shimmied. The motor growled and off they went the whole distance of the cul-de-sac. Accomplished in seconds.

  And still in Reverse.

  Suddenly alone with Vince, all Kate could think to say was “She certainly handles that truck well.”

  “She should. She practically rebuilt the thing herself.” His eyes shone with admiration.

  I rebuild human feet. It’s sort of the same thing. Only harder. And more noble. Not that I’m bragging or desperate to impress you. Kate thought of throwing that, or most of it, into the conversation. But in the few moments it took for her to watch the young woman help Jo hop down to the drive across the way, she matured enough to allow someone else to have some well-deserved credit.

  So, she changed the subject. “So, that wasn’t your truck, after all. Jo and I debated about it before we came over.”

  “That? You thought that was my truck?”

  “I know.” He probably drove a brand-new, gleaming pickup with all the bells and whistles. Men liked their toys the way they liked their women, she had heard. Showy and without a lot of miles on them. “What was I thinking?”
/>   “I’d love a classic like that.”

  “Oh.” Kate found some comfort in hearing that.

  “Naw, mine’s got a few years on it. You know, not too flashy, still cleans up good.”

  “Good to know.”

  He looked at her.

  “You know, in case I see you around town. I can…wave.” She lifted her hand to demonstrate.

  “Hope you do. See me around, that is.”

  He doesn’t want me to wave? Kate the kid felt slighted, but only slightly. “What color?”

  “Stick around a minute and you’ll see it. Esperanza should be driving up in the thing any time now.”

  “Esperanza?” She had heard the name mentioned yesterday, hadn’t she? “Should I know—”

  “Hey, yeah.” He stepped forward, blocking Kate from his line of vision and raised one arm. His whole face lit up. “Here’s my girl now.”

  “Your…girl?”

  “C’mon, I’ll introduce you to the new love of my life.”

  New love of his life.

  What did she expect? Sixteen years had gone by. He had moved on.

  That was healthy.

  Good for him.

  She made her way down the steps, repeating it again and again. “Good. Good. Good for him. That’s healthy.”

  Vince hurried ahead, pulling open the passenger side of his not too flashy but still pretty new and very red truck and began doing something inside the cab.

  “That’s healthy. Good and healthy. For him. That’s—”

  He stepped away from the truck and closed the door to reveal what he had taken from inside it.

  “That’s a baby!” Kate followed up that brilliant statement of the obvious with a rush of unintelligent babble that she thought went something like “Well. There. Hey, there. It’s a baby. Look at the baby. You have a baby. Well. Yes. A baby. How nice. Nice baby.”

  She might have gone on like that indefinitely if Vince hadn’t finally taken his eyes off the child, fixed his delighted gaze on her and said, “Kate, I’d like you to meet Mary Fabiola Merchant.”

  She didn’t know whether to ask him to say that name again or just go with it and shake the baby’s hand.

  Vince didn’t wait for her to do, either. “Fabiola is eighteen months old, my little ray of sunshine.”

  His words focused Kate in a way neither the strange image of him nor her disappointment at realizing he had a new family, a very new one, could.

  The new love of my life. My ray of sunshine. Vince deserved that. “I’m glad for you. And the baby’s mother…?”

  “Esperanza?”

  “That beautiful young girl? She’s so…beautiful.” And young. Young, young. She could be his daughter. She could be Kate’s daughter. She could be Kate and Vince’s daughter if only…

  “Here, I’ll take the baby, Vince.” The black-haired beauty lifted the bright-eyed child from Vince’s strong arms.

  “She’s lovely, Vince. They both are.”

  “I may be a little prejudiced. She is my first, after all.”

  “Your…first?”

  Vince watched Esperanza and the child heading up the porch, giving a small, totally goofy wave as they walked away. “My first grandbaby.”

  “Grandbaby? Oh! Grandbaby!” Kate pivoted to watch them, too. “Of course.”

  “Of course? Why? What? Who did you think she…Oh, Katie, you didn’t.”

  “I did,” she confessed, leaning on her cane. “The odds of finding you here in Santa Sofia after all these years were—”

  His eyes glinted with good humor. He laughed as he spoke. “Pretty good, given the track record of vacationers who become locals.”

  “But that you’d be here when I came back, got dragged back against my better judgment, in fact? And then to think you wouldn’t have remarried?”

  “I almost did, once.”

  “Oh?” Good for him. Healthy. Good. She forced a smile at him.

  “I’m talking about you.”

  “Oh!” The smile eased into a laugh, the laugh into hushed awe. “Then that means the baby is Gentry’s?”

  “Yes.”

  Kate shook her head, slowly. “I always picture him as still a kid himself.”

  “He is.” Vince cast his gaze toward the ground. If he had looked Kate in the eyes, she’d have taken that as defensive, but his refusal to do so told her that he was admitting to her something he had tried to keep hidden, even from himself. “Which is why Esperanza and Fabiola are moving into this place without him. He’s just not mature enough to handle a family, that’s all.”

