The Barefoot Believers (9 page)

She led with her cane only to find it plunging into the mud where there should have been dirt, as if someone had left the water hose running for the better part of the day and soaked the ground. She slowed her already snail's pace to an awkward lurch-and-lunge motion.

“This isn't going to work,” she muttered. “Jo! Jo?”

Still no answer. What if she had run around back, tripped over a petrified log, pitched forward and been knocked unconscious by the western-most part of Kentucky? Kate chucked her cane to one side and did what she had to do—she hopped on her good foot faster and faster, calling out as she did, “Jo? Jo, I have to tell you something. Jo? Answer me. I have to tell you that—”

“What? What's so urgent? I almost had the back door jimmied open when I heard you—”

Wham!

The two of them collided.

Kate went careening into the side of the house. She whomped her head, her shoulder, her hip but somehow kept her foot protected from any impact.

Jo was not so fortunate.

“Why were you running toward me?” Kate demanded.

“Why were you
hopping
toward me?” Jo, sprawled out on the ground just inches away from having been impaled on a red metal birdhouse with See Rock City painted in white on the black roof, shouted back.

Kate swept her gaze over the “garden,” which had “grown” over the years to include not just rocks but now also strange and tacky souvenir statues and knickknacks from all over the southern states. She cringed, as much for her sister's pain as for the awfulness of the display. “I was trying to save you from getting hurt.”

“I hope you'll understand if I don't give you a big gushy thanks for the heads-up.” Jo pushed herself up on her scraped elbows. She didn't seem to even notice that her hair had suddenly become much longer on one side. It went positively lumpy along her scalp as she pushed the blond cascade back from her face and asked, “Are you okay?”

Kate slid her hand over her head, down her neck and then along her leg all the way to her cast. “Yeah. I think so.”

“Good.” Jo sat up and wound both of her delicate hands low on her calf. Her once-glittering shoe hung by one broken strap from her toes, battered, unbeaded and bedraggled. “Nothing hurt on me but my dignity. And my shoes.”

“And I'm guessing you're the most upset about your shoes,” Kate teased.

“Let's just say that with you as an older sister, I never got the chance to develop much of a false sense of pride, and leave it at that.”

Kate didn't want to leave it at that but given the circumstances felt she had no choice.

“But taste in shoes?” Jo pressed on. “You were never an impediment to me developing great taste in shoes. Even though I am sure you would have advised me not to buy these. In fact, I can just bet you are thinking right now that I shouldn't even bother to get them repaired because I don't have any business wearing them around this place.”

“Finally you've said something I can totally agree with.”

“What?”

Hand on the side of the house, Kate leaned down. “You are not going to be wearing those shoes again for quite a while.”

“Yes, but that's not because of your opinion of them, it's because they're broken.”

“No, actually, baby sister, it's because you have sprained your ankle, and badly, too.”

“What? No. It's just a little twisted.”

“No, Jo,
you
are just a little twisted,” Kate joked. “That ankle is sprained and my advice to you is to get inside, elevate it, ice it and don't try to put any weight on it for a couple days.”

“You mean?”

“Welcome to the one-footed, rest-and-recuperation, you-ain't-going-nowhere and better-mind-your-doctor club.”

“T
his is serious, Jo.”

“Oh, please. Maybe for an old lady like you this would be a serious setback but for your much younger sister?” Jo had pushed herself upward guarding her potentially injured ankle from bearing any weight.

“Much younger?” Kate challenged.

“You were born old, Kate.” Deep breath. She could do this. The alternative? To not only acknowledge that Kate was right but to depend on her for who knew how long.

Jo shuddered.

“I was
not
born old.” Kate extended her cane.

A peace offering? A way of taunting Jo to say “Here, you need this more than I do?” Or did she mean to prod her sister with it?

Kate honed her gaze on Jo, and concluded, “I grew old too fast.”

Peace, prod
and
taunt, Jo decided. As ever, Kate had found a way to do it all and do it with graceful efficiency. It made Jo want to go to great lengths to show her sister that she—Kate the correct—had gotten it all wrong.

So she did not hop her way around the old cottage. She did not hobble.

No, instead, she whisked off her battered shoes. She fluffed up her tattered weave. She straightened her dirt-covered dress. She held her head high, kept her mouth shut and she walked.

At least as long as Kate was watching.

The second she rounded the corner, Jo nearly collapsed against the side of the grungy old place. The paint was so old it turned to dust against her shoulder, leaving a grayish-white smudge. Ever the upbeat Realtor, she made a note to herself:
Original condition. Or maybe rustic charm.

