33 The Return of Bowie Bravo (3 page)

Redemption,
Bowie thought as he coaxed Glory up the stairs to her bedroom. That was pretty much what he’d come back to his hometown to get.

He wanted to know his son and to try, at least a little, to be an actual father, the kind he’d sure never had. To maybe make peace with Glory. And to help her however he could, with Johnny, with the new baby, with the damn hardware store she’d inherited from Matteo Rossi, if it came to that. He’d had this idea he’d do whatever was needed to make up for all the years he hadn’t been there when his son and his son’s mother needed him.

He hadn’t gotten off to such a great start, he had to admit. She’d started out mad at him and then gotten madder.

And then, all of a sudden, she was screaming and clutching her big stomach. She was having her baby. Now. Today.

Way to go, Bowie.
He showed up, and instantly Glory went into labor. The doctor, the nurse and her whole family turned out to be unavailable. It was too dangerous to try driving to the hospital. Cell phones didn’t work and the landline was dead.

It was all his fault, for showing up when he probably should have just stayed away. For pissing her off so bad that she started having contractions.

Redemption at this point didn’t seem all that possible. In fact, it seemed like a ridiculous thing for him to have imagined he wanted, a silly crock of crap.

Right now, redemption didn’t matter in the least. Glory was having her baby. And if anything happened to her or the child, well, he knew damn well whose fault
that
would be.

Halfway up the stairs, she had another contraction. She leaned over the railing, holding on to it with one hand and him with the other. She had quite a grip on her for a small woman. She gritted her teeth and yowled. And she swore. A long, harsh stream of amazingly bad words.

“Time?” she demanded when she stopped swearing. She blew a hank of sweaty brown hair out of her big brandy-colored eyes and looked at him like she dared him to answer that question.

But he was ready. He had the watch and he’d actually remembered to glance at the second hand when that one started. He told her—both the length of the contraction and the time between it and the one before it. And then he pulled the paper and pencil from his pocket and wrote everything down.

Once that was dealt with, he wrapped his arm around her again and coaxed her the rest of the way up the stairs.

The master bedroom was at the front of the house, big, with bay windows the same as in the family room below it. It had a separate sitting area, its own bath and a walk-in closet. All so damn tasteful, wallpapered in blue- and-white stripes, with sheer curtains and antique furniture that had probably been in the Rossi family—in that very house—for generations. He thought of Glory and Matteo sharing the big four-poster mahogany bed and then decided
not
to think about that.

She’d been happy with him, that was what mattered. He’d made her happy and he’d been good to Johnny. And he’d left her well set up when that sudden rock slide hit his car last summer and rolled him right off the road into the river gorge way below.

“There are going to be fluids,” Glory said.

He didn’t know whether to laugh—or run down the stairs and out the front door and never again let himself even consider coming back to the Flat and trying to make things right. “Good to know.”

“We need a sheet of something plastic to protect the mattress.”

“A shower curtain?”

“Good. The curtain liner in Johnny’s bathroom is plastic.” She pointed. “It’s across the hall.”

He ran in there and started ripping the inner curtain liner off the hooks, aware in a distant sort of way of the clothes hamper by the door with the leg of a pair of boy’s jeans hanging out of it, of the bright plastic toys in the corner bin, of the jungle mural on the wall across from the old-fashioned claw-foot tub.

The task should have been simple, but the curtain hooks didn’t seem to want to let go.

“Bowie?” Glory called from across the landing.

“I’m coming!” After forever, he had the damn thing free. He dragged it out of the bathroom and across the hall.

“About time,” said Glory. She was kneeling in the sitting area, her head on a chair, a hand under the giant curve of her belly. “I was starting to wonder if you’d decided to have a shower while you were in there.…”

“Sorry, I…”

She put up a hand. He knew from her expression that another one was starting. He dropped the curtain liner, checked the time on the watch and went to kneel beside her.

One hour later, the phone was still out and the snow was still coming down. No one had come to their rescue—not Brett and Angie, not Rose, not Chastity. Bowie had already volunteered to go down the block knocking on doors to see if anyone was around who might be able to help.

Glory had grabbed his hand. “If you leave right now, I will curse you until the day you die.”

So he’d stayed. He’d found the place in one of her pregnancy books that told what to do in an emergency delivery.

