Barefoot Brides

by Annie Jones

  Kate cringed. She snapped her collar down and jerked it into place, muttering, “I’ll strike ‘if only’ from my vocabulary if you’ll strike ‘Scat-Kat’ from yours.”

  “Done.”

  Kate took her eyes off the image of her flustered reaction to face her mom, sitting on the ugly plaid couch surrounded by decades-old decor as if she was the queen of all she surveyed. Which she was.

  Kate managed a tentative smile. “Scat-Kat Kate? Gone? Never to be heard from your lips again?”

  Her mother made the classic “tick-a-lock” motion, pretended to turn a key to seal her lips.

  “Really?”

  “Really.” She raised her hand as though pinching that invisible lip key between her thumb and fingers and then proceeded to pantomime tossing it over her shoulder. To her credit, she did not even pretend to look where it landed.

  Kate made note of that because, well, Cromwell women did not just say what they meant, they meant a lot of stuff they did not say. They had a long history of taking some things too literally, taking some things too silently, and taking far too many things far too personally. If Dodie had just once glanced over her shoulder, even in jest, Kate would have taken that as a sign she planned to get that nonexistent key back just in case she ever wanted to take the horrid nickname out of the vault again.

  “You just plan to stop saying it?”

  “Better than a mere plan, I promise to stop saying it.”

  There it was. One of those said and unsaid deals, one of those things to be taken literally and meant personally. A plan? Everyone knew that was just a good intention which, as the saying went, “often goes astray.” But a promise?

  A promise from a mother to a daughter. From one longtime hurting and guardedly healing heart to another. From Dodie to Kate. Now that was a commitment.

  “Oh, Mom.” Kate went to the couch and wound her arms around her mother’s shoulders. She laid her cheek on top of her mom’s cotton candy–stiff but pliable bubble of pale hair. She drew in the smell of perfume barely masking the crisp scent of the astringent hand wash they were required to use at the hospital when visiting Billy J.

  Dodie rested her warm cheek on Kate’s forearm for a moment then gave her oldest daughter’s hand a pat. “Now off with you. Vince is waiting.”

  She said it like “your future is waiting.”

  Kate kissed her mother’s cheek then straightened and took a few hobbling steps back to the mirror. She gave herself one final glance, sighed, then headed for the door.

  She had finally closed the cover on the Scat-Kat Katie chapter of her life. Time to move on and see what happened next. Her answers, or the beginnings of answers, lay just across the street.

  Her pulse fluttered. She hurried for the door as fast as her cast and cane would let her, her damp palm gripped so tightly against the cold, brass cat’s head topper that squeaked every time she pushed off to take another step.

  Thump. Clunk. Squeak.

  Thump. Clunk. Squeak.

  Somehow she had thought the sound of rushing off to greet her future would have more dignity.

  “Have a lovely time. Remember who you are.”

  Remember who you are.

  It was Dodie’s way of saying “mind your manners,” “do your family proud,” “be God’s hands on earth.” It meant she should comport herself like a Christian. And a doctor. And a lady. A potentially high-profile member of a small close-knit community Christian lady doctor.

  Dodie had used the old Southern admonition on Kate many, many times before. She did not think Dodie ever had to use it on Jo, who always seemed to know exactly who she was and where she was going. Not like Kate. Not like good ol’ Scat-Kat Katie.

  She turned slowly to say good-night and instead heard herself asking, “Why?”

  “Because I raised you to be somebody!” Dodie shot back, clearly more than a little surprised to find herself having to justify what seemed to her just common sense.

  “It doesn’t matter who you raised me to be, the persona I became, at least for a good deal of my life, was Scat-Kat Katie. You acknowledged that. Rubbed my nose in it a little more than I thought you should, in fact. Why abandon it now and so readily?”

  “My gift to you.” Dodie held both hands out, palms up, the way a person might hold a bird with a newly mended wing about to set it free. “My way of letting you know how proud I am of the woman you’ve become, a woman who has stopped running away from life and started to embrace it.”

  “Oh, Mom.” Kate made a step toward her mother. All the years they had spent torn to pieces inside and trying to look whole on the outside, all the ways they had tried to patch the two realities together, all the time they had lost looking for Molly Christina and often seeing right past each other came rushing back to Kate. All that time she had blamed herself for not being a better sister and saving her kidnapped sister, maybe she should have been thinking about how she could have been a better daughter to her brokenhearted mother. “Mom, I know I haven’t always…I just want you to know…If I had it all to do again, I’d…”

  Dodie laughed in a peculiarly maternal way. Her lips hardly moved beyond a faint smile but her eyes shone with humor and love. “I know, sweetie.”

  “If only…”

  “Hey! None of that!” Dodie’s hand flew up in the universal stop right there sign.

  “I thought that just applied to me and Vince,” Kate said, though not very convincingly.

  Dodie shook her head. She wasn’t buying that.

  Kate smiled ruefully at her own slipup. She, who had worried her mother might try to eyeball an imaginary key to her lips, had been the first of the pair of them to revert back to the old habit she had agreed to quit.

  “Okay, but given our circumstances, it may be a lot harder for me to stop with the ‘if onlys’ than for you to drop that accursed nickname.”

