The Barefoot Believers (7 page)

Talk about his son? Or
to
him?

Clearly the man was not comfortable with the concept.

When Vince passed near her, Moxie couldn't hold her tongue any longer. “He's like twenty-four years old, Vince. A father. You can't keep fighting his battles for him.”

“You don't understand how it is for him.”

“To be a kid raised by a charming but sometimes maddening single father? Oh, I think I have some idea.”

He conceded her point with a tight-lipped nod then added, “You had your mother until you were a teenager. Gentry never knew his. I always had to be both parents to him.”

“I get that. But in time both parents have to let go. You have to let go, Vince.”

“Yeah, I let go a couple years ago and the kid runs off and marries a girl he hardly knows.”

“She's a good girl, Vince.”

“Yeah, but she's a girl. And he's a boy. They had no idea what they were getting into.”

“But they are in it. Together. If people would stand back and let them be together.”

“I know you think I made it too easy for her to move out on him.”

“No. I think you made it too easy for him to let her go.”

“I thought letting go was good.” He tried to laugh it off.

Moxie wasn't having any of it. In much the same way that Vince had never made Gentry be responsible for his own problems, nobody in town held Vince accountable for the way his son had turned out. Gentry wasn't a bad kid, far from it. He just never saw anything through. He never had to. Vince was always there to make excuses, fix things up, smooth things over.

Pretty handy having that kind of handyman cover your back your whole life. Moxie wondered if she would have turned out differently if her own father's shortcomings and quirks hadn't required she develop an independent streak.

No one in Santa Sofia had known Gentry's mother, but the story went that Vince and Toni had married young and started a family sooner than they had intended. Giving birth to Gentry had aggravated a congenital heart defect Toni hadn't even known she'd had. She had died when the child was only a week old.

“It's true. I had a mom, of sorts. A very unhappy mom, from the time I was a toddler until I was a teen. I have that over Gentry. But Gentry knows that his mother didn't abandon him. Not to mention that Gentry has you for a father and I have—” She cut herself off. Another sniffle, this time not entirely allergy related. She dabbed at the dampness under her eyes with her Bait Shop T-shirt once again. “I have to get back to work.”

Vince nodded. He started for the kitchen then turned. “I appreciate what you're saying, Moxie. And that you care enough to say it to my face.”

She nodded back.

“Oh, about me versus your dad?” He cleared his throat, ducked his head then peered toward the kitchen again. “Thanks.”

“You're welcome.” She dropped her gaze to the cleaning supplies and picked out a few things he'd need. She thrust them out toward him, compelled to add, “That doesn't mean I don't love my dad.”

“I know.”

“And appreciate all the things he's done for me.”

“I know.”

“Of course you know that but did you also know that I've even come to appreciate the things he didn't do for me?”

Vince held up his hand, the one with the spray glass cleaner in it. “I know where you're going with that and I am
not
going to go along with you.”

“I'm just saying I still love my dad no matter what and Gentry will still love you even if you stop bailing him out of every fix and obligation he gets into.” Moxie lifted her shoulders up.

“Okay,” he said. “I'm going to hit the kitchen now.”

At least she'd given him something to mull over, she thought, watching him go slowly. Perhaps, thoughtfully?

When he reached the beam of light, he paused.

Moxie held her breath, hoping he might share something deep, meaningful. That he might finally peel away that romantic, broody-hero image to reveal the real man beneath.

He turned.

She waited.

And in the stream of light, he met her gaze, shook his head and chuckled softly before heading off to do the job he should have demanded his son take on.

“A
re you sure this is the right place?” Jo had gotten out of the car and come around to help Kate.

The drive had taken longer than they had expected. First, they hadn't gotten away as early as they'd planned because they'd had to convince their mother that it would be a bad thing for her to tag along.

Despite getting Dodie to say she understood time and again why they wanted to go down first for a few weeks so Kate could heal and they could get a feel for the place, as soon as they started to get ready to go, their mom would hit a mental Reset button and hurry around trying to pack and come with them. The old girl wasn't loopy, she just thought that since Florida had been her idea, she ought to actually go there.

And if she went, it only seemed fair, came the next step in the reasoning process, that her girlfriends who wanted to share the property with her come along, too.

To which Kate promptly—and loudly—proclaimed that if they were all going, she wasn't.

And Jo would rush to point out that the primary purpose for the trip was to help Kate recuperate and having all these older ladies to chauffeur around and take care of would wreak havoc with Jo taking care of Kate.

The solution to it all came when Dodie offered to drive herself and her friends down. As soon as she heard
that,
Kate, making sad eyes and a truly pathetic whimpering sound, played her trump card.

“Drive, Mom?” She patted her cast. Winced and gripped the cane in a white-knuckled grasp. “I'd really feel safer if you didn't.”