He’d followed the instructions to the letter, stripping the bed and covering it with the plastic, and then covering the plastic with an old sheet. Between contractions, he’d coaxed Glory into the bathroom for a quick shower and then had her put on a T-shirt with nothing on under it.

She hadn’t put up any argument about being pretty much naked in front of him. It wasn’t like that, not in the least. It was just about doing the job of getting her baby born. Getting through it with both her and the baby safe and well.

He’d washed his hands thoroughly. And more than once, too.

He had two stacks of towels ready and another of clean, ironed receiving blankets from the baby’s room. And ice chips. Between contractions, he’d bolted downstairs to the kitchen and gotten them for her, like the book said, so she could keep hydrated.

Every contraction had been timed and recorded—just in case a miracle happened and Brett showed up before the actual delivery and wanted the numbers on how far her labor had progressed. The contractions kept getting longer and closer together. And while they were happening, Bowie spoke soothingly to her, just like the book said. He comforted her and reassured her, per the instructions.

She continued to swear a blue streak and scream like it was the end of the world. She also clutched his hand so hard that she almost cut off the circulation to his fingers.

Now and then, when she wasn’t screaming, when things settled down for a minute or two and Glory closed her eyes and seemed to be dozing, he thought of how he should have been there like this for her and for Johnny, when Johnny came. He thought about how much he’d missed, how many ways he’d gotten it all wrong.

And then he thought about Wily Dunn. He’d lost Wily only two months ago. The old man had died nice and peaceful in his sleep on the day after Thanksgiving. But if Wily was still around, Bowie knew what he would say about now.
That is water under a very big bridge. Let it flow on by, son. ’Cause there sure ain’t no bucket big enough to catch it.

“Bowie?” Glory squeezed his hand. “Another one. Starting now…”

He checked the watch on his wrist and then she was screaming and he stopped thinking about all that he’d done wrong—stopped thinking altogether. He said soft, soothing things and told her to take quick, shallow breaths and to go with it. Just go with it and keep on breathing.

An hour and fifteen minutes after he’d gotten her upstairs, she was all the way down at the end of the bed, her head and shoulders supported by a pile of pillows, her feet on two chairs, knees wide. Bowie knelt on the floor between them. It was the last place he’d ever expected to be on the day he returned to New Bethlehem Flat.

The top of the baby’s head appeared. Bowie said what the book had told him to say. “Pant, don’t push. Easy, easy…” Glory moaned and panted. She seemed pretty focused now, and she wasn’t even screaming. She did mutter a string of bad words, though, as she blew out quick, short breaths and moaned and swung her head to get the sweaty hair out of her eyes.

He used his hands—washed again a few minutes before—to apply gentle pressure as the head emerged. The goal, the book said, was to keep the head from popping out suddenly. The faster, the better, Bowie thought. But, hey. He followed the instructions and told himself to be grateful that so far, everything was going pretty much the way the book said, which he took to mean that everything was going okay.

The head slid free. It was all scrunched up and covered in sticky white stuff. The tiny, distorted mouth opened. But no sound came.

He reassured Glory. “Good, good,” he said. “Really good.”

“What does that mean?” she demanded furiously. “
Good, good.
Hello? That could mean anything.”

He glanced up into her sweat-shiny face. “It means that so far, we’re doing fine.” And then he was back to business again. Gently, he stroked the sides of the tiny nose and downward toward the neck. And then he went the other way, upward from under the chin, to expel mucus and amniotic fluid from the nose and the mouth. It worked. Slimy, gooey stuff came out.

“What’s happening?” Glory moaned, straining to see. “Is the baby…”

“Fine. It’s fine. Shh, now. Shh…”

“Don’t you shush me, Bowie Bravo.”

“Shh…” Next, as gently as he could, he took the baby’s sticky head in his two hands. “Okay, Glory. Now. Push!” She stopped griping at him and started grunting and bearing down and he pressed the baby’s head very carefully downward at the same time.

And it happened. Just like in the book. One shoulder slid out.

After that, it was all so quick that he didn’t have time to do what the book said. Nature did it for him. The other shoulder slid out. And then the rest of the tiny body came sliding fast in a rush of fluid, so fast he barely had time to catch it, let alone have the receiving blanket ready.

Glory cried, “My baby, my baby…”

And he said, “It’s a girl,” and then the tiny little thing opened her mouth and let out a big yelp followed by a long, angry cry. He smiled. Just like her mother, the dark haired little scrap of a thing didn’t hesitate to make her feelings known.

“Is she…”

“She’s perfect, Glory. Just perfect, I swear it.” He got a blanket and put the baby on it, still with the cord connected. The book had said not to cut it, to wait for the professionals.

Bowie was just fine with that. There was also something called the placenta that might or might not be popping out before help came. He sincerely hoped that he might get lucky and not have to deal with that.

Glory was crying. “Serafina Teodora,” she sobbed. “After Matteo’s mom. Sera. She’s Sera.…” Glory held out her arms. And Bowie put another blanket around the tiny, red, sticky little body, to make sure she stayed warm. And then he lifted her up to give her to Glory.

But right then, as he levered up on his knees, carefully raising her to put her in Glory’s arms, trying to hand her over without pulling on the cord that still connected her to Glory, he looked down and saw that the baby was staring up at him.

The little thing was quiet now. Calm. Her eyes watched him so seriously from that tiny, red, old-person face. Her mouth was a round
O.

It was like…she knew him. That little baby knew him.

And she accepted him, absolutely. Instantly. Unconditionally, unlike her mother and most everyone else in his hometown where he’d never managed to do anything right.

He, Bowie Bravo, was okay with Sera Rossi, no questions asked.

And inside him there was a rising feeling, all warm and good. Right then, for that too-brief moment, looking into that baby’s eyes, he could almost believe that everything would come out right.

Chapter Three

G
lory was crying, the tears sliding along her temples into her already-sweat-soaked hair. “Come on,” she said softly now, still holding out her arms. “Come on, give her to me.”

Bowie handed Sera over.

He got up and washed his hands. Returning to the bedroom, he went to the bay window. It was quiet out there, the sky a gray blanket, the street covered in white. The wind had died down and he could see across the river now. Smoke spiraled from the chimneys of the houses over there and people were already outside, shoveling walks, scraping off windshields. “The snow’s stopped,” he said.

“Ah,” Glory replied, kind of absentmindedly. He looked over and saw she had the baby at her breast and she was stroking the little one’s matted dark hair, smiling a tender, secret, mother’s smile.

Bowie checked the phone to see if they had a dial tone yet.

Nothing. Dead air.

So he went to work mopping up the floor with the towels he had ready. He cleaned up as best he could without making a lot of noise and disturbing the exhausted mom and the tiny girl in her arms.

Glory asked for some apple juice. “In the fridge, downstairs,” she added softly.

He went down to get it. The doorbell rang as he was starting up the stairs again and the sound grated in his ears, made the muscles at the back of his neck jump tight. He didn’t want to answer it. He wished they’d all just stayed away.

Everything was so peaceful now. He hated to ruin it.

And he knew it would be ruined the moment everyone started showing up and they all found out that Bowie Bravo was back in town.

“Bowie?” Glory called from above.

“It’s all right. I’m getting it.” And then he turned and went and pulled open the door.

His brother Brett and his sister-in-law Angie, each wearing heavy coats and snow boots, mufflers, wool hats and gloves, and each with a black medical-looking bag, stood on the other side.

Angie blinked her big brown eyes. “Bowie. Wow. Mina said you were here.…”

“Hey, Ange.” He faced his brother. “Brett.” And he knew, just from the wary look in Brett’s hazel eyes, exactly what his brother was thinking,
Not again.
As a matter of fact, he’d seen the same look in Angie’s eyes. He didn’t blame them. How could he? After all, they were both there the day that Johnny was born, when he’d been drunk as a skunk and nothing but trouble. “Look,” he said levelly, “I’m stone sober and I’m only here to help.”

Brett and his wife exchanged a look. And then Brett said, “Good enough.”

Bowie stepped back and let them in. They set down their black bags and started taking off the layers of outerwear.

Brett said, “Sorry it took us so long. The phone was out at Redonda’s all morning. We didn’t have a clue Glory was in labor until we got back to the clinic twenty minutes ago.”

“Who is it?” Glory shouted from upstairs.

Angie answered, “It’s me and Brett. We’re on our way up.” She grabbed her bag and raced up the stairs.

Brett hung back. He asked Bowie quietly, “How’s she doing?”

“She did great,” Bowie answered. “She’s a damn champion.”

Brett looked puzzled.
“Did?”

And then Angie called down from the second floor. “Brett, you won’t believe this. You’d better get up here.…”

Ten minutes later, Brett had cut the umbilical cord and checked over both mother and child. He’d said what Bowie pretty much already knew. That Glory and Sera were doing fine.

Brett looked at him with real respect, which Bowie couldn’t help but find gratifying. It was a much better reaction than he’d expected.

“Little brother,” Brett said, “you did an excellent job here.”

Even Glory gave him a tired smile. “Yeah, you did. Thanks.”

He looked in her big brown eyes and dared to think that maybe coming back hadn’t been such a dumbass idea after all.

The placenta arrived. Bowie was very grateful that it had waited to make its appearance until Brett and Angie were there to deal with it. Angie packed it up in a cooler to take to some woman who made vitamins out of it for the new mother—or something like that. Bowie didn’t really care to get the particulars on the subject.

He checked the phone again a few minutes later and got a dial tone. “Phone’s back on,” he said, in case anyone needed to know.

It rang the second he hung it up. He stepped aside and let Angie get it. It was Rose Dellazola, Glory and Angie’s mom, known around town as Mamma Rose. Angie told Rose that Rose’s new grandbaby had arrived safely and everything was fine. When she hung up, she reported that Rose and the others had headed for Grass Valley at the crack of dawn that morning. It had been rough going, getting back in the storm. But they’d made it safely and Rose was coming over right now to meet her new grandchild.

Bowie and Brett’s mom called next. Angie repeated the happy news and then passed the phone to Bowie. “Your mom wants to talk to you.”

He took it. “Hey, Ma.”

“Bowie, it’s so good to hear your voice.” He could tell that she was smiling, just by her tone. And maybe getting a little misty-eyed, too. He’d kept in touch with her in the time he’d been away, even started calling her now and then in recent years. Twice in the past two years she’d visited him up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. She said, “You come on down the street and see me.”

He wasn’t going anywhere until Johnny got home. “I will, Mom. In a few hours.”

“Shall I fix up a room for you?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Think about it.”

“I will.”

He’d barely hung up when Glory’s mom and dad—and her aunt Stella, too—arrived. He and Brett went downstairs to let them in. Brett answered the door and they all three looked like they were seeing a ghost when they caught sight of Bowie.

“Bowie!” Glory’s dad, whom everyone called Little Tony, clapped him on the back. “Good to see you, man!” He actually seemed to mean it.

Mamma Rose and Stella were friendly enough, too. They’d always been civil to him. Back when Johnny was born and Bowie had hounded Glory for months on end to marry him, the older generation of Dellazolas were all on his side. They were good Catholics. They believed that a man ought to be allowed to do the right thing and marry the mother of his child.

Bowie did see the irony. He’d been so worried about everyone’s reaction to his showing up. But Stella was more upset about Glory’s phone message than she was about seeing Bowie Bravo back in town again. She clutched her rosary to her chest. “I am hurt. Terribly hurt. Glory said she didn’t want me here. Why wouldn’t she want me here?” And then she started quoting scripture.
“‘And I will cleanse them from all their iniquity, whereby they have sinned against me; and I will pardon all their iniquities, whereby they have sinned, and whereby they have transgressed against me.’”
She turned her dark eyes on Bowie then. Probably because he was the biggest sinner in the front hall at that moment. “Jeremiah, thirty-three,” she declared in a noble tone, “verse eight.”

Mamma Rose, who was taller, thinner and prettier than her sister, patted Stella’s shoulder. “Now, Stell, you can’t go taking it personally. You know how Glory is.”

Stella pursed up her lips and fingered her rosary. “Yes, I do, sadly enough.”

Rose put an arm around her and gave her a quick squeeze. “You know what they say?
This, too, shall pass away.
”

Stella’s reply to that was an injured, “Hmmph.”

A minute later, the two women went upstairs and Glory’s dad joined Brett and Bowie in the kitchen. Brett and Little Tony seemed right at home in Glory’s house. Brett got a fresh pot of coffee brewing and Little Tony went through the cupboards and the fridge looking for snacks, coming up with some packaged cookies and a box of mini chocolate doughnuts.

They sat for half an hour or so, drinking coffee, eating the doughnuts and talking about the weather and the New Bethlehem Flat High School basketball team. Nobody seemed to want to get around to the big, fat elephant in the room—which was what was Bowie doing there and where the hell had he been for all this time?

