The Barefoot Believers

by Annie Jones

  “We need food.” Kate had matched the woman in volume but relied on small words in hopes that they would not be lost in the broken signal and the noise of the…sardines? “I have a broken foot. Can’t drive. My sister fell coming in last night and now she can’t drive, either.”

  “Oh, no! Not…front porch? Hey, put that fishing pole down and get back in that kitchen, mister!” That odd comment to someone on her end of the conversation came through loud and clear, of course, especially loud.

  “Hearing you go on about fishing and sardines, not to mention the sounds of the buffet, are not helping.” Kate had no clue how much of that got through.

  “Don’t start…closing this place up.”

  Kate sat up, even though it sent pain shooting through her leg to do so. “You’re closing Billy J’s?”

  “Huh? Oh. No. No, my…always threatens…when people…eat all they can eat.”

  “We don’t need all we can eat. We just need something to eat,” she assured the woman. “We’re really hungry here.”

  “Sit tight…know someone headed that way. He can…lunch…grocery list.”

  “Okay, we need milk and bread, and eggs, you know, the basics and…” That was when Kate realized she was talking to dead air. She considered calling back but decided to allow the caretaker to make that move, to allow her to get someplace where she could actually hear to take down the grocery list she had asked for. After a few minutes, when no call came back, Kate went back over the parts of the conversation and came to a conclusion. “I think she’s going to send a man over with lunch from Billy J’s.”

  Jo had spent the time while Kate had been on the phone fussing and fiddling with her hair and had it in a cute, if a bit finger-in-the-light-socket-esque hairdo that took years off her fresh, unmade-up face. “Did she take our order?”

  “No.”

  “Then how will she know what to send?”

  “It’s batter-fried fish, batter-fried shrimp, batter-fried bread, batter-fried corn on the cob, for all I know they batter and fry the sodas right in the can. So, what does it matter what they bring? It will all taste the same.”

  “Delicious.”

  Kate nodded her agreement. She had always loved the food at Billy J’s and it had done her heart good—in a way that only a place with the kind of food destined to give a body total cardiac failure can do—to see it still open for business. “And it will all make us feel full.”

  “Did she give us a time frame?”

  “No. But she mentioned lunch, so my guess is soon.” And with that, Kate laid her head back, shut her eyes and…

  “What shall we do while we wait?”

  “I don’t know.” She glanced around the room and suddenly she knew exactly what they could do, and exactly how much Jo would hate the very suggestion. “Whenever we got restless around the cottage when we were younger, Mom would make us tidy up the closet.”

  “Oooh. Great idea.”

  “Really?” Kate considered demanding Jo tell her why the sudden interest in dealing with decades of old junk, then thought better of it. Jo wouldn’t tell her a thing and if they started nitpicking again, what would that accomplish? “Okay, then let’s see if we can—”

  Before Kate could finish her sentence, Jo had jumped up to try to make her way to the closet a few feet across the room.

  “Be careful. You can’t go hopping around like that yet.”

  Jo’s eyes practically glinted with bravado. “Is that a challenge?”

  “That’s sound medical advice!”

  “Same thing to me.” And off she went.

  Kate pushed herself up and followed.

  It was a small space under the narrow, enclosed stairway paneled with knotty pine that had aged into rich shades of honey-yellow and reddish-brown. Every personal effect their family had left behind at the cottage over the years seemed crammed into the tiny space. It smelled of mustiness and mothballs.

  “Do they even make mothballs anymore?” Jo asked.

  “If they do, they don’t look like these.” Kate frowned at the small white marble-sized balls strewn all over the floor. “Which only shows how long it has been since anyone has dealt with this storage problem.”

  “Or on the bright side, lets us know no one has messed with our belongings all these years.”

  “Jo! I never figured you for a bright-side kind of girl.” Kate smiled at her sister.

