Free Barefoot Girls by Tara McTiernan Page A

feet. No!
    Keeley reached over, picked up her glass, and stood up. She looked directly at Zo and in her eyes was a plea. Then she smiled. “All right! Let’s do it!”
    Relief swept through Zo. Thank you, God. Thank you, All that is Powerful.

“To love!” Zo said. She still believed in soul-mate love, even after everything, after all the disappointment and heartbreak. And their Hannah might get it, catch that shooting star.
    “To love!” the others agreed, clinking their glasses together loudly and drinking. They smiled at each other, grins that were wide and expectant, their youthful hopes and dreams for Hannah still in their hearts, as relentless as the waves upon the beach below.
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 4
     
    Keeley put down the book she was trying to read, a mystery from one of the many crowded built-in bookshelves that lined the walls of almost every room in Pam’s house, and lay back on the thick pillows plumped up behind her on the bed in Pam’s guest room. She couldn’t read novels; she could never focus that long on one thing. To have raised a daughter that not only read entire books in one sitting, but had even written one was incomprehensible to Keeley.
    After Zo and Amy left later that afternoon, Keeley stayed on at Pam’s. Pam had been more than thrilled to have Keeley for the night plus Ben was away in Atlantic City working on a deal for a new casino on the boardwalk. Keeley hated being in that huge apartment with its high ceilings and glossy surfaces without him. She had redecorated it three times already and it still didn’t feel like home. It was too perfect and everything in it was too valuable and museum-quality. She liked to throw things around, ding up the furniture, leave piles. The fancy apartment with its ritzy Upper East Side address strongly discouraged that, its eyebrows raised in disdain.
    Pam’s house felt more like home, more like the little cottage in Fairfield that she and Hannah had shared, more like Keeley’s house on Captain’s, the one before Ben, a bungalow that they’d moved into eventually after spending most of Hannah’s childhood summers staying in the cramped quarters of the Barefooter house. It was telling, their struggling along and making do while her mother still owned their old house on the island, a fairly spacious place with three bedrooms and a wrap-around porch. Instead, her mother rented it out to strangers up until her death, and even then she left it to her church, which sold it immediately. Her mother would have done anything to stop her daughter from staying there. Her mother never stayed there herself after Keeley’s father died, had never liked the island or island life. It was too rustic and sloppy-casual for her. She had hated the extra work the island required with its rainwater cisterns, its hand-pumped toilets you could only flush on a number two, and its seawater-damaged wood that required constant vigilance and basic carpentry skills.
    Worse, her personality was all wrong for the island. She was snobbish and shy where most islanders were outspoken and easy-going. She disapproved of drinking alcohol, in spite of her husband’s love of whiskey, and the island’s social life revolved around each day’s five o’clock cocktail hour. She was also a painfully uncoordinated skinny little woman who avoided sports on an island where a person’s value was based on their athletic ability, fishing acumen, and the ability to out-sail your neighbor. 
    Thank God her mother had never known about the Barefooter house. That had been between her father and herself, a gift of enough money to help her and her friends buy it and fix it up. Her father had even helped them find out who owned the title to the derelict shack that she and her friends had turned into a playhouse as girls and later grew to think of as their own. The owners had inherited it from an uncle and sold it with just a little cajoling and assurances that it was worth nothing, that they were