  “Ahh.” Dodie blinked a few times as though processing that information, then took a quick breath and opened her mouth.

  “And, no, you may not substitute Blank Blank Katie for…that other name.”

  “Oh.” Her shoulders slumped but only for a second before she perked up. “Right. You’re absolutely right. I called you on a mere variation of if only. I shouldn’t expect leniency on a masked version of what I promised to stop calling you.”

  Kate smiled and nodded. She turned and had just reached for the doorknob again when—

  “It’s going to be very difficult, you know.”

  Kate turned just her head. “To stop calling me that?”

  “To keep yourself from going back to the oddly aching comfort of those words.” Dodie gazed off toward the closet under the stairs.

  It was in that closet where they had found the photos that had helped Moxie identify herself to them. They had been packed away there all these years, with the matching photo of Dodie and the missing baby hanging right on the wall of the Bait Shack Buffet. Summer after summer they had come here. Season after season Dodie had searched for her ex-husband and missing child, always sending back a reminder of each place she had looked to be placed in a memory garden just beside the back deck. So many summers. So many souvenirs. And Molly Christina had grown up right here where they could have found her so easily.

  “If only,” Dodie murmured again before she gave her head a shake and sat up straight, her whole demeanor charged with a kind of purposeful energy. “Don’t surrender to it. Take it from a woman whose whole life could have been reduced to those two words.”

  Kate tensed. The average outsider looking at their recently reunited family might think all those old issues would have evaporated. But a lifetime of wondering, of guilt, of sadness wasn’t so easily shaken.

  They all felt it. The residue of their past clung to every interaction. It colored the way they talked, the way they saw themselves and each other in much the same way the sense of emptiness and grief over having lost Molly Christina as a baby had. It was the kind of life experience that shaped and defined them as
people and as a family.

  “If only I had done this or known that, if only it had been different. You will never find contentment down that road, Katie. You will never make peace with the way things are. What might have been will always cut a chasm between you and moving forward.”

  Kate nodded.

  “You have to turn away from that temptation, Katie. Let it go. When you came to terms with having walked away from Vince and Gentry all those years ago, you said the verse from First Corinthians had guided you.”

  “‘When I was a child I thought like a child…’”

  “The person you were, the one you hold responsible for Molly Christina’s fate, the one who ran away from happiness, was a child compared to who you are today. Let that child go, Kate.”

  “Thank you, Mom,” Kate whispered through a shimmer of unshed tears.

  Though she had not said it outright, Kate heard in her mother’s words the forgiveness Kate had so long withheld from herself. From this moment on she would no longer worry that Dodie blamed Katie for not telling anyone sooner that her father had been in the house just before Molly Christina went missing.

  Dodie sniffled, then gave her daughter a wave and said, “Enough of that, now! Vince is waiting. Your whole new life is waiting!” She cleared her throat. “Go and claim it.”

  Kate blew her mother a kiss and headed out the door.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “No!” The dark-haired toddler craned her neck to turn her head away from the dollop of strained carrots that her grandfather offered her. Every muscle in her compact body stiffened. She spread her fingers and even her toes as her arms and legs flailed.

  “C’mon, Fabbie.” Vince followed the dodging and weaving of her head with the spoon. “Just one bite.”

  “Careful what you ask for there, Vince.” Kate bent down, kid level. “From the look in her eyes, I think she might just bite you.”

  “If she doesn’t, her mom might when she gets back.” Vince dropped the plastic spoon onto the food-caked tray of the child’s high chair. “I don’t think this child has actually swallowed more than a mouthful this whole evening.”

  She gave the man a gentle nudge to get him to relinquish his seat directly in front of Fabbie. “Here, let me try.”

  “Kate, I’ve been doing this since the kid went on solid foods.” His resistance shone through in everything from his posture to the tone of his voice but he rose from the chair, his arm extended to welcome her graciously to the task. “What makes you think you can do a better job with it?”

  Kate tensed. “There were three things wrong with what you just said. Shall I enumerate them?”

  He shook his head, smiled a big goofy grin at her and held out the spoon.

  Kate took it, snatched it away, really, then softened toward him and laughed.

  Vince laughed, too.

  It felt good to share this evening with him, and yet it didn’t entirely take the sting out of his reminder that she remained an interloper in his family.

  “I am a doctor, you know,” she couldn’t help throwing out as she moved past him toward the uncooperative baby seated in the bright, cheery kitchen.

  “You’re a podiatrist, Kate. That’s like being a specialist in the opposite end of the baby that’s giving me fits. Now if she had issues squishing strained carrot between her toes…”

  He reached out and lifted up one fat, pink baby foot spotted with globs of green and orange. “Then I could see where your expertise would come in handy.”

  “My expertise also includes emergency-room medicine.” She swatted his hand away from Fabbie’s ankle. She seated herself in front of the baby and bent her nose just inches from Fabbie’s face, as though they were longtime girlfriends commiserating about the difficulties of dealing with the men in their lives.

  Fabbie scooted closer, too, her small hands gripping the edge of the tray.

  “Tell your grandfather that I’ve quieted plenty of little ones in my life.” Kate lowered her voice in a tone of shared confidences. Then sputtered her lips, made a face and stuck her tongue out of the side of her mouth.

  Fabbie giggled.

  This wasn’t so hard. Kate pushed the bowl of baby food back in front of the child. “You just have to get their attention. Don’t you, Fabbie? Grown-ups aren’t the only ones who enjoy a little dinner theater. Are they?”

  Fabbie clapped.

  Kate pulled her shoulders up. “You have a long record of approaching child care by trying to control the outcome of every encounter, Vince. You never learned to pick your battles.”

  Fabbie shoved the bowl across the tray toward Kate.

  Kate met the child’s determined gaze with one of her own in which she tried to telegraph the message, I’m making a point here, kid, work with me.

  Another shove.

  The bowl wobbled.

  Vince snickered but said nothing.

  Kate plastered the sweetest smile she could muster on her face and cooed to the baby. “Okay. So you want the bowl at the edge of the tray. No problem.”

  Kate very calmly wriggled her chair over to clear herself from any potential drop zone for falling food or bowls. She then turned and looked at Vince. She could do this. She did not have to have been involved in this child’s life every day up until this point to make a connection with her. She could be a part of this family if he would only ask her to.

  “Sometimes you have to roll with the punches,” she told him, talking about far more than just poking food into an uncooperative child. “You start where you are and work with what you’ve been given.”

  She held up the spoon.

  He watched her intently.

  So intently she could not tear her gaze from his, or hide the double meaning in her words as she said, “It’s not so hard, really. You’d be surprised what people can do when they just—”

  Splat!

  A tiny handful of baby food hit Kate across her cheek and nose.

  For a moment, silence practically crackled in the air.

  Then Vince burst out laughing.

  Kate sat there for several seconds more before she got over the shock enough to make a sound. To Kate’s surprise, the sound she made was a warm, heartfelt peal of giggles.

  “I really don’t know that much about babies. I just thought…” She looked at the wriggling child then at him.

  She swept her gaze across the small kitchen and into the nearby front room, the small space that both defined and disclosed almost nothing about Vince. She looked at the school photos of Gentry as a child hanging on the wall and the snapshots of Fabbie stuck to the fridge. In a matter of seconds she took in the highlights of what Vince found important in life. She tried not to think too much about the fact that there was nothing of her to be found. She was the one sitting here helping him care for his grandchild after all.

  He loved her.

  She loved him.

  “I thought—how hard can this be?” she confessed.

  Vince opened his mouth to say something, cocked his head then frowned. “We’re not just talking about feeding Fabbie now, are we?”

  Kate took one last look around, put the spoon aside and stood. “No, we’re not.”

  “Yeah. I thought so.” Vince grabbed a dish towel and came to her. “You had that look.”

  “What look?” Kate reached out to take the towel from him.

  He yanked it away. “Hold still.”

  She wanted to protest that she could take care of herself. Then he placed his large hand gently along the side of her neck.

  As the warmth from his palm sank slowly into her tight muscles, Kate shut her eyes and sighed.

  The nubby fabric of the cloth moved in circles over her skin as he dabbed off the goop on her face. After a moment, he stepped back to inspect his handiwork.

  “Better?” she asked, lifting her tentative gaze to his.

  “Just a smudge more right…” He placed his thumb at the center of her lower lip.

  His touch made her s
hiver.

  “There. That’s the last of it.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked coyly.

  “Maybe I should take a closer look.” He leaned in.

  Whap. Splat. Clunk.

  This time the runny mix of green and orange mush came at them spoon and all. Fabbie didn’t have the oomph to throw the thing hard enough to reach their faces but hit Vince’s knuckles just as he was raising his hand to run his fingers through Kate’s hair. Which caused him to spread baby food from her temple to the back of her head.

  “Oh, Kate. I’m sorry.”

  “Yuck!” She thought she could simply brush the mess away but found herself inadvertently rubbing it deeper in. She withdrew her hand and stared at her gooey fingers. “When you said Fabbie would be our chaperone I never dreamed she’d take the role so seriously.”

  “She has done a great job of keeping us apart so far,” he admitted.

  “So many things have tried to keep us apart so far, Vince, Fabbie is going to have to come up with something a whole lot better than flinging a little food.”

  “I know a way to foil her scheme.” Vince lifted the baby from her seat. “We’ll see if a little time in a warm bathtub changes your tune.”

  “Actually it’s not her tune that needs changing.” Kate put her finger under her nose.

  Fabbie kicked both legs like a jumping frog and squealed.

  Vince kept his grip on the child even as he held her at arm’s length. “So I guess this is out of your area of expertise, Dr. Cromwell?”

  He was actually going to let her help! Sure, with the messiest and stinkiest duty of the evening. Not the kind of job you asked an outsider to do. She reached out. “Give me that baby.”

  Half an hour later everything was back to normal—the high chair, Fabbie, Kate’s hair and…

  Kate looked up from the crib where she had just put the sleepy child to see Vince staring at her.

  “What? Did I get soap all over my clothes? Powder on my cheek?” She swiped her palm down the side of her head. “Is there still strained carrot in my hair?”