Buoyed by that reminder of just why she had come all this way and of all the work that awaited her, she grabbed a stick she found in the yard and used it as a makeshift crutch. On the return trip, she had the luxury of propping her injured ankle on the back of the small rolling luggage carrier. Probably a risky choice given that she had to navigate that crazy rock and hee-haw gewgaw garden again because the front porch was definitely off-limits.

But she managed to wrangle their things inside without showing too much of her discomfort to Kate, who was waiting inside with a hankie full of cloudy ice, chipped free from a plastic container she'd found in the freezer. Despite Jo's protests, Kate got her to prop her foot up and applied the pitiful ice pack.

Too late to actually help the swelling much, all it succeeded in doing was numbing the pain a bit.

“How do you feel?” Kate asked.

“Like I'm sporting a foot-sicle,” Jo snapped back.

“I'll get you some aspirin. That should help.”

“Only if you bring them to me in a pair of fuzzy slippers you warmed in the oven.”

At that, Kate stopped. She did not face Jo. She simply looked around at their setting and her shoulders sank a little. “How did we get to be this way?”

“Mom ran over your foot and I tripped on Mom's rock garden.” Jo knew Kate meant “How did we get to be so stubborn, so driven, so competitive with each other?” but she answered as if she meant “How did we both get banged up like this?”

The other question? Each member of their family had mulled that over for years and Jo found contemplating it yet again quite pointless. What did it matter how they got this way, after all, if they never asked themselves the real question that could make all the difference. What can we do about it?

Jo didn't have the answer.

Kate must not either since the smarty-pants hadn't offered it again and again over the years for everyone to ooh and aah over.

Easier to deflect any and all questions with a joke, even a joke tinged with an underlying and almost unthinkable sliver of truth.

“How did we end up with our tootsies in trauma?” Jo tried to wiggle her toes. Stiffly, slowly, she managed and somehow that gave her the boost of confidence to say, “Mom's car. Mom's creative endeavor. I guess with us, what those psychologists say is true—it always goes back to the mother.”

Kate chuckled slightly and Jo knew her sister wasn't going to stick her toe any deeper into that quivering little pond of emotional quicksand.

Once they sold this old place, maybe it wouldn't matter, anyway.

Maybe this small deed, this tidying up and disposing of this last shard of their shattered past would finally grant them the one thing that could heal them at last. Closure.

That was the sweet fairy tale that Jo told herself to allow her mind to drift off to sleep that night. She wasn't here to merely solve her own problems, to make a desperate attempt to fix the looming financial mess she'd made with a couple of prideful business deals. By selling this house, she would finally get the real thing she had wanted for as long as she could remember. To finally be the hero.

Her.

“Not Kate.”

“What did you say?”

Jo startled to find her sister crouched beside the big, sagging brown-and-gold plaid couch where Jo had spent the night, unable to navigate the narrow stairway to the two small bedrooms on the second floor. A quick glance over at the tangle of sheets, quilt and bunched-up pillow on the overstuffed yellow floral couch that sat on the other side of the coffee table told Jo that Kate had bunked there for the night.

“I said, um, never mind.”

“Hmm.” Kate's tone left Jo with the impression she'd at least caught her own name in Jo's mumblings.

“By the way, thank you.”

“For what?”

“Watching over me last night.”

“I thought you might get to hurting in the middle of the night and I wanted to be close at hand.” Kate pushed back the covers from Jo's knee downward. “Or close at foot, as it were.”

“Ha-ha.” Jo intoned the universal notes for sarcastic humor. “Podiatrist humor. I'm sure it's funny. Somewhere.”

“It is, trust me.” Kate laid her chilly fingertips against the black-and-purple bulge that had once been Jo's slender—slender-
ish
—okay, less swollen and more attractive than a fat, overripe avocado—ankle bone and the top of her foot. “I'm a real knockout at our conventions.”

“Sure, but can you really count boring people into a stupor as a knockout?” Jo sucked air through her teeth at the gentle probing.

“Count it? I depend on it,” Kate countered just as smoothly as she rolled Jo's leg inward, then outward again to examine it from all angles. “Saves on anesthetic. Shall we give it a try now or are you ready to admit you've got a serious injury here?”

“Injury? Yes. Serious?” Jo glanced at her exposed ankle. It looked bad. Very bad. But it didn't hurt.
Much.
“What does that mean really? Do we have to go to the hospital?”

“No. I can take care of everything right here.
If
you promise to cooperate.”

Jo couldn't afford to go to the hospital. She'd taken the risk and cut out her health insurance a few months back, hoping to apply the sizable sum she paid being self-employed to the never-ending sinkhole of a budget on her last real-estate flip. So she had no choice, really, even though it scalded her right down to her very last stretch of self-respect to say, “All right. If it means I don't have to go to the hospital, I'll cooperate.”

“Good. I know I packed a first-aid kit in your trunk. Do you remember bringing it in last night?”

