The Barefoot Believers (6 page)

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 people 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.

Ever changing, never changed. That would have been a great motto for the town as it summed up the place's greatest charm…and its biggest drawback.

She sighed and opened the car door. “The sooner begun, the sooner done.”

In a few steps she had the back down on the old truck and had pulled out her basic cleaning supplies. She wished she knew more about the owners. That would help her know where to focus. For some people the outside of their house—the part that other people saw—was the end all and be all. For others the outside could be a wreck as long as the beds were soft and the bathroom sparkling. Still others only wanted a fully stocked fridge to feel instantly right at home.

Not knowing what these people would want, Moxie decided to do a little bit of everything, concentrating heavily on the bathrooms, bedrooms and the kitchen.

The porch would have to wait.

“What are the odds that all they wanted to do was drive here from Atlanta just to sit on the porch and drink tea, anyway?” she mused.

With that, she forged ahead, through the yard, up the steps and onto the porch. It groaned under her weight.

Moxie sneezed.

More groaning.

She held her breath, hoping it wouldn't fall in. Forget bleach and elbow grease, this thing needed major work. For the time being she decided she'd rope it off and stick up a sign saying to enter through the back door.

It took some wiggling of the key and a shove with her shoulder but she got the front door open.

“Not too bad,” she muttered, moving into the front room. She put her cleaning supplies down by the stone fireplace with the polished driftwood mantel. From the bucket she withdrew a small notepad with a nub of a pencil tied to it by a short string.

She drew in a breath but didn't sneeze. “Musty but not moldy.”

She ran her fingertips along the gnarled and knotted mantel. “Dusty but not disgusting.”

She made notes.

She blew her nose.

She plumped a pillow on the overstuffed floral couch and eyeballed the ugly plaid monstrosity of a couch that hid what was probably a very uncomfortable pullout bed. “A little vacuuming, maybe throw something over them.”

Her gaze went to an old cedar chest against the far wall where they used to store bed linens. She'd need to do a load of laundry now so she could have any blankets or quilts she found cleaned up before she left.

She wrote that down, sniffled then took a swipe under her eyes with the hem of her I'm Hooked on Billy J's Bait Shack Buffet T-shirt. Away from the mold on the porch, her scratchy throat, drippy nose and watery eyes had started to clear. Some.

Enough so that from the front room she could see all of the dining room and into the kitchen. It would need a scrubbing. As would the bathroom beyond.

Noted.

She pressed her lips together and adjusted the scrunchie holding her hair out of her way. As the list of things she had to do grew, she couldn't help focusing on the door hiding the enclosed stairway that led to the sleeping quarters.

The mattresses in the two tiny bedrooms should be turned at the very least. The rooms aired out. She'd have to check to see if she needed to haul any furniture up there—last time she'd looked, one of the dressers had gone missing and the lamp that had rested on it, broken. One dresser, one lamp. In all these years, she counted that a pretty good reflection on the town's people and the out-of-town people who found refuge here from time to time.

Still, she'd need to replace that dresser with something—maybe the chest of drawers from the dining room where they usually kept candlesticks and silverware? She winced at the thought of trying to wrestle that up the tight space and the steep wooden staircase.

“Where is that lumberjack when I need him?” Or her sweat-equity-promising renter-to-be, or—

“Resident handyman reporting for duty.”

Moxie whipped around to see a tall man standing in the open doorway, his face in shadow. Of course, she didn't need to see that face to know exactly who she was dealing with. Her fingers tightened around the pad in her hand. Her whole body tensed. “Vince Merchant? What are you…? How did you…? Where did you ever dig up the courage to walk across my threshold again?”

He laughed. No surprise there—laughter was Vince's response to most anything. A jolly disposition, people liked to say of him.

Moxie didn't buy it. Nothing in life, particularly Vince Merchant's life, was a constant laughing matter. Sure, she could admire someone who found the bright side of every situation, but Vince never looked for the bright side. He used laughter to deflect that kind of effort, introspection, the scrutiny of others.

“Your dad called. I was already on my way over.” He jerked his head in the direction of the cottage across the way. “So, I came over to help out.”

“Help?” The man had come to offer the one thing she needed most. Help.

Didn't that just figure? Moxie had felt obliged to only give two people a piece of her mind in her lifetime. She'd just got off the phone with one of them and the other was standing before her now.

“Yeah. Help. Say the word. Point the direction. Slap a hammer or a mop in my hand and turn me loose. What can I do?”

What couldn't he do? He was Vince Merchant.

Every small touristy town like this had its cast of characters. Some only played bit parts. Some came and went. Some, like her father and the man offering his help to her, rose to the level of icon.

Her father was the crusty old coot, for lack of a more complex description. And Vince?

Tall, with rugged good looks (which basically meant that women found him breathtaking and men couldn't see why), Vince Merchant filled the role of tragic heroic figure right down to the tousled golden hair, scar on his cheek and heart that he never shared with anyone. The young widower, raising a son on his own, had come to Santa Sofia to escape from the overwhelming weight of his loss and had found only more of the same.

And yet he had found the faith and the fortitude to carry on, to run his own handyman business and to still laugh. Often.

Too often, Moxie thought.

“Not even going to wait to see if Gentry or Esperanza are going to uphold their part of the bargain about helping me, huh?” It was what she would have done. What he
should
have done.

“I'm not doing it for them.” He crossed into the room at last, and the light settled on his tanned face and showed the brilliant accents on his black Hawaiian shirt.

“Well, you're sure not doing it for me.” Moxie and Vince had known each other forever. He was like a big brother to her. Not the kind of big brother who taught you how to bait a hook, chased away the bullies and when you got old enough, bragged about you to his pals. But a big brother like the kind who thought he knew better than you how to run your life.

“What can I do?”

“I said you certainly aren't doing it for me. That's your cue to tell me why exactly you are doing this.”

“Give me an assignment.”

“You want an assignment? Write an essay in twenty-five words or less on why you have shown up out of the blue to pitch in with this project.”

“The kitchen, you say?” He stretched his body so that he could peer in the general direction of the large, sunlit space beyond the dining room. “Yeah, I can handle cleaning the kitchen.”

“Or you could make a phone call and get your son over here to get a head start on the work he's supposed to do as part of our rental agreement.”

“Then after that, I'll go around front. Got a new power washer in the back of my truck, might was well see what that baby can do, see how much of the mold I can blast off the porch.”

“Vince…”

“I don't want to talk about Gentry.” Vince scratched the back of his neck with his blunt fingers, ruffling the shaggy waves of hair that fell just over his collar.

Vince never wanted to talk about Gentry. He would brag about Gentry. Make up excuses for Gentry. Even speak on behalf of Gentry. But talk about his son and the way Vince's overprotective parenting had left the kid unprepared for life, unavailable to those who counted on him and unmotivated to change?

No way.

“Just call him and—”

Vince started toward the kitchen, his eyes fixed forward to avoid Moxie's high-beam accusatory gaze.