  Kate went to him.

  She touched his arm.

  You can’t stand by and let that happen. No. No, Vince, you cannot enable him in this choice. You of all people, a man who put being a father above everything else in your life, even me. You should rail against this. This is not a game of Wa Hoo, these are lives at stake here, Vince, futures. Do not help your son make the biggest mistake of his life.

  Kate wanted to scream all that and so much more at him. But she held back. What good would it do? She was a veritable stranger now. She had no part in this.

  Besides, she had argued with this man once about the way he raised his son. All she had wanted was to be a part of telling Gentry about their engagement. To be a part of the when and if of telling him. But Vince had told her to stay out of family business.

  That was when she’d known she and Gentry and Vince might never be a real family. That she would never be allowed to behave toward the boy as if he were anything but Vince’s son.

  She looked now at baby Fabiola. The light of Vince’s life.

  If Vince paved the way for his son not to step up and be a man or a husband and father, because Gentry knew his own father would be there to take up the slack, Vince would be left with the task of being a father to his granddaughter. This was family business, and where Kate was concerned, it would always have a big ol’ Keep Out! sign posted across it.

  She had come all this way, across all these years and borne all this guilt to find herself in the exact same position she had found untenable then.

  And suddenly the old Scat-Kat-Katie urges returned. She wanted to run. Run all the way back to Atlanta even though she had nothing waiting for her there. To have nothing by choice was surely better than to have nothing because everything you cared about had been ripped away from you. Right?

  Kate didn’t know if she was asking herself or wanting an answer from some higher source. She did not wait for an answer, either way.

  “I have to go now.”

  “I’ll, uh, get the girls inside then be right over to help with the dresser.”

  Kate could only nod, her back already to the man, and her gait uneven and awkward in her attempt to get away as fast as she could.

  Minutes later, breathless, she wiped away the damp film of sweat on her forehead. She leaned one hand against the fender of Moxie’s old truck. She fixed her eyes on Jo’s, then Moxie’s, then Jo’s again and she announced, “I’ve had second thoughts. I don’t think it would be such a bad idea to sell this place. The sooner the better.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The next day, Moxie stood at the back door clutching a file she had put together concerning the Cromwells’ cottage.

  The land survey from city hall showing where Moxie’s property and the Cromwells’ met.

  The city zoning ordinances that described how the land could be used, single-family dwellings with potential for commercial zoning and on what sized lot.

  Printouts from the Realtor’s Multiple Listing Service database to show the prices of similar houses in town.

  A list of basic repairs needed just so the house could pass inspection, cost estimates included.

  Plus some suggestions from her as to what would appeal to the buyers in the area, paint, landscaping, upgrades.

  And an offer.

  From her.

  To buy the house as is.

  She knocked on the back door once, ligh
tly, and waited, knowing it would take either of the sisters a while to get to her.

  She took a deep breath. Scanned the chipping paint, then narrowed one eye and tried to imagine the back of the house with a real garden instead of that odd assortment of rocks and tacky souvenirs. “Where did all those things come from, anyway?”

  Had renters gotten the idea of bringing a little piece of home with them to sort of say “We were here?” Or had people thought it a good joke to find some awful, ugly piece of statuary and stick it here? She skimmed the collection of birdhouses, signs, concrete mascots and replicas of famous landmarks. It didn’t matter, she supposed, unless the strange creation came from the minds, hearts or wacky sense of humor of the Cromwell family themselves. That might tell her if she had made a big mistake with this offer or not.

  She thought she heard movement inside the house and her pulse quickened.

  One more time she slipped open the file and stared at the preliminary buyer’s contract she had drawn up with the proposed numbers and contingencies all in place.

  Low end.

  Again her eye wandered to the rocks and schlock and then to the most obvious things in need of repair. She studied the offer again. Reasonable given these conditions.

  But low. Very low.

  A knot tightened high in her chest.

  Too low?

  Just a starting place, she told herself. A jumping-off point. But jumping off into what?

  A family rift? Moxie had no idea whatsoever how to deal with that kind of thing.

  When her family faced conflict, her father went fishing. He’d gone off fishing today, in fact. Which might have seemed pretty fishy in itself to her, except that fishing was what William J. Weatherby did every Saturday.

  He put himself out there, threw a line in and saw what happened. That was all she was doing, wasn’t it? Just casting a line and seeing if anyone would take the bait?

  If they did, Moxie would pick up a sweet little property that had a special place in her heart—and finally secure her ownership of every lot on Dream Away Bay Court. Her own small empire—with large commercial potential.

  Moxie could just see an antique shop in the smaller of the two existing houses. Next to it, a new building that could hold a couple of specialty shops, and then a large, two-story bed-and-breakfast, with a charming café tucked inside. The Cromwell cottage would house her property-management office, a place for her to oversee it all. A community of her own inside a community where she had always been just a little bit of an outsider.