Jo shook her head. “I only brought the luggage that fit on the rack. Clothes, shoes, snacks, you know, the necessities.”

“You couldn't have left the shoes?” Kate shook her head.

Jo gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Hope springs eternal.”

“That's okay. I wouldn't mind getting outside for a few minutes. Stretching my good leg. Figuring out how to maneuver with this bum one.”

“Checking to see if there is any activity at the mystery house.”

Kate gave a sly smile but she did not deny Jo's accusation. “Do you need anything before I go?”

“A trip to the restroom.” Jo pushed her fingers back through her hair, and they stuck. “And a professional hairdresser.”

Kate winced.

Jo worked her hand free, making a mental note to get a comb, a mirror and maybe some scissors later, after she'd taken care of her other needs. “And breakfast.”

“I can help you to the bathroom.” Kate anchored her cane firmly on the old living-room carpet then crooked the elbow of her free arm to give Jo something substantial to grab on to. “Since I can't use the front door, I'm headed in that direction, anyway.”

Jo nodded and scooted forward on the couch. Holding her injured ankle out at an awkward but presumably safe angle, she grabbed the coffee table with one hand and her sister with the other, allowing Kate to help her to her feet, uh, foot.

“Okay, let's coordinate.” Kate wielded her cane then led with her intact foot. “Step.”

Knee bent, Jo rested the top of her toes on the cushion behind her and made a half wobbling, half skipping movement forward with her strong leg. “Step.”

“And…” Kate looked at her sister in horror. “Uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh!” Jo repeated dutifully. A half a second later, the reality of their situation sank in.

Whump.

Back they fell, both of them landing in the relative comfort of the couch but with enough jarring force to rattle them for a moment. Then the laughter began.

“Uh-oh?” Jo gave her sister a playful elbow to the ribs. “We're about to collapse into a pile and the only warning you can give me is ‘uh-oh'?”

Kate tapped the tip of her cane lightly against her cast. “What has anyone in this family ever done to make you think we're good at issuing warnings?”

“Point taken.” Jo exhaled. As her laughter subsided, the pain in her ankle intensified. She sat up, ready to try again. “Let's get this over with, right?”

“We can do this. No reason we shouldn't have learned from our mistake.”

What has anyone in this family ever done to make you think we're good at learning from our mistakes?
Jo considered paraphrasing and throwing Kate's own words back at her. Then Kate slipped her arm around Jo's shoulders and suddenly, she didn't feel like dredging up old hurts and grudges, at least not just then.

“Let's see, my cast is on my left foot.” Kate dragged her cane over the floor as if she were doing complex math computations in the carpet. “Your sprain in on your right…”

“Wouldn't it figure that we'd even get hurt in exact opposition to each other?” Jo gritted her teeth and used humor, such as she could muster, to try to stave off the growing pain.

“No, now, don't fret. Maybe we can use this to our advantage. You know, like running a three-legged race.”

“Yeah—without the
third
leg.” Jo swept her hand out to remind her sister that their bad legs were side by side, making it pretty hard for them to bear weight much less move them forward.

“Maybe if I walk backward?”

“Oh, that can't possibly end up with me, um,
end up
by doing a nose plant right into this, uh, vintage-chic carpet.” Jo laughed.

“Don't fight me on this.” Kate positioned herself directly before Jo and met her gaze. “For once don't fight me and I think we can actually work this out.”

Jo opened her mouth to make a joke. But a funny thing happened on her way to saying a funny thing. She looked into her sister's eyes, really looked. And suddenly she saw something in Kate she had never seen before and yet recognized as so familiar she could not refuse Kate's request.

Kate was afraid. And worried. And still, absolutely full of hope.

Jo took a deep breath and grabbed her sister's outstretched arms.

“Step.” Kate inched her good foot backward.

“Step.” They both moved their incapacitated limbs.

“Uh-oh!” they both exclaimed at the same time as Jo completed the first movement in their dance with a forward stride.

Using the “step, step, uh-oh” cadence, they made their way slowly through the front room where they had slept, through the wide arch that framed the open dining room and into the kitchen beyond. Thumping, bumping, bouncing off walls and giggling as they went.

“Don't make me laugh too hard, Kate, or I won't need to go back there anymore and you'll have to help me figure out how to change into some dry clothes.”

“Hold on, we only have to get across the kitchen floor now and you're home free.”

The bathroom, the real bathroom, the only full bath, complete with shower, sink, toilet and bathtub was ground-floor level…in the back of the house…through a heavy door just inches from the massive gas stove.

“Whose idea was it to put a bathroom right off the kitchen, do you suppose?” Jo stared into the large room with its sea-foam-green tile floors and walls and faded flamingo-pink fittings.