The Barefoot Believers (15 page)

“Yeah. Billy J's.” Kate fell back against the cushions and sighed. “I was sort of hoping that whoever she sent over would come bearing a plate piled high with steaming, delicious seafood and sides hot off the buffet.”

“Stop.” Jo couldn't reach through the crutches to clutch her complaining stomach so she just leaned forward even more to show her suffering as she moaned, “You're killing me.”

“Then let's go.” Travis tugged a set of car keys from his pants pocket.

“Give me a chance to change my clothes,” Jo said before the keys could so much as jangle. “Kate, tell Travis what you want us to bring you.”

“Bring? Why can't I go with?” Kate asked.

Travis gave his keys a shake. “No reason we can't all go down there and fill up now.”

Jo could think of a reason. She didn't
want
them all to go. She wanted this chance to talk to Travis about selling the house, about whom he knew and—

“And then on the way back we can stop by the grocery store. You wouldn't mind that, would you, Vince?”

“That might put too much strain on Kate's foot,” Jo spoke up before Vince could. “She had surgery only ten days ago.”

“And you sprained your ankle just yesterday.” Kate scooted to the edge of the couch, ready to push herself up. “If you can do this, I can do this.”

“Maybe I can't do it,” Jo offered, grasping at anything to try to get her plan back on track.

“Don't worry.” Travis moved to her side. “I'll catch you if you fall.”

“You promise?” she whispered without meaning to.

“I promise,” he whispered right back, sounding very sure.

Jo wanted to be alone with Travis now more than ever.

Which was why she knew she could not let that happen. Business and romance simply did not mix. That was how she had gotten herself into this awful mess to begin with.

She could not risk adding insult to…irrationality, again. She had to stick with her original plan, even if it meant changing those plans at a moment's notice.

“Let's do it, then,” she said as she hurried to the back of the house so she could change into something a little less…slept in. “Let's all go to Billy J's together!”

A
steady stream of people had flowed in to the Bait Shack Seafood Buffet since the doors had opened at eleven.

In.

But not out again.

Every available space along the two rows of highly varnished picnic-style tables that filled the center of the huge dining room was full. Every booth by every plate-glass, fogged-over window that lined the walls, too. Every stool sitting haphazardly around what had once been a bar and now was officially called the “drink station,” where waitstaff grabbed sodas and specialty juice concoctions, was occupied.

There was a line at the buffet. A cluster of people waited for tables to come open—or to spot someone they knew well enough to squeeze in beside. A few folks who didn't have the patience for that had simply taken the chairs from the waiting-to-be-seated area and set themselves down wherever they could find a spot.

“Hey, put that chair back where you got it!” The infamous Billy J stabbed his finger, or what was left of it after an unfortunate fishing accident, at two of the buffet interlopers. “You tryin' to get them to come out here and close this place down?”

“If your bad cooking ain't made them do that yet, I doubt my sitting in this chair eating the stuff will,” one of the robust fellows called back before popping a hush puppy into his mouth then puffing out his already round cheeks.

“'Sides, you ol' coot, you the one al'ays sayin' you gonna close this place down anyways. Why you care if we hurries things along a bit?” the scruffy fellow next to him threw in.

“Now, I ain't foolin', folks. Listen up, here.” Billy J lifted both of his fleshy arms, which, coupled with the soft flab flapping under his chin, made him look a little like an old, proprietary pelican trying to scare scavenger crabs and gulls away from his catch.

He did it to draw attention to himself, of course. As if he needed to do anything to accomplish that.

Wherever he went, Billy J
commanded
attention. Bearded, wearing shirts roughly the size of and with the same subtle array of colors as a circus tent, and never without his white captain's hat with a parrot feather in the brim, he sort of naturally drew people's eyes. Children often mistook him for Santa Claus off on a tropical vacation. Adults often thought of him as some kind of mythical creature as well, they just never agreed on which one.

“I will close this place down,” he barked. “You just watch me.”

That was about the time everyone looked away.

See, they had heard this promise before.

“One more group of folks comes through that door before some of you overstuffed freeloaders leave, I won't have no choice.” He gave them all what people called the not-so-evil eye. Nothing about Billy J. Weatherby could be construed as anything but benevolent. And everyone knew it.

Moxie most of all. She sighed and laughed at his antics.

