Barefoot Brides (2 page)

A lack of distinction that the middle sister, the one left behind by their father and left to her own devices by her mother, would feel to her very core.

And Kate. She had become a doctor after years of searching for her true calling, including leaving behind her one true love, none other than her porch rescuer Vince Merchant. She usually radiated good health, athleticism and a take-charge attitude. But anyone reading the
Sun Times
today would describe her as birdlike and practically ancient.

In the photo, the sun streaks in her brown hair could easily have passed for premature gray. The fact that she had one hand on a cane because of the accidental foot injury—which was a nice way of saying her mother had tried to run away from home and ran over Kate's foot instead—that had brought her to Santa Sofia to recover in the first place did not help.

Then there was Moxie.

Poor baby.

Kate felt a rush of genuine empathy for the youngest sister.

Squished between Jo and Kate, both vying for prominence next to their mom, Moxie had to squat to get her round chin between the heads of Billy J and Dodie. Not only did that require she suffer the discomfort of the hair helmet and ever-present hat but she had to twist her face just so to avoid the indignity of having a feather go up her nose. To top it off, nothing of her thick ponytail, in a mix of colors she liked to call
beach-blah-nd,
showed. That left only her bangs in view, suggesting she'd cut her hair by putting a cereal bowl on her head and merrily whacking away at anything that stuck out.

Moxie looked as if she wanted to be anywhere but there.

“Let me see that article again. Did that hack even mention my great food at fair prices?” Billy J coughed again, lightly this time, as he created a commotion fighting with the pages. “I went over that and made him recite it back to me word for word. He assured me that he would put the Bait Shack in the piece.”

“And he did.” Kate ran her index finger line by line over the scant few rows of smudgy black ink as if she had to double-check that she had missed something in the bland four-paragraph summation. “He didn't even mention that I've joined the Urgent Care Clinic and will be setting up a part-time private practice after the first of the year.”

“If you last that long,” Jo muttered into her raised coffee mug.

“What's that supposed to mean?” Kate narrowed her eyes, one hand still on the paper, the other on her ever-present cane.

“Oh, nothing,” Jo said soft and
almost
sweet. “Except maybe the man didn't mention it in his article because he's heard of your reputation for running away when things get too intense, Scat-Kat Katie.”

“Don't call me that.” Kate did not protest that she had changed, or at least was trying to, but the muted anguish in her words got the message across.

“Don't even bring up names!” Moxie put her hand to her forehead then impulsively swept it back to loosen her almost-always-present ponytail to let her hair down. She fluffed and smoothed the heavy strands even as she promised, “If I ever meet this R. Hunt Diamante in person, I am going to give him a piece of my mind!”

Everyone looked at her in a medley of disbelief, amusement and maybe just a dash of hope that she would muster the backbone to do just what she said.

Moxie might be mouthy but she was also generous to a fault and more likely to give of herself than to give anyone a strong talking-to.

“Or…” she said, twisting her fingers in the hem of her “I'm hooked on Billy J's Bait Shack” T-shirt, “at least I'll hand him my business card so he can get my name and occupation right.”

“Call me when you do that.” Jo put a sympathetic hand on her sister's shoulder.

“So you can send your boyfriend, the wonderful minister man, around to lend counsel?” Dodie asked, the eagerness in her eyes clearly more for the prospect of Jo admitting that handsome Travis Brandt was officially her boyfriend than about him helping Moxie deliver what Southerners fondly call a “come to Jesus” message to R. Hunt Diamante.

“No, so I can go with her and cheer her on,” Jo shot back, ignoring the blatant question about her relationship with Travis altogether.

“You're just hoping you'll get a second shot at getting your picture in the paper.” Kate pointed to the white blob that should have resembled Jo.

“Well,
I
don't want my picture in the paper again, but I wouldn't mind having the facts corrected.” Moxie tried to keep from sounding overwrought, which she clearly wasn't, but sometimes she came off that way because of her age and her still-girlishly chubby face. Besides, as the daughter of a character like Billy J, a lot of folks around town probably thought she had every right to be overwrought most of the time anyway. “I have worked hard most of my life to get where I am, to be more than just Billy J's daughter, and everyone in town knows that—except, apparently, the new editor of our only newspaper!”

