Barefoot Brides (7 page)

M
oxie came sailing through the glass front door of the Urgent Care Clinic.

An eerie stillness radiated through the spotless green-and-white reception area amplified by the smell of disinfectant and the soft, incessant buzz and almost imperceptible flicker of the fluorescent lights overhead. The place rarely kept busy, except for late-night weekends and tourist season when things could get downright chaotic. But most of the time, like today, even the intake worker tended to wander off on personal errands, take long lunches or plug herself in to her MP3 player and tune out the world. Moxie didn't know where the rest of the staff was today, only that Dr. Lionel Lloyd had been sitting at the receptionist's desk twirling back and forth in the squeaky blue chair.

“Once burned. Twice shy. Isn't that how the saying goes?” she asked as she stopped directly in front of him.

“You've been burned?” Lionel came rushing around the desk toward her, his disheveled lab coat flapping.

“No. No, not literally burned. Metaphorically.” Out of sheer force of habit she met him not with a sweet kiss but with a quick visual once-over.

The man had never learned to make himself presentable and often went off to work looking more like an unambitious mad scientist than a serious medical professional. She reached out to straighten his collar. When she tugged on it from one side, the sleeve on that side jerked up. When she tried to pull the lapels together, the collar bunched up again. She frowned.

“What's wrong?”

You're a grown man. Everyone in town has us on the path to matrimony and yet every time I see you I can't help but think of you more as some kind of fixer-upper than as my home sweet home. That's what's wrong.
Moxie twisted her mouth to one side and looked him over again and said merely, “I'm not sure.”

He slid his glasses off and cleaned the lenses with his hastily tied tie as he asked, “You've been metaphorically burned but you're not sure what's wrong?”

“Hmm?” She looked him in the eye at last. She'd been in the clinic for five minutes and this was the first time she'd looked into the eyes of the man she supposedly loved. And all she could think was…

When she had looked into Lionel's eyes, her mind had instantly flashed to yesterday's encounter with R. Hunt Diamante.

She stiffened. “Nothing's wrong.”

“But you said—”

“I'm just mad at my sister, that's all.” That wasn't all.

“Your
sister.
I still can't get used to you saying that.”

“Welcome to the club.” She rubbed her temple, but that didn't ease the tension tightening like a band around her head. She wanted to lay the blame for her discomfort on her sisters and newly found mother, but in truth they were just one more brick in the wall Moxie felt rising up around her, closing her in.

Jo, Kate, Dodie, the infamous and fatherly Billy J, even Lionel, all added to the sense that she was quickly losing the independence she had asserted over her own life as a teenager. “Ever since my foster mom left Dad and me, I always felt a certain amount of pride in knowing I could take care of myself.”

He slid his glasses back on and peered at her. “Dad?”

She didn't know if her remark confused or intrigued him.

Intrigued, she decided, though the way the man couldn't seem to even manage to roll the sleeves up on his lab coat presented a strong case for confused. He had a point, either way, because up until recently she usually referred to her foster father as Billy J when talking about him to other people, especially around Santa Sofia where that's how absolutely everybody knew him. But now it seemed more important to identify him in the way she felt about it. Now that her whole story had unfolded about her birth father having taken her and eventually given her away and with the arrival of…

“And now I have
these people,
” she went on as she attacked his uneven sleeve situation.

“Your sisters.”

“Yes. I have these
sisters.
” She unrolled the right sleeve of his wonky lab coat and began turning it up, trying to keep the fabric from bunching. “
And
a mother that I never even knew about. But they knew about me, you see?”

“I suppose so.”

As she spoke her emotions got the better of her and with every word she uttered the sleeve got higher and more crumpled. “And so they have all these expectations, they want me to step into this…this…”

“Role?”

Moxie had been thinking
trap
or perhaps
strait-jacket.
But for this discussion's purposes…

“Okay, role. The role of Molly Christina, baby sister. The little lost lamb who's been found again and should be grateful to be back in the fold again.” She moved the left sleeve and tackled it with the same fervor as the right one, propelled by her escalating emotions. “Except I don't want to be in the fold. I want to be free.”

“Moxie!” He shook his arm to free himself of her nearly manic coat-sleeve-rolling. In seconds he had shaken the fabric loose and began trying to no avail to smooth it out as he said, “What does all that have to do with being burned?”

“Jo asked me to write something for the paper in response to the article about ‘our' family.” She made quote marks in the air.

He looked at her blankly.

“I wouldn't mind that, of course, but yesterday the whole family—” more quote marks with crooked fingers “—had to get together to read the original article together.”

“All of you?”

“All of us reading one lone newspaper at the same time in Dodie, Jo and Kate's kitchen. A bit too much togetherness in that, if you ask me. Like we couldn't all just read it on our own then maybe make some phone calls to talk it over?”

“Hardly seems like enough to get this worked up over.”

“It wouldn't be, I suppose, except Jo asked me to come to the beach to help her start a group there.”

“What's that got to do with the newspaper article and her asking you to write something else?”

“My point exactly.” She stabbed her finger at him.

“She didn't
start
anything.”

