The Barefoot Believers (2 page)

Kate sighed.

Mom finished her perusal and, obviously satisfied, handed the file back.

Kate set the file aside again. She didn't need it. She hadn't written in it the things she intended to tell her mother today, anyway. Dodie was not the only sneaky Cromwell in the bunch, after all.

“I know you are up to something.” Dodie hunkered down on the table and the paper crackled. She gave her eldest girl what she and her sister had grown up calling the “confess and no one gets hurt” look.

Only it was too late for that. It had always been too late for that because the tight-knit—so tightly knit that they often poked one another with their metaphorical knitting needles—trio had lived most of their lives in their own particular world of hurt. It bound them together and yet kept them at arm's length—which was still close enough to get an emotional choke hold, if the need arose.

Despite the appearance of a cherub-faced Southern grandmother type—all warm hugs, high hair and a pocketbook full of hard candy—deep down inside Dodie Cromwell had a hole in her heart.

Not some kind of congenital defect that affected every aspect of her life, mind you, but something just as pervasive. Dodie Cromwell had lost a child.

And as long as she lived, Scat-Kat-Katie would always feel, because of her actions or lack of action, just a little bit responsible for that.

And on top of that, she'd lost the only photographs they had of the little chubby-cheeked girl named Christina.

“I know you're up to something.” Dodie raised her chin, well, one of them. The second and third flaps of soft flesh that lay under her jawline sort of dangled lazily down along her neck as if they had been yanked up for no good reason a few times too many and had no intention of falling for that again. She crossed her ankles and arms, using body language that did not need an interpreter. “And I think it's only fair to warn you that you are wasting your time.”

“
You
made the appointment, Mother. So if anyone is wasting anyone's time here…”

“It's not as if you couldn't use the—”

Practice? Money? Company?
Nothing her mother ended that sentence with was going to make Kate feel good.

“—the situation to your advantage,” Dodie finished then grinned. She had her daughter dead to rights. But then, she usually did.

“Would you sit still?” Kate used her most doctorly tone to both concede her mother's point and to try to keep things in hand. “All that wiggling makes it sound like you're trying to fish the last nut out of the popcorn bag.”

Dodie Cromwell did her best to act shocked and wounded but her eyes glittered with pure impish pleasure as she demanded of her oldest daughter, “Who are you calling a nut?”

“If the shoe fits…” Kate bent down at last, easily uncrossed her mother's swollen ankles then worked her sensible but half-size-too-small pumps free. “Did these shoes
ever
fit?”

“They were on sale.” Dodie wiggled her fat little piggies and let out a deep, satisfied sigh.

On sale. Waste not want not. One man's trash…is a resourceful woman's treasure.
Kate had grown up with her mother's admonitions ringing in her ears. She respected them, understood where they came from but…“Treasure or not, you have got to stop trashing your feet, Mom.”

“What?”

Kate met her mother's eyes, so like Kate's own, deep set and startling green. All the women in her mother's family had those green eyes. Kate and Jo had them and their baby sister…Well, no one could say for sure but they all believed she must. Her whole life, Kate had searched the face of every girl child the right age for another pair of green eyes like theirs.

“And don't get on your high horse with me, young lady.” Her mother's voice drew her back instantly. “You don't even know that popcorn doesn't have nuts, it has old maids.”

Now it was Kate's turn to use the power of the green-eyed gaze and put on the indignant act. “Who are
you
calling an old maid?”

“Old maid?” Dodie went all gushy, her lips pushed out, her words not quite baby talk, not quite mindless mush, the way she might have spoken to an elderly pampered poodle if she had one. “You're not an old maid, sweetie pie. You're just…”

Kate held her breath. She hadn't intended to hold her breath. But her mother had that kind of effect on her—causing her to do all sorts of things she had never had any intentions of doing.

And with that thought, she exhaled in a whoosh that made her shoulders sag and blew her bangs upward. Before they could land in a brown fringe over her eyes again, her mother concluded her sentence.

“You're just
discerning.
”

“You mean too picky for my own good.” Kate nodded.

“Both you girls are…”

Too picky for your own good.
It hung in the air between them like another piece of the family's dirty laundry they tried so hard to ignore.

“…discerning,” Dodie finished as she exhaled, looking adoring but glum. “I suppose I have only myself to blame.”

Kate put her hand on her mother's leg. “No, Mom, I've never…”

Dodie reached out and placed her ruddy palm on Kate's cheek. “Your father may have only loaded the baby into his brand-new overpriced pickup truck and driven off that awful night but he took a part of
all
of us with him.”

Kate turned her back. It was the closest thing she could do to bolting for the door. She took her mother's foot in one hand as if she wanted to begin an exam. Actually, she just thought it was a good way to keep Dodie from kicking her aside and bolting as well when Kate said what she had planned to say. “But you took care of us then, Mom.”

“I did.”

Deep breath. She considered grabbing her mother's other foot, maybe throwing in a leg lock. Instead, she stood straight and turned. She'd promised Jo she'd do this and she
would
do it. This time she could not run. “And now it's our turn to take care of you.”

“Oh, no.” Dodie shook her feet free and slid off the table. She nabbed her shoes and headed for the door without even putting them on.

Kate
couldn't run, but Dodie
could.

Right out the examining-room door.

“No?” Kate stood in the doorway and called out, “You haven't even heard what I have to say.”