Dodie backed down.

Kate felt a wee bit bad about it.

Jo loaded up the car with Kate and all their cases, kissed her mom farewell, then headed down the nearest highway headed southeast.

They got away early but the drive itself dragged on forever. Atlanta traffic, Kate's need to keep fed and medicated, and to walk periodically to avoid problems from sitting too long in one position all played a part in the delay.

When they finally rolled into Santa Sofia, it was more than an hour past six o'clock, the time that they had told the caretaker to expect them. They called to let her know and learned that she was going to be unavailable to help them tonight. Something about a long steamy shower, a fistful of allergy medicine and a phone off the hook.

They didn't mind, they told her and hoped to see her the next day. Or the next. No big hurry. She hadn't seemed particularly anxious to encounter them, anyway.

They had some trouble finding the old place after that and, true to her word, when they called the caretaker, they got an answering machine. Nothing in town looked the way Kate remembered it. Here and there a landmark stood out. The pizzeria on the corner downtown, where she and Vince had taken Gentry every Friday night, had morphed into a mega-chain coffee shop.

“I can't believe what they did to that cute little pizza place. Remember how they used to actually toss the dough in the air and cook it in these big ovens?” Kate asked Jo. “And how upstairs was a…Oh, what was it?”

“A Junior League thrift shop?”

“You remember it?”

“No, I'm looking at it.”

Kate followed her sister's line of vision. “Oh, great. Now I'm completely turned around.”

A few right turns trying to get Kate set, well,
right
accidentally put them in position to see the orange glowing lights of Billy J's Bait Shack Seafood Buffet. Then it was as if the whole landscape fell into place and they were on their way.

Being early fall, it was not yet fully dark, but the best light of the day had begun to fade when they found the rusted and bent street sign proclaiming Dream Away Bay Co.

The rest had fallen off but they'd gotten the gist and gotten to the cottage.

Jo was relieved.

Kate was exhausted.

After helping Kate out of the car, Jo went around to open the trunk, then paused. She raised her head like a gazelle at a watering hole listening for lions. She frowned. “I thought this place was closer to the beach.”

“It was. Thirty years ago when you were a kid.” Kate walked, well, limped, really, up the drive. She leaned the hip bone that wasn't connected to her nearly numb leg bone and soon-to-be-aching-again foot bone against the front fender, took a deep breath and let it out, slowly.

Seeing the old place again almost overwhelmed Kate. She hadn't expected to feel such a…connection to it. To have the memories flood over her so fast and form so fully realized.

She and Jo as children.

Playing.

Laughing.

Mom, happy.

Well, relaxed, if not undeniably happy.

The sun.

The sand.

Vince.

The image of a young man, with Paul Newman eyes and just a hint of Alfred E. Neuman around the gap-toothed grin, broad shouldered and bronzed from the sun formed in her mind. No matter how much time had passed, this place would always remind her of him. There was no running away from that.

“We don't have to stay here if you don't want to,” Jo called out.

“Oh, it's fine. It just needs a little TLC,” Kate returned. “And a well-aimed hammer and nails.”

The railings leaned decidedly to the left and inward. Their many missing spindles gave her the impression the cottage was greeting her with a toothy grin in need of a good dentist.

“Hammer and nails? Don't you mean a wrecking ball and an excavator?”

Kate laughed her sister off. “It's rustic.”

“Okay, I'll give you that.” Jo's lips twitched. “But can't you get tetanus from that much rust?”

“What did you expect?”

“Honestly, I don't know what I expected. But I sure hoped for something…” Her voice trailed off.

Kate didn't question her further. Instead she turned again to look at the facade of the old place.

The wicker flower box under the upstairs dormer window, which had always made the place look like something from a tropical watercolor painting, now hung higher on one side than the other. More dried twigs poked through the sides of it than shriveled, dead flowers swayed in the breeze on top. The dead petals scraped against the tarnished storm window screen with a sound that reminded Kate of a knife on burned toast.

The yard had bald patches. The bushes were overgrown. Bits of the scrollwork trim had broken off in the eaves. The trim around the porch was splintered. It all needed painting.

Over the sixteen years since she had last stood at this vantage point, the sidewalk had sunken down four inches in spots and jutted up in rocky slabs in others. Two big bins of trash, including a lot of brown and green bottles and crushed soda and beer cans, sat by the curb. A sign hung across the front door warning against stepping foot on the front porch and suggesting they go around back.

“It's a disaster,” Jo muttered.

“I think it's wonderful,” Kate murmured.

