The Return of Bowie Bravo

She kept her head buried in his shoulder. “Yeah. Better. For the moment at least.” He smelled good. Clean. Like soap and cedar shavings. Like pine trees in the springtime. He’d always smelled like pine.

“What was that?” he asked. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Yeah, more or less,” she panted and made herself look up at him, at his worried frown and his blue eyes full of questions. She told him, “I’m in labor. The baby’s coming. The baby’s coming now.…”

Bowie’s tanned face blanched. His eyes, too, seemed to lose their color, to grow paler. She looked in those eyes and she thought of his father, for some crazy reason. She’d never seen Blake Bravo in the flesh. He’d made his last visit to the Flat before she was born. But she’d seen the pictures, heard the stories. People said that Bad Blake Bravo, kidnapper, suspected murderer and notorious polygamist, had the kind of eyes you never forgot.

Pale eyes, wolf eyes…

Bowie was staring at her, blinking like a man suddenly wakened from a deep sleep. “Uh, what did you say? Tell me you didn’t say what you just said.”

She had the most ridiculous urge to laugh. “Sorry, I did say it. And it’s true. My baby’s coming.” Strange how absolutely certain she was. But then again, she’d been here before. “It’s just like it was with Johnny. Out of nowhere, with zero warning, I was far gone in labor. He was born an hour and a half after I had my first contraction—one that felt exactly like the one I had just now.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Oh, yes, I am. This baby is coming. And coming fast.”

Chapter Two

“Now?” Bowie cast a desperate glance toward the windows. Outside, the wind gusted and the snow came down harder than ever.

“Yeah, Bowie. Now.” She could almost feel sorry for him. This had to be the last thing he’d expected when he came knocking on her door.

He gulped. “The hospital. I’ve got to get you to the hospital.”

She shook her head. “In this storm, on the mountain roads? It would take forever to get there. And this baby is just like Johnny. This baby is not going to wait.”

He remembered. She could see it in his eyes. He’d been there when Johnny was born—or at least, he’d tried to be there. She’d had Johnny in her mom’s house down the street, upstairs, in the big front bedroom. Bowie had begged her to marry him as she sweated and screamed through one grueling contraction after another. He’d pleaded and he’d coaxed. He’d been drunk, as he usually was back then. His brother Brett, who was the town doctor, had finally gotten him to go away.

But he wasn’t drunk now. He said, “The emergency helicopter. We can have you airlifted.”

“Come on, Bowie, nobody’s flying a helicopter in this.” She flicked a hand toward the storm outside.

“Brett…” He said his brother’s name desperately. She understood that, the desperation. She wanted cool, calm, competent Brett there, with her, and she wanted him now. And when Brett came, so would her sister Angie. Angie was not only Brett’s wife, she was also his nurse. And of her six sisters, Glory had always felt closest to Angie. She could tell Angie anything. They were not only siblings, they were also best friends.

The phone was a few feet away down the counter. Going for it gave her an excuse to escape the scarily comforting circle of Bowie’s arms. She had the number of Brett’s clinic on auto dial, so she punched it up fast.

The receptionist answered on the second ring. “New Bethlehem Flat Clinic. This is Mina.”

“It’s Glory, Mina. I’m in labor. The baby’s coming and coming fast.”

“No kidding? Wow. Right now? Isn’t that a little early?”

Glory gritted her teeth. “Yeah, Mina. It’s two weeks early, but it’s happening. