The Barefoot Believers by Annie Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

woman Moxie had made special arrangements with to rent out the second cottage on Dream Away Bay Court. At about half of what she usually charged.
    â€œEsperanza is not a single mom, Daddy. She has a husband and her baby has a father.” And that baby’s father had a father, a father who made it easy for the baby’s father to act like a big baby and not live up to his fatherly responsibilities. Moxie clenched her jaw to keep from blurting all that out, not that she was sure she could blurt all that out. “Anyway, on my end of the deal, you know I’m not just giving her a cut rate on the rent. She’s going to pay what she can in sweat equity.”
    â€œThat don’t sound proper for a young mother.”
    Moxie chuckled at her father’s apprehension. “Just means doing yard work, upkeep, maybe help with my other properties.”
    â€œYou know that girl is not going to do any of that. Ain’t that she’s a bad girl, but, you know, with the baby and all.”
    She knew what her father was driving at, and all she could do was gaze at first one cottage and then the other, then sit back in the truck seat and shut her eyes. “It will get done.”
    â€œWell, not by me it won’t, so I guess it’s not my worry.”
    Translation: It’s your worry, girl. I hope you know what you’re getting into.
    â€œI’ll leave you to this, then,” he finally said when she did not come back with a reply. “You know Billy J’s famous words to live by—When the going gets tough, Billy J…”
    â€œâ€¦goes fishing.” She spoke the last line with him, with a practiced cadence and proper emphasis to match him syllable for syllable. “Thanks a lot, Daddy.”
    Not that she had expected to get any work out of the old fellow. It would have been nice for the company while she tackled the job, though.
    â€œBeen the Weatherby family motto for generations. Who am I to break with tradition at this late stage of life?”
    â€œWho indeed?” she agreed with a puffy-eyed sniff and a soft laugh under her breath. Since she wasn’t a Weatherby, at least not by birth, the motto didn’t seem to apply to her. “So I guess I’ve run out of excuses. I’d better get after this mess and see what I can do before nightfall.”
    â€œSee that you do.” It came out sounding like an order.
    Moxie did not like taking orders. “We’ll see. It’s a big job, after all.”
    â€œThis job is only as big as you make it. Just do the basics and go,” her father reminded her as he hung up.
    She clicked the End button on her phone. “Do the basics and go?”
    Certainly her father knew her better than that. Nothing in the makeup of her personality or her history spoke of a person would could do the basics then go.
    Fifteen years ago, the year Moxie had turned sixteen, three momentous things had happened. That was not counting the getting her driver’s license thing, which she didn’t count because she’d been piloting boats and Jet Skis and zipping all over town via scooters long before she’d gotten a license to drive a car. And in Santa Sofia, who had anywhere to go, anyway, that having a car would mean so very much? So that wasn’t the big deal for her that some other kids might have thought it.
    No, when Moxie was sixteen her mom, the only mom she had ever known, ran off.
    She’d gotten up one day, made Moxie and Billy J a big breakfast, washed up the dishes and when she was done, she’d written a note, packed her bags and left. All the note said was “Isn’t there something better than this?”
    A few days later they had learned that her notion of “something better” had come in the form of a thirty-something college professor who had been coming down to Santa Sofia for spring break for many years. She’d sent divorce papers and started her life over.
    Billy J