Moxie replayed the frustrating encounter in her head leading her inevitably to another encounter she had had shortly after that.
R. Hunt Diamante.
She clenched her jaw. “On second thought, maybe she did.”

“Did what?”

“Start something.” She gave the man a “please try to keep up” pat on the arm and dived headlong back into voicing her theory. “Because in the end she excused all of her wishy-washiness about starting a group, not starting a group, whatever, by making this big, emphatic announcement saying that she wasn't going to play it safe.”

“Play
what
safe?”

“I don't know, really.” She only knew how her sister's emphasis on the idea had affected her and how that eventually led to her embarrassing herself in front of the new newspaper editor.

That's what she was really mad about. Not about her sister's total disregard for her time, but for the way Jo or Kate or Dodie could get her worked up into such an emotional state that she made a fool of herself.

“I'm still lost, Moxie. Where does the twice shy part come in?”

She bit her lower lip to keep herself from furthering her humiliation by repeating the tale of the overwrought maiden in distress mistaking the town's newest citizen for Road Rage Pharaoh.

“I'm just saying I'm stressing a little here, Lionel, and I wanted a little…” She turned to smile at him, squinted, then sighed. “Lionel, you have on Kate's lab coat.”

“Do I?” He looked at the name tag and laughed. “I'm not used to having another one hanging on my hook. The residents usually bring their own.”

“Are you two still sharing an office?”

“For now.” He slid off Kate's lab coat then hung it on a row of hooks attached to the back of the intake office door. “What with her only here part-time.”

“Only here when she feels like it,” Moxie corrected. While she had found much to admire and even love about her oldest sister, Moxie couldn't help noticing a pattern among the Cromwell sisters. “Don't let her boss you around. She has a dominant personality and doesn't hesitate to tell people what she wants from them.”

“Are you giving me advice or talking about your own, shall we say,
burning
issues?” He gave her a wry yet knowing smile.

“Got me,” she confessed. “But still…”

He shrugged into his own coat.

She stepped forward and looped his stethoscope around his neck, straightened his name tag and stepped back to admire her handiwork. “I just want you to look out for yourself.”

“Isn't that what I have you for, Moxie?”

She studied the title, Lionel Lloyd, M.D., and sighed. “Doesn't really seem like enough, does it?”

“What doesn't?”

“Me looking out for you.” She finally said what had been on her mind for quite some time now. “It doesn't really seem like enough to build a marriage on.”

“Doesn't it?” Everything from his tone to the distant look in his eyes suggested he was asking himself this and not her.

“I think you know the answer to that, Li.” Speaking softly, she prodded him to consider it all a moment.

He did. Casting his gaze away, he stared out the window for several long moments before finally looking her in the eyes again. He exhaled, making his shoulders slope forward, and tilted his head to one side. “Moxie, are you breaking up with me?”

“I think I am.” Shouldn't she feel sadder about that? Or sad at all?

Moxie took only a few seconds to marvel at that and to try to distinguish just what emotions she was feeling. When she couldn't instantly pinpoint them, she figured they could wait and she turned her attention to Lionel. “I didn't come here with that in mind. It just sort of came around to that conclusion.”

He nodded. “It's
been
coming around to that conclusion for a while now. Neither of us just said it out loud.”

“I guess the stress and pressure of dealing with my new situation has sort of made me feel the need to…” How could she put this considerately?

“Create a little more space in your life?”

Not very considerate but a good way of putting it. “You don't seem all that upset by this,” she noted.

“Hey, just because I'm easily distracted doesn't mean I'm easily fooled.” He tugged at the lapels of his coat. “I've pushed for us to make our engagement official for a long time now and you've kept putting me off. I knew the chances of us making the big leap were pretty slim.”

She nodded awkwardly, trying to think what they might have left unsaid, trying to come up with a gracious way to say goodbye and get out.

Finally, Lionel cleared his throat, folded his hands together behind his back and asked, “So. How long do you think we should, uh, um, mourn?”

“Mourn?” It didn't seem like the right term.

“We did date for a long time,” he justified.

“Hmm. True.” She almost blurted out, “But my heart wasn't really in it for a while now,” but caught herself. If she said that much, she might say
too
much. Not that she had anything to hide, no potential new love waiting in the wings. “Hey!” She jerked her head up. “Why do you want to know about the proper ‘mourning' period for our relationship? That's the kind of thing people say when they are trying to decide how long to wait before they jump into a new relationship.”

“Just, um…”

“There's somebody you want to ask out, isn't there?”

“I didn't, honest, Moxie. But since you broke up with me, well, I can think of someone.”

“Someone I know?” She had no right to be so nosy. Or so bossy, making that kind of demand. She supposed if he confronted her about that, she could rightly call it a Cromwell family trait.

“I don't think you know her. You might. Possibly you do.”

“Possibly?” That meant
probably.
She told herself it was her pride more than her feelings that were hurt by this news. “I guess the only way to know for sure is for you to tell me who she is.”

“Just one of the new residents taking shifts here at the clinic recently.”

“A resident? That works here?” Moxie could hardly believe her ears.

“Nothing's happened, Moxie. I don't even know if she would consider going out with me.”

“And if she does, then what? You two get involved and decide you don't need Kate around here anymore and squeeze her out completely?”