Try as she might to blame that response on her medication, she more honestly suspected she was seeing the sweet old cottage through the eyes of the five-year-old who had first come here full of anticipation. Not through the filter of the thirty-nine-year-old who had arrived today with a broken foot and a lifetime of broken expectations. Tears deluged her vision, and probably clouded her judgment as well, as she reached for her sister's hand and gave it a squeeze.

Jo didn't quite recoil but she did flinch slightly at Kate's unexpected touch. “Are you okay, Kate?”

She nodded, sniffled and seized the brass head of her cane with both hands. “Probably just a side effect of my pain medication.”

“So, you going to explain to me how this place used to be closer to the beach thirty years ago or will that cause a total meltdown?” Jo had already turned her attention in the direction of the beautiful beach that lay somewhere out there, beyond her ability to see it, bordering the Gulf of Mexico.

“Back then, before the area got so developed, before they built the bypass and widened the highway, come nightfall we could sit in the backyard and hear the waves crashing on the beach. It was the lullaby that sang us to sleep at night and the thrilling charge that woke us in the morning.”

She paused and listened.

No waves. No lullaby.

“It became a part of the way we thought of this place,” she went on. “It set the rhythm of our days and became inextricably intertwined with our memories.”

Kate took a deep breath but only smelled car exhaust, dust in the air and the slight hint of bleach. “So much so that being gone all these years we just sort of merged the ideal and the real. In my mind, when we first came to this place, it was on the ocean, and even though I can see that's not true, it still rings true for me today.”

Jo crinkled her nose first at Kate then at the house. “Are you a podiatrist or a poet?”

“Can't I be both?” Kate raised her head. The sound of highway traffic greeted her, the buzz of cars and trucks trundling over the roads that had only been narrow streets years earlier. “At least Dream Away Bay Court is still isolated and undeveloped.”

“You say that like it's a good thing.” Jo squinted at the bumpy lane they had come down to reach the cul-de-sac with only two houses in it.

“If someone wants privacy. If they want a retreat from the world to be alone with his or her thoughts. If you want to make a spot that's yours alone. This is just the place.” Kate tried to make it sound appealing even though Jo had to know that Kate, herself, found the very notion appalling.

“Privacy, sure. Except for having windows of the only other house around staring directly into yours.” Jo turned to face the smaller cottage.

Designed in the same style as theirs, it only had one story. Though, as a child, Kate had attributed the old place with plenty of stories of her own making. “Ahh, the
mystery
house.”

“The
what?
” Jo, who had popped up the tailgate of her Cruiser and had begun unloading suitcases, swung her head around so fast that even the hem of her blue-and-white sundress flounced in response. “This is the first I'm hearing of that. What mystery? Do not tell me something awful or untoward went on in that house and you never told me about it.”

Kate smiled slyly, enjoying the ability to reclaim the right of the big sister to spin tales and enchant her younger sister, who had long ago become disenchanted with everything from men to these kinds of whimsical memories.

Jo went up on tiptoe, or as on tiptoe as she could in her stylish but ridiculously impractical shoes. She twisted her head over her shoulder to whisper. “It looks deserted.”

“It always looked deserted.” Kate made her way over to Jo, her head ducked down as though creeping along, trying to stay low and out of sight. Even though she stuck out like a sore…foot with her clunking cane and clumsy cast. Still, she grinned and whispered in her best late-night, under-the-covers, scary-story voice, “That's why I called it the mystery house.”

“Nobody ever lived in it?”

“No one was ever home the weeks we were here.” Kate shook her head trying to recall sharing the quiet cul-de-sac with any other vacationers or locals. “But look at it. So neat and well kept. Someone must live there or rent it out sometime or it would be in as bad a shape as…”

Jo followed Kate's line of vision, putting her facing their own cottage again. She let out a slow, muted sigh.

“Didn't you ever go over there and…”

“And what? Snoop?”

“Investigate.” Jo raised her nose in the air, making her gorgeous blond curls shimmy over her squared, straight shoulders. “You never went over and rang the bell or knocked on the door to see if anyone was home?”

“Every year,” Kate confessed. “But no one was ever there.”

“Ever?”

“Nope. I mean, there was furniture from what I could see through the windows, you know, from standing on the porch.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It was as if whoever owned it packed up and left as soon as they heard our car come down the lane.”

“Like those photos in documentaries about ships at sea that are found with the table still set for the evening meal?”

“Well, maybe not quite that dramatic but the place looked like someone could come home at any minute and pick up their lives without much fuss or bother. The kitchen had all the appliances, fridge running and all.”

“You looked in the fridge?”

“I could hear it humming.”

“Standing outside?”

Kate ignored the loaded question. “And the place always had curtains and a window air-conditioning unit and a phone. Sometimes even a dish with hard candy in it on the coffee table and a new
TV Guide
by the armchair.”

“But that was just what you could see from the porch, right?”