He caught her gaze and smiled back. Not the big, goofy grin he bestowed on strangers and old friends alike. No, this smile was for Moxie alone and came with a twinkle in his blue eyes and a twist of his lips that said without a sound,
There's my girl.

He often spoke about how the Lord had “rained down a double fistful of blessings” on him by bringing his Molly Christina into his undeserving life. And he never let her forget how much she meant to him.

Moxie smiled back at her dad, smiled then shook her head as if to let him know she didn't buy his claim about closing down any more than his customers did.

“Bam!” He slapped his meaty hands together as he made his way back toward the kitchen muttering—loudly. “Shut them doors and head off fishin' and leave y'all locked in here till Christmas.”

“It's a fire-code violation,” Moxie called to chair-sneaks. She jerked her thumb toward the place in the waiting area where they had taken the chairs, and the men grudgingly got up and relocated.

Someone called out to her, asking for more sweet tea.

A drawn-out creaking, rising then falling in pitch and loudness, made Moxie turn.

Yet another couple crowded in through the front doors.

In. But not out again.

Rain did that in Santa Sofia. Made people restless. Bored. Hungry.

“Hungry!” Moxie remembered her promise to get someone to go by the house to pick up a grocery list for the Cromwells and realized she hadn't followed up with Gentry to make sure he'd done it.

Surely he'd done it.

Moxie had explained that it was important. The women needed Gentry's help. And he was going to be in the area, anyway, helping Esperanza and the baby move in, right?

“Right?” The hardness she interjected into the single-syllable word struck her nerves like a hammer on a piano string. Gentry Merchant was a twenty-three-year-old man. Despite his father's insistence on treating him like a kid, he was a
man.
A man with a child to look after. Moxie had done the right thing in asking that man, okay, that
young
man, to do this small favor.

“Right?” she whispered.

He'd said he would.

No.

He'd listened to her lecture and then had said, “All right. All right.”

Did that actually constitute a bargain struck between them? Knowing him, he would find a way to argue that he hadn't committed to helping the Cromwells at all, but had merely conceded that he should be helping his wife and child move into the rental cottage on Dream Away Bay Court.

She thought about calling the Cromwells back but she couldn't hear a thing in here, even on a good day when the reception was strong. Besides, they had her number. If Gentry hadn't shown up yet to collect a grocery list for them and run their errands, surely they would have called her back.

She thought of all the years they had not bothered to call or inquire in any significant way about the cottage. Clearly, follow-up was not their forte. Moxie chewed at her lower lip.

She tried to get a glimpse of the clock on the shelf behind the cashier's stand. She had to squint to fully concentrate on the kitschy Kit Kat clock ticking happily away amid the confusion of seashells, strings of paper lanterns and pink-flamingo lights, rubber fish, crabs, lobsters and starfish tacked to the wall.

“After two,” she murmured as her gaze drifted downward to fix on the framed photo of herself as a baby.

A photo faded into shades of green, ruddy brown, violet and a sky bereft of blue, left stark white by the passage of time, it was the only memento of her life before Billy J and his wife had taken her in. She paused for a moment, as she always did when she became suddenly aware of the photo, to stare into the eyes of the woman holding her. Her aunt, or something like that. Her birth father hadn't given Billy J more details before he'd abandoned her.

“A relative.” Billy J had told her to settle for that, then had added, “A person who knows where you was and who you was and still hadn't come a-lookin' for you. Why get all-fired fired up about that kind of connection anyways?”

Usually after a bluster like that, he'd begin to cough. And cough. And say he needed to see a doctor.

The man loved her. He needed her. He could not tolerate the idea that anything would ever interfere with that.

So Moxie let it drop.

Okay, she stopped asking or talking about it.

But every now and then it caught her unawares and she had to stare. Were the woman's eyes really that green or was that a trick of the aging ink colors? Had she really once loved Moxie as much as it looked like in the photo? Then why hadn't the woman tried to find her?

Moxie had certainly tried to find her birth family, but to no avail. She had so little information, after all. No paperwork from before the Weatherbys had adopted her. No memories to help guide her. Her birth father, who had died in an accident as a long-haul trucker when Moxie was three or four, had left nothing for them to go on—except this picture, which they had found in the glove compartment of his old pickup truck.