“That's just the problem, isn't it?” Kate sighed. “Everybody in town already
does
know you. But me?”

Jo gave her the ol' arched-eyebrow routine as if to say, “What
about
you? Not everything is about
you!
”

“I'm trying to get established here.” Kate shut her eyes and exhaled impatiently. “And in partnership with
your
boyfriend, Moxie, so he'll have more free time for you. So there's something to benefit you in them mentioning the clinic and my practice—”

“I didn't ask you to do that.” Now Moxie
did
sound overwrought. “I didn't ask you to join the clinic or free up Lionel's time or do me any favors, Kate, so—”

“Might as well learn it now, Moxie, you don't have to
ask
Kate for anything.” Jo angled her shoulders so that it gave the impression of a united front, the younger girls against the eldest. “She's always too happy to rush in to the rescue, whether you want her to or not and—”

“Stop it! Would you two stop it?” Billy J thundered at last, smacking his hand against his knee. Another burst of soft coughing followed then subsided. “Land's sake, you sound like—”

“They sound like—” Dodie stood slowly, almost choking on the last word “—sisters.”

The room fell utterly silent, charged with a tension that felt almost electric.

Dodie wiped away a tear. “After all these years and after all that heartache, my girls sound like the sisters they were always meant to be. Please don't tell them to be quiet, Billy. To me it's the sweetest sound I've ever heard.”

More silence, this time charged with some lesser energy, more like the static cling generated by two socks hot from the dryer.

Finally Moxie, for whom this sister business must still have been very new and very odd, frowned. “So let me get this straight…you
want
us to keep bickering?”

“She wants us to be sweet and act like sisters,” Kate corrected, giving the final word on the matter.

Then Jo, never willing to let her sister
have
that last word, summed it up for all of them. “Given the reality of our lives as they are, not as they should have been, she may just have to choose one or the other. We can be sweet or we can act like sisters, but for the time being, I don't think we can do both.”

S
hortly before noon, Jo stood at the edge of the ocean with her sandals in her hands, her feet in the sand and her heart in her throat. Just a few hundred feet away, the sounds from Traveler's Wayside Chapel mixed with the rush and swoosh of the waves lapping at the shore.

She could hear the voices, mostly male voices, laughing and talking. By now Travis Brandt had probably just finished dishing up a hot meal to the homeless and working poor or anyone who just needed a little warmth and kindness.

In a few minutes she would go to the chapel to talk to him about her plans. She so wanted to start again, to try to be the kind of person she believed God—and the people near and dear to her heart—wanted her to be.

And she would probably fall short.

Be sweet.

Her mother had admonished her to do that her whole life.

Act like sisters.

She didn't know if she could.

Jo had tried. She felt the Lord knew how hard she had tried to be a good sister and a good daughter only to find herself feeling…superfluous.

No, that didn't sound right. Jo wasn't
super
anything.

Her whole life she'd been a spare part. Something left over when their father had taken the baby and their mother had fit the pieces of their life back together again.

The role of mother's little helper had been filled to overflowing by Kate the great. And while to most onlookers Jo might have seemed the logical choice for baby of the family, that spot had remained forever unfilled—a giant gaping hole in their hearts and in the very fabric of their family dynamic because of Moxie's abduction.

And now Moxie was back in her rightful place and Kate had taken strides to establish herself in the town where their mother wanted to live out the rest of her life. And Jo?

When she had decided to change her priorities and look to the Lord for her guidance, she thought she'd really go places. Yet Jo still had unfinished business in Atlanta, though no real
job
here or there. She had a new man in her life but he didn't seem to have much room for her in his. She talked a good plan but so far hadn't found anyone to listen to her.

In short, despite turning the driving force in her life over to God, Jo had gotten nowhere.

That had to change. She had to step out in faith and…do what? If only she had a clear message, some guidance, a light to shine on the right path to take.

“But I'm hungry. I don't want a nap!”

