Free The Barefoot Believers by Annie Jones Page A

even though every second they stood there she could feel her medication waning. She took a deep breath and tipped her head toward the uneven walkway that led through the yard and around to the back. “Shall we?”
    â€œGive me a sec.” Jo pulled a tape measure out of her purse and extended the yellow metal strip from the chrome casing. She narrowed one eye, lifted her chin, lowered it, wagged her head side to side then let the metal slide back into place with a decisive whisk and clatter. “I remember it being bigger.”
    â€œWhat are you doing?” Kate scowled at her sister.
    â€œOh. This?” Jo blinked at the tool in her hand. “I, uh, force of habit, I guess.”
    â€œYou guess?” If Kate were to hazard a guess, she’d guess her sister was up to something.
    This whole adventure had her on edge. More than the usual edginess she applied to every situation of every minute of every day of her life. It had all come too easily, hadn’t it? This trip. This sudden interest in a place neither of them had seen in sixteen years. Nothing with Jo, nothing between the two of them or anyone throughout the patchwork of relationships that made up their family had ever come that easily.
    Complications. It was something the doctor had warned her to avoid. He’d meant with her bones knitting, range of motion in the joints and with the tissue healing, but Kate couldn’t help thinking it applied here as well.
    So she let the slightly strange action slide. If people ever decided to start calling her on every oddball thing she ever did, she’d…she’d feel as if her father had returned. Kate blinked and in that instant she remembered this cottage for the thing it had once been—a haven from her father’s scorn, frustration and, sometimes, rage.
    With that thought it was as if the whole scene before her transformed. The layers of chipped and peeling paint fell away. The small Victorian- ish style cottage stood in her mind fresh in buttery-yellow clapboard and brilliant white gingerbread scrollwork.
    â€œIs it a fairy house?” she had clasped her hands together and asked her mother the first time they had driven up.
    â€œIt’s a fairy-tale house,” her father had muttered.
    She had blinked, not understanding.
    â€œYour father just means that there are no such things as fairies. But it certainly does look like a house straight out of a storybook.”
    â€œDon’t put words in my mouth. I meant that it’s a fairy tale to think us buying this house down here will change anything, will make anything better.” He had laced his bitter grumblings with curses and name-calling. She wasn’t sure, but the gist of it all was that she and her mother had come to this house with their hearts filled with hope and anticipation, and he wanted no part of it.
    â€œYou don’t have to be here,” her mother had said in reply, her green eyes scrunched down into slits and her always impeccably made-up lips pursed. She looked as if she had just sucked a lemon, Kate remembered thinking.
    And her father had looked as if he was about to spit fire.
    â€œGood.” He had slammed the trunk of their car and dropped the suitcases on the drive. “I’ll be back to pick you up in two weeks.”
    Two weeks out of every year without her father. Then it had seemed the best of all worlds. Later, after he had gone from their lives forever and taken her younger sister with him, Kate had wondered if things would have been different if it hadn’t been so easy for him to leave that first time.
    Her gut twisted knowing she had not run to him, wrapped her arms around his legs and begged him not to go. If only…
    â€œIt’s awfully old-fashioned, isn’t it?” Jo tilted her head one way and then the other.
    Kate startled, then forced her attention to the place, which again looked like a poorly aging, once-grand lady. “I think it looks a