She had often studied the background of the photo for some hint as to where it might have been taken. But it just looked like an ordinary driveway in Anytown, America.

She could thank the old picture for one thing, though—it had inspired her to buy and restore her vintage truck. Somehow, she felt it gave her some connection to her past.

“Here's a full pitcher, boss.” A young waiter pressed a plastic handle into her palm, ignoring the amber liquid the hasty action sent slopping everywhere.

Moxie shook the sweet tea from her hands and called after the kid as he retreated, “I am not the boss around here.”

A statement that was greeted with a lot of jeers and laughter.

“I'm not!” she insisted.

And she wasn't. She had no interest in running the Bait Shack Seafood Buffet, even if she had the skills to do it…blindfolded, or at least with a patch over one eye…and a wooden peg leg that made her spill as much tea when she hopped from table to table as she poured when she got there. Her skills didn't matter. This was her father's domain. Her father's dream.

Not hers.

Not that Moxie had a dream. She looked again toward the cash register and the picture.

“I don't want to run this place,” she said firmly again for anyone listening to hear.

She only worked here to help him out on days like today, when the rain brought people in like driftwood on the tide but didn't wash them out again.

Moxie pushed her way through the crowd, holding the pitcher of sweet tea almost above her head as she went.

“I hate the rain. Just hate it.” Billy J met her in the middle of the main dining room, pushing along an empty high chair as he strode toward her.

“Rain can't be that bad, Mr. Weatherby. It sure is good for your business,” the fresh-faced father who slid his baby into the seat joked as the old man abandoned the chair and pushed on past.

“Good for…?” A short cough cut him off. The old man's already ruddy cheeks puffed out and grew an even deeper shade of red.

“You've done it now.” Moxie tried to get to her father before he exploded. It wasn't the customers Moxie feared for, but her father and the effects his getting all worked up would have on his precarious health.

“You'd think that, wouldn't you? And at first it does seem that way when so many folks stop by meaning just to dry off and grab a quick feed.” Redder and redder. His eyes became dark and beady above his ballooning cheeks. He wasn't angry so much as on a roll—a roll that wasn't going to stop until it had flattened somebody! Another short cough, a deep breath, then he launched in again. “Then you look around and realize folks is hunkered down and settled in for the long haul.”

“Daddy, calm down,” she said, knowing she might as well tell it to the plastic hammerhead shark hanging just above them as to the hardheaded man in front of her.

“The lunch crowd becomes the dinner crowd.” Cough. “The dinner crowd stays through the night, gabbing and grabbing fourth and fifth helpings of food for which they's only paid once.” A flurry of coughs that quickly subsided.

“Daddy, it's an all-you-can-eat buffet, you have to expect this to happen from time to time.”

“Look at 'em.” He scowled. He coughed into his powerful fist, then raised his head and scolded, “Look at yourselves! All of you who tell yourselves you just come in outta the rain for a bite. Only bite that gets taken on days like these, gets taken is outta…” Cough, cough. “Outta…” More coughing before he rallied and said at last in one indignant huff, “…outta
my
profits.”

He paused and took a good long look around. He closed one eye and put his fist on his hip, his lip snarled up on one side like some grizzled old sea dog. “I think some of you are taking advantage of my sweet and gentle nature.”

The room greeted him with silence. For one second.

Two.

Then all at once people began to whistle, to stomp their feet, to laugh, clap and cheer. Yes, the whole lot of them had seen Billy J's rabid fit of temper for exactly what it was. The greatest performance they were likely to see this evening.

He snorted. Held back a cough, then waved the response away with one hand, part aw-shucks humility, part dismissive bravado.

“Why don't you go spread some of your sunny disposition around?” Moxie pressed the pitcher into his hand, tugged free the dish towel she had been wearing as an apron and threw it over his shoulder.

“The only sunny thing I want to spread around is the real thing. I hate the rain, I tell you.” He started to stalk off, then paused to stop and refill a few glasses at the nearest table.

Old habits, Moxie thought. He could complain all he wanted but deep down, the man loved what he did. He knew everyone in town. He probably even knew the Cromwell sisters.

“Daddy?”

“Give me a warm afternoon and a room full of people so rarin' to get out into the open air that they fill their plates once, good and full, but they don't go back because they want to get fed and…”