by Annie Jones
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 Gent
ry. 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.
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.
Chapter Four
“Are 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 positio
n 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?”