  Her sister returned that smile with a sly one of her own as she whipped something out from behind a three-foot-high tower of boxed board games and jigsaw puzzles. “You also never figured me for a world champion Wa Hoo player, but I proved you wrong about that a time or two.”

  “Wa Hoo,” Kate whispered the name painted in squiggly letters over the old handmade game board. Their mother had bought the game and the bag of marbles for playing pieces from a roadside craftsman when they’d been quite young. They had spent hours playing it. So many hours that Dodie had often joked it was the only way she knew to get Kate to sit still.

  “I’d forgotten all about that.”

  In turn, Kate had played it with Vince and his son, Gentry.

  Jo handed her the board.

  Kate trailed her fingers over the indentations, remembering the times spent laughing and chatting at the kitchen table. Of how full of himself Gentry had acted when he had beaten his father. He had always beaten his father.

  Even as a young kid, he had told Kate he knew his dad was letting him win. Kate had tried to make that seem like a good thing, to point out how much Vince loved his son and wanted him to succeed.

  Gentry had grudgingly agreed with her explanation then had rushed to add “I like it better when you and I play. Because then when I win, I know I did it because I’m go-oo-od.”

  “When you win? Don’t you mean if you win?” she’d asked, waving the score pad in front of his adorable pug nose.

  He’d gone quiet. “Even if I don’t win, I like playing with you instead of Dad. He doesn’t get this but I don’t like winning all the time, not if it’s not real.”

  “Being real is important,” Kate had admitted.

  “Yeah. But so is just being there, you know, like where a kid knows you’re not going anywhere. That’s important, too.”

  “Yes, it sure is.”

  “My dad is like that.” Gentry had put the marbles in the leather pouch and set them in the center of the Wa Hoo board, looked up at her and asked, “And you, too, right? You’re not going to go anywhere. We’ll always be like this, like a family, right, Kate?”

  “Kate?”

  The sound of her sister’s voice jarred Kate back to the present. She caressed the game board one last time then set it away from herself and fixed her attention on Jo. “What did you say?”

  Jo began digging and pulling and scooting things around, seeming more intent on emptying the closet than on reviewing its contents. “I said that this is a great closet.”

  “Well, it’s all right. As closets go, I suppose.”

  Jo yanked free then clunked a metal file box into Kate’s lap without stopping to examine what she had just uncovered. “Are you kidding? People love deep, secure closets like this.”

  “People?” Kate looked up from the locked metal file box Jo had just discovered with the words Important Documents painted on it in what looked like nail polish. “What people?”

  “Oh, just, you know, people. Hey, what’s that?”

  “This?” Kate smiled mostly to herself, her fingers running over the still-shiny chrome handle of the box. “Just a wee bit of buried treasure.”

  “Treasure? It says Documents on it, or rather Documints.” Jo emphasized the pronunciation of a much younger Kate’s mistake.

  Kate hugged the box possessively. “Of course it does. Do you honestly think that if it said Kid’s Treasure that any adult would have rescued it from a blazing fire or even bothered to preserve it all these years?”

  “We had a fire here?”

  “No, but I was planning ah
ead in case we did.”

  Jo pressed her lips together but to her credit she did not chide Kate about that whole “born old, grown old” debate. Nor did she point out that even as a child Kate had been prepared to pick up and run at a moment’s notice.

  Kate shrugged. “I had an overly dramatic imagination as a kid.”

  “Which you’ve completely gotten over, oh she of the obsession with the so-called mystery house?”

  “I was just explaining my thinking when I wrote documents on the box where I kept my special keepsakes locked up.”

  “Ahh, keepsakes.” For a split second Jo looked almost gooey with sentiment before she rubbed her hands together and demanded, gleefully, “Let’s crack that baby open and see what’s inside.”

  Kate hugged the box closer still. “I have a key.”

  “Of course. You would. Do you have it in a safety deposit box somewhere in abandoned salt mines that have been converted into an underground storage facility? Or have you kept it on your key chain all these years so you’d always be perfectly prepared?”

  “It’s hidden from a certain younger sister who used to spy on me and get into my things when she thought I wasn’t looking.”

  “Hmm, I’ll keep an eye out for that kid.”

  “And for the key. I forgot where I put it years ago. Good chance it’s in here someplace.” She gestured toward the games, puzzles, toys, piles of old clothes, mismatched sandals and secondhand musical instruments to indicate all the work that lay ahead of them.

  “Great. You can look for it later, after I beat you a few dozen times at Wa Hoo.”

  “Jo, we can’t play a game now. We still have a lot of work to do.”

  “Work? This?” Jo snatched up the leather sack filled with marbles. With the handmade board under her arm, she put her back to the chaos that had come out of the closet. “What’s the rush? We can pack all that stuff up and get it out of here tomorrow.”

  “Pack? Get it out of here?” Kate struggled to stand without letting go of her treasure box in the process. “Who said anything about—”

  “I call greensies!”

  Greensies. Kate pursed her lips and blinked to keep at bay the tears that one silly word brought to her eyes. Their dad had always picked green in any game they’d played. Kate doubted that Jo even remembered that. “Okay, you can be greensies. For all the good it will do you, because I am in no mood to show you any mercy.”

  Jo offered just enough of a smile to show that she didn’t believe her sister for one moment.

  More than an hour later, after Kate and Jo had each won an equal amount of games and neither wanted to risk breaking the tie, Kate laid her head back on the couch and tried to make the most of their wait.

  “Ka-aa-te?”

  “Shhh.”

  “But, Kate, I’m bored.”

  “Be still.”

  “I don’t really have much choice.”

  Kate put her finger to her lips.

  “And I’m hungry.”

  “I thought you were bored.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  At that, Kate opened one eye to peer at her sister. Jo slumped against the side of the plaid couch with her legs covered by an old floral bedspread. With her short, choppy hair all awry and the bag of Wa Hoo marbles in her lap, she looked all of six years old.

  That got to Kate.

  “Okay. One minute.” She shut her eyes and concluded softly, “Amen.”

  “You were praying?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What were you praying for?”

  Patience. Miraculous healing. Anything to get me through the rest of this rainy day, Kate could have said. But she kept those thoughts to herself. Jo was probably just as miserable as she was and, unlike Kate, Jo didn’t have any prescription medication to take the edge off her physical discomfort.

  And she was hungry.

  And bored.

  Kate exhaled. “You know, Jo, people don’t only pray for things. Sometimes people just pray about things.”

  “I…I know that.”

  “But you don’t put it into practice much?”

  “I…uh…” She might as well have just thrown up her hands and confessed, “You got me.” The look on her face and tension in her formerly sprawled-out body spoke volumes. As did the surliness of her tone when she snarled, “When did you get to be so spiritually enlightened?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t explain it but being here, with you, with all these memories…” She motioned toward the boxes of photos, papers and junk that they had hardly begun to look through, then to the old Wa Hoo board. “It just made me want to…”

  “Pray for help?”

  Kate smiled. “To say thank you.”

  “Thank you?” Jo tipped her head to one side then the other, as if she must physically turn the thought over and over in her mind. “Thank you. For…?”

  “You.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No. You. And Mom. And this place.”

  Jo hung her head.

  “You praying now?”

  “Me? What? No. No, I…” She wove her fingers together, cleared her throat, looked toward the front door. “Maybe you should have prayed that the guy bringing our lunch would show up soon.”

  “We really are at his mercy, whoever it might be.” Kate picked up her cell phone to check the time. “Which is why when I prayed I also asked for—”

  “Aha!” Jo took a little too much joy in hearing her sister had, indeed, asked for something.

  “—good neighbors,” Kate finished her thought.

  “You mean when you go back to Georgia and need help there?” Jo said it, more than asked it, seeming to want to lead Kate to confirm her take on things more than understand her sister’s actual thinking.

  “I mean here.” Kate tapped one finger into her open palm. “In Santa Sofia. In the house across the street. This is where we need help, Jo.”

  “But this place is only temporary…I mean, for us.”

  “Everything but this place has been temporary for us, Jo.” As Kate spoke the words, they took on a new and fuller meaning for her. She swallowed to push down the mix of sadness and regret welling up inside her. “We haven’t even been here twenty-four hours and already I should be thinking about when I can get back to my practice. Or if I will even have a practice to go to when I’ve recovered, especially if I have the second surgery.”

  “I’m looking at some major upheavals of my own back home. Things that might mean I won’t stay at my job. I may have to move out of my apartment.”

  “Again,” Kate added softly.

  “Again,” Jo echoed in agreement.

  “New jobs, new challenges, new living arrangements. Those only go to show that besides each other and Mom, Jo, this place—the cottage, the town—those have been the most consistent things in our lives.”

  “I…I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “I hadn’t much, either, until we got here, until we got stuck inside today.” Kate looked around them. “I got to imagining how it would be if Mom really did move down here.”

  “Here?” Jo jabbed her finger toward the faded carpet. “In this very cottage?”

  “Yes, of course here.” Kate didn’t know what else Jo had in mind and she didn’t care. They were only talking “if” right now, anyway. “If she did stay here, then I’d want her to have good neighbors. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I guess, knowing how easy it would be to feel stranded out here, then yes. Yes, I would.” Jo fluffed her hair then tucked the bedspread snugly around her legs. “And it wouldn’t hurt if they were gorgeous, single guys on the high side of thirty.”

  Kate feigned shock then laughed. “I’m thinking of Mom here, Jo.”

  “Oh, me, too!” Her eyes grew wide and twinkled with fun. “Mom would definitely want us to have neighbors like that!”

  “You’re probably right.” Her mother would love to see them both in love and married, and with kids of their own, K
ate knew. A tall order for a woman who had raised her girls to feel as if nothing were permanent, no one stuck around for long. “But maybe we should think about the best kind of neighbors for Mom.”

  “And if they were not so great neighbors?”

  Kate got up, grabbed her cane and headed toward the window that faced the mystery house. “That might go a long way toward influencing my vote on whether Mom moves down here or not.”

  “Really?” Jo nodded, her eyes narrowed.

  Kate could practically see her sister filing away that little tidbit. Clearly, Jo did not see any advantage in keeping the old place and just wanted to find a way to get Kate to come around to her way of thinking.

  “Really,” Kate said softly as she pulled back the white lace curtain and stared in the direction of the only other house on Dream Away Bay Court. She flattened her palm to the glass where rain droplets exploded then trickled downward in dozens of wandering paths.

  Neither of them spoke for a moment, then Jo groaned. “Why doesn’t it stop raining? Did it rain this much here when we were kids?”

  “Not that I recall. In my mind, I always picture this place as always sunny and warm.”

  “And closer to the ocean,” Jo reminded her.

  “Yeah.” Kate raised her head, wishing she could hear the sound of the waves now. “Funny, huh?”

  “Oh, yeah. Regular laugh riot. Apparently when we were kids this place had everything—location, looks, perpetual good weather. I wonder how it did it?”

  “Did what?”

  “Picked up its foundation and moved away from the beach and landed in some kind of urban rain forest.”

  “Without the forest.”

  “Or the urban, really. Have you noticed that now that we can’t hear the highway because of the rain, we don’t hear any traffic at all?”

  “Not even the guy supposedly sent out here to bring us some lunch.” Kate strained her neck to see as far down the bumpy road as possible. “I had my mouth all set for a big bite of…Truck!”

  “Truck? I suppose if they put enough batter on it and deep fried it long enough—”

  “Quit kidding around, Jo. There’s a red truck turning in to the cul-de-sac.” Kate spun around, nabbed her cane and took a few strides away from the window.