Barefoot Brides (13 page)

She froze, unable to argue with that assessment.

“You think I'm too harsh?” he asked.

“No.” She turned to face him. “I think I should have listened to your…
reminder
before I stretched my finances to the limit on my last house.”

“Jo…how can I help?”

“What?”

He moved to his desk, pulled open a drawer and took out his company checkbook. “How 'bout I make this month's mortgage payment?”

The moment the offer left his lips Jo felt lighter. The tightness in her chest eased. She dropped into the chair opposite the desk and sighed. It wasn't a long-term solution but it would buy her enough time and reduce her stress enough to allow her to do as Travis had advised—to take responsibility for her own actions.

“You…you'd do that?”

Not Kate, not her mother, not even Travis had offered Jo anything so concrete, so pragmatic so…helpful.

She looked up at the man in the white shirt and red tie sitting across from her with a black-and-gold pen poised over a blank check.

“But why, Mike?”

“Because I missed you?” he asked, a little too smoothly.

A few months ago that would have been enough for Jo. Today she shook her head. “You've watched me struggle with this house through nightmarish renovations, plummeting market values and personal crisis. Until this moment, you never offered to help before. Why now?”

He folded his hands on the open checkbook and looked her right in the eyes. “Because you always seemed to have a handle on everything, Jo. You made everything look so effortless, so…”

“Perfect,” she whispered.

“Yeah. Perfect.”

She clenched her teeth. She had spent so much of her life striving for just that. To do all the right things. To look just the right way. To be somebody worthy of being loved.

“Jo, until this very moment, as you put it, I never worried about you. I never thought I had to, you know, give you a second thought.”

“Nobody does.” Except…maybe…Travis.

“I never did because I always had so much confidence in you. I always knew you'd be all right because…you're
you.
”

Her whole life this was what she had wanted. For someone to see her and trust her. She had never imagined it would come from such an unlikely source.

“Thank you, Mike. You don't know what that means to me,” she said softly. “If you can help with that payment, I'll put all my energy into getting that house sold. You won't be disappointed in me.”

“I know I won't, Jo. I
know
I won't.”

K
ate flipped up the collar of her crisp pink-and-blue print shirt then ruffled her hand through her shaggy bangs to give them a carefree tousled look. She stepped back to check out her image in the full-length mirror inside the door of the closet under the stairs. She pursed her lips, frowned then smoothed down both her collar and her thick, sun-streaked brown hair.

“Goodness, child, you act as nervous as a teenager going out on her first babysitting job.” Dodie settled into the plaid couch in the front room of the cottage and propped her stockinged feet up on the beat-up old coffee table. “Want Mama to sit by the phone in case you need to call for backup?”

Dodie was just having a little fun, of course. Still, it did give Kate some measure of comfort knowing that while Jo was in Atlanta, Moxie was working at the Bait Shack and Gentry and Pera were in Miami, there would be a trusted voice of experience nearby she could call on if she got overwhelmed. Not overwhelmed by caring for Fabbie, but by her own feelings for Vince.

Vince.
Just standing here trying to decide what to wear to spend the evening with him reduced her to a tangle of twitchy nerves and iffy emotions. She fussed with her collar again, frustrated by the way it seemed to mimic her erratic emotions. Up. Down. Out of control.

She heaved a sigh and went back to working with the stiff fabric. “I
so
want this to go well, Mom. It will be the first time Vince and I have done anything even remotely domestic since the days when Gentry was a kid and we took him on outings.”

“You'll do fine. Now scoot.”

“If only I knew—”

“Uh-uh! No, ma'am. No ‘if onlys' allowed in this household!” Dodie held one finger up to cut Kate off sternly. “Nobody ever built a solid bond or a solid future on ‘if only.' You want to nurture a relationship with Vince Merchant, those are two words you have to strike from your vocabulary right now, Scat-Kat Katie.”

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.