“I don't have to hear.” As Kate's lone assistant for the slow workday stared with her mouth open, Dodie's feet plopped softly over the stiff brown carpet of the outer office. She did not pause to put her shoes on, not even when she got to the main door. “I know what's coming. You think this same kind of thing hasn't happened to my friends? I should have recognized the signs. Getting me on your turf, taking away my shoes…”

“Mom, I'm a professional. I'm a podiatrist.”
Not that anyone would know it from the pitiful lack of patients around here.
She glanced around the room, then called after her mother again, “You had an appointment.”

“Yes, but
you
had another objective.” She had jammed her hand down into her shoe so she could stab the pointed toe of the pump in her right hand. “And I want no part of it. I'm not some delicate old woman who needs looking after by her children.”

“You just said you were frail.”

She flung the door open, almost lost the shoe in her left hand, caught it and stuffed it, quite haphazardly, into her open purse. “You just said I was a nut.”

And as if to disprove that notion to anyone within earshot, Dodie hustled out the door and into the hallway of the medical-arts building with her head high, one shoe poking out of her purse and the other firmly placed on her hand.

“No, Mom, I didn't.” Kate followed as far as the door. “That was a joke. That was us just kidding around.”

“Behind every joke is a kernel of…” She stopped, opened her mouth, then smiled. She yanked the shoe from her purse, fit it to her other hand and clapped both soles together like a pair of triumphant cymbals. “Kernels! That's what's in popcorn, isn't it?”

“See, Mom. You cannot focus. You go from one thing to another without thinking it through. One minute you're leaving in a huff, the next you're in this public hallway waving around those awful shoes that you will never be able to cram your feet back into.”

Dodie frowned at the shoes.

When she did not try to prove Kate wrong by throwing the navy pumps down on the floor and beginning to shove her swollen tootsies back into them, Kate could tell her mother had taken the point to heart. She might not want to hear what needed to be said, but she
was
listening. So Kate pushed on. “Besides, you're going to slip in those stockings. Probably fall and break a hip. And then what?”

Dodie put her hand, uh, heel, on her hip, her penciled-on eyebrows furrowed over her worried gaze.

“You have no home of your own to go to and your lady friends are not capable of taking care of you when you're healthy much less when you need real care.” Kate had not met these women, but she assumed they must be like her mother. And though she loved her with all her heart, the last person Kate would want hovering over her when she was seriously ill or in pain was her mother. “You haven't thought this through, just like you didn't think through selling your condo. Things like that are what have Jo and I…”

“Jo and you…?” Dodie mimicked the way Kate's voice trailed off then her face lit up. “Oh! That's right, I'm fleeing! I'm flying for my life.”

“Fleeing? Really, Mom.” Kate watched her mother now switch to careful baby steps.

“Remember when you and your sister used to put on your father's old gym socks and skate on the hardwood floors?” she asked, making almost no progress at all heading for the large glass front doors.

Kate had insisted her office be on the ground floor, to better accommodate patients with aching feet. Little had she known she'd get the most benefit from that when trying to just do something sensible for her own mother. “Mom, this is hardly the time to—”

“Oh, that's right. That's right. Fleeing. Oh, and skating!” She put her weight into it and went gliding along the hallway. “Hey! The old girl has still got it! Try to catch me now Scat-Kat-Katie!”

“Mom, this isn't helping….”

And she hit the door.

Literally.

Went sailing right into it with a big thud. It knocked one of the pumps off her hands. That did not slow her down.

In fact, it just freed her up to open the door and rush headlong out into the bright afternoon sun, leaving a lone bargain pump lying on the floor à la Cinderella making her getaway.

If only Dodie's land yacht of a car would simply turn into a pumpkin. That would solve some of Kate's problems.

Oh, her mom would still try to drive it, of course, but people would be more apt to get out of her way.

Unfortunately for Kate, she didn't have sense enough to do just that.

“Mom, come back inside.”

The driver's side door slammed. “Can't dear. I have someplace I have to go.”

“Where?” Scat-Kat-Kate pushed aside her usual response to retreat and charged forward.

“Dream Away Bay Court!”

“Dream Away…” Kate knew that name. Wasn't it from a fairy tale or something? “What are you talking about, Mom?”

“Florida, darling. My friends and I are headed to our old vacation cottage in Santa Sofia.” Dodie rammed the key into the ignition.

“Santa Sofia.” The name tingled on Kate's lips. Or maybe that was the memory of the last kiss she'd shared with Vince in that very place.

The engine roared to a start.

“Mom, you can't be serious. We haven't used that place for like…sixteen years.” They had a caretaker who, up until the last year or so, had kept it rented and they supposed in decent repair, but who knew? “Mom, stop. Think this over. Jo and I think you should come and live with one of us.”

“Well, I think you should come and live with me. Nothing keeping you here. You want me as a roomie? You'll know where to find me.” Dodie gave her a grin, a wave, and not one other bit of warning before she jerked the car into Reverse and hit the gas.

And her tire hit Kate's foot.

The wet snap of bones breaking got to Kate long before the actual pain.

Crunch.

Grind.

Squish.

Or maybe the squish came first.

On that, Kate could not be one-hundred-percent sure, what with her legs buckling, the agony overtaking her and her mind swerving randomly between a doctor's cool objectivity and a daughter's hot-headed frustration.