And then Mamma Rose appeared. She loaded some food and juice on a tray and took it back upstairs.

Once she was gone, Little Tony finally broached the delicate subject. “So, tell me, Bowie, how you been for all these years?”

Bowie said he was doing okay, that he lived in Santa Cruz, up in the mountains.

“You find work?”

“I did. I’m a carpenter now.”

“As in construction?”

“I build mostly furniture.”

“Any money in that?”

“I make a living.”

“Good. Good. And it’s great to see you back in town.”

“Yeah,” Brett agreed. “Good to have you back.”

Bowie figured that was probably the warmest welcome he was going to get—except maybe when he went down the street to say hi to his mother. He told himself to be grateful that a few people seemed glad to see him. For the rest of them, he would either earn their respect—or get along without it, as he’d been doing for all of his life.

Later, after Brett and Little Tony left, Bowie sat in Glory’s kitchen for a while, wondering what he ought to do with himself now. The women were all upstairs with Glory and the baby, doing whatever women do after a baby comes. The kitchen clock and the Timex watch he’d used to time Glory’s contractions both agreed that it was quarter of one. What time did school get out? Two? Three? Four?

He took off the watch and put it back in the drawer where he’d gotten it and then he wandered around downstairs for a while. It was a great house. He’d always admired it. The place was well over a hundred years old and still standing strong. There were built-ins—that little desk area in the kitchen, the dining-room china cabinet and the waist-high bookcases on either side of the family-room fireplace. The bookcases, like the mantelpiece, were hand-carved with flowers and vines.

Eventually, when he ran out of quality woodwork to appreciate, he put on his jacket and went outside. The storm had dropped about six inches of new snow, white and pure, stretching out over the wide field at the back of the Rossi house, all the way to where the pines started. Since the house was at the end of Jewel Street, where the street hooked to the northeast and then came to an end, there was a good deal of open land around it on the north and east sides. His breath pluming in the icy air, he stood at the base of the back-porch steps and looked up at the mountains that rimmed the town, all of them blanketed in snow-dusted evergreens.

His hometown. In some ways it still didn’t seem real to him, that he was here, that he’d actually done it. Returned to the place of his childhood. The place where he’d grown up and made such a mess of everything.

After a moment, he shook his head. He started moving, trudging through the fresh, powdery snow, out to the big gray barn fifty feet or so behind the house.

The barn had windows. He wiped the snow off the panes and peered in. The structure had been divided. The smaller side was a garage for a riding mower and other yard equipment. The larger section was a workshop. Through one of the workshop windows, he saw a cot and a free-standing woodstove, as well as pegboards hung with tools and long, rough waist-high wooden workbenches. A fluorescent light fixture hung from a ceiling beam.

It wasn’t bad. Big enough for both a place to work and a living area. His needs were simple. A cot to sleep in and a stove to keep him warm during the long winter nights. If he stayed, the workshop would suit him fine, although he’d have to have a phone installed because his cell wasn’t going to be any use to him here.

But getting a landline put in was no biggie. The biggie would be getting Glory to go for it. He hardly felt confident on that point.

You’ve got zero hope of getting a yes if you never ask the damn question,
Wily Dunn would have said.

Right, Wily. But it’s Glory we’re talking about here.
Glory wouldn’t give him a yes if her life depended on it.

Still. If he felt he had to, he would ask the question, anyway. He’d know better what his next step should be after a certain six-year-old got home from school.

He returned to the back porch, knocked the snow off his boots and went inside again. Angie and Stella were in the kitchen and something that smelled good simmered on the cooktop.

“Soup and a sandwich?” Angie asked. She looked at him warmly, he thought. And suddenly, he was grateful after all that he’d come today, that for once, he’d been there for Glory when she needed him—and that her sister knew it.

He realized he was starving. “Soup and a sandwich would be great.”

Angie fixed his food and he sat down to eat while she and her aunt loaded up a couple of trays and went back upstairs.

After he ate, he started wondering how Glory and little Sera were doing. He went out into the front hall and stood at the base of the stairs with a hand on the newel post and thought about going up there. He wanted to go up, but he didn’t quite dare to. Instead, he went into the family room and rebuilt the fire that had burned down to coals during Sera’s birth.