The voice of a little boy whining startled her from her fit of anxiety. Jo turned and watched a young mother tugging a child along the beach.

“I want something to eat!”

Jo did not know if they had a home to go to for that promised nap or means of getting the meal the boy needed. What she did know was that they were heading
away
from, not
toward,
the chapel.

That troubled her.

Very few women sought out the shelter of the chapel these days, though some attended Sunday service. That dropped off considerably after tourist season when the clusters of visiting families no longer filled up the pews.

Sometimes she saw them at the free breakfasts, women with children in worn clothes and shoes with holes in the toes. Given the ebb of jobs and business away from Santa Sofia this time of year, a fair percentage of which would not come back with the few returning tourists next season, Jo knew they were out there. She knew they needed help just as much as she wanted to help them. If they would just give her—an outsider—a chance, she could make a difference in their lives.

That's why she had asked Moxie to meet her here today. Jo wanted to form an outreach to the underserved women of the community and her mother wanted her to be more sisterly. Two birds. One stone.

“I just hope she doesn't end up wanting to throw rocks at me,” she whispered.

Be sweet. Be sisterly. Be the person God and your mother want you to be.

Jo shut her eyes and gave a silent prayer for help in doing it all.

A large, warm hand cupped the curve of her shoulder.

“Travis!” She whipped around, as flustered as if he had caught her ogling cutie-pie surfer dudes—not that there were any around, and even if there were, that one of them would be more ogle-worthy than the former pro-athlete turned beach-preacher himself.

He tipped his head toward the woman and child. “One of yours?”

“One of my what?” Jo squinted against the sun's bright glare.

“One of the women you had in mind when you came up with the idea of doing this…” He held his open hand to her, obviously encouraging her to finish the sentence, to tell him just exactly what she had in mind for a proposed women's ministry.

“A Bible study?”

“You're asking me?”

“No.” She threw her hands up as though she wanted to shove the very notion out of the picture.

Then she paused and reconsidered. Of all the people on the planet whom she should ask about this effort, Travis was the one who might have real answers. Or at least be able to provide that solid guidance, that light on the right path she had prayed to receive.

“Well…maybe.” She dropped her hands to her side and sighed, then finally gave up and recanted entirely. “Yes. Yes, I am asking you, Travis. What should I be doing?”

“If you don't know, isn't it going to be pretty difficult to get other people on board?”

There was an analogy in there somewhere, about people not having to know where a boat was headed to know that they needed to be on it. “Yeah. I see your point. I really have no clue what I'm doing, do I?”

“Jo, you keep asking me questions that I think you should be asking yourself.”

“Because you've been there. You are there. You have a life mission, a path.”

“Nobody else can tell you your mission, Jo.”

“I know. I just…I see this need in the community. These women who don't seem to have the connections they need to make their lives better, and I want to help.”

“Why you?”

“Now
you're
asking me questions I should be asking myself.” She smiled shyly up at him.

He laughed and nodded. “Got me.”

I wish.
She sighed. Even with her heart and mind laboring full steam to try to flesh out her plans for helping others, there was still a part of Jo that wondered how Travis felt about her. That wanted some hint of where their relationship was going. If they even
had
a relationship.

“The point is, it's not enough to know what you want, Jo. You have to give some thought to how
you
can best serve the needs you see around you. What unique gifts do you bring to the table?”

You tell me.
She pressed her lips together to keep herself from fishing for some kind of insight about how Travis felt about her.

“You have to examine your own motivations. Who are you doing this for? Do you really want to serve others or are you trying to make yourself feel better, serving your own interests?”

Ouch!
That told her a little bit more of what he thought of her than she had reckoned on.

Jo took a step backward, then looked down to watch the impression of her feet in the wet white sand fill with the incoming tide then disappear as though she had never been there at all.

She could not think of a more apt metaphor for herself.
The girl who has walked in everybody else's shoes trying to keep them happy for so long that now she no longer even leaves a footprint of her own.

A bleak heaviness descended over her shoulders and chest. She breathed, but only shallow breaths. She fought back the ridiculous urge to burst out crying.

She cleared her throat and raised her head. In doing so she caught a glimpse of Moxie's old truck in the strip of parking spaces along the edge of the beach. That served as a stark reminder of her past, of her family's past, and what she had drawn from it.

Cromwell women did not cry.

Crying was self-indulgent. It did not make things better.

But then what had Jo ever done in her life that made anything better for anyone?

She couldn't think of a single thing.

She had thought she was doing so when she became a Realtor. Helping people find a home, build toward their dreams. But before long she had been sucked into the cycle of buying and selling and winning awards and being the most sought-after name in the business. It became about flipping houses at higher and higher risk for bigger and bigger profit in order to please her boss. And when the risk got too big? Her boss took the profit and left her in a financial mess that even now she had no idea how to dig out of.

Be sweet?

Life so far had neither prepared her nor rewarded her for that.

She glanced at Moxie waving at someone she knew in the lot, walking with her head as high as any fashion model's even while wearing a baseball cap, rolled-up pants and flip-flops.

Be a sister?

Be the lesser of three sisters was more like it.

Be substantial?

A woman that left no footprints for anyone to see, much less follow?

Be a servant of God?

She looked at Travis. So many questions. So many things she simply had no answer for.

Be safe?

That elusive feeling she had never really known, not as a child, not at her chosen field of work, not in her newest relationship.

How could she be any of those things, much less all of them? Jo hadn't even figured out how to be herself.

Finally she looked Travis in the eye, even as Moxie drew closer, and laid it all out for him as earnestly as she could. “What if I ask myself those questions…and I don't have the answers?”

“Then you have a lot of work ahead of you finding them,” he told her softly. Another squeeze of her shoulder and a nod to approaching Moxie then he turned and headed back toward the chapel.

Cromwell women do not cry.
Jo straightened her back and turned to meet her younger sister.

“Where's he going?”

“I think he's giving me some…space.”

“Oh?” It was only one syllable but Moxie packed a lot of concern in it.

Jo shook her head. “Apparently I have a lot of work to do.”

“Okay. I'm here to help.” Moxie patted the canvas bag slung over her shoulder the way a gunslinger might lay a hand lightly on his holster to make sure everyone present knew he hadn't arrived empty-handed. “We the first ones here for the Bible study or, uh, whatever?”

“We're the only ones here.” Jo held out her hands to show she had come unarmed, as far as bringing her Bible or any study materials were concerned. The sandals she had removed when she decided to pass the time waiting for her sister by walking along the beach dangled from her fingers. “I had originally asked you to come over hoping you'd come help me convince Travis of the need for this kind of thing.”

“
What
kind of thing?” Moxie asked.

“That's part of the work I need to do, to come up with a plan or a mission or…I don't know.” Jo felt a little silly. No, she felt a
lot
silly. Travis was right, maybe she had come at this with good intentions but little else. “At least I have a name. I thought we'd call ourselves the Barefoot Believers.”

“The what?” Moxie lifted one foot and shook the sand from the sole of her flip-flop.

“It symbolizes humility and a sense of…equality. You know the kind of group where you don't feel you have to have the right clothes…or the right shoes…or any shoes at all, to feel comfortable.”

“Comfortable doing what?”

“I don't know.” Jo slipped the straps of her sandals down to her wrist and used her free hand to sweep back the coarse blond curls from the back of her neck and sides of her face. “To be like Travis, for example.”

“You want to be
like
Travis or you want to be liked
by
Travis?” Moxie's eyes, so familiar and yet so enigmatic, flashed in a teasing challenge.

“Nothing wrong with wanting to be like Travis.” Jo stood her ground. “He's accomplished. He's focused. He's substantial.”

“Not to mention gorgeous.” Moxie feigned a big ol' goofy, doe-eyed sigh. “Except, of course, to me. He's too…” She crinkled up her nose. “Too
beachy
for me.”

“What's
that
supposed to mean?” Jo snapped.

“You know, sun-kissed hair, cloudproof outlook.” Moxie waved her hands around as she spoke. “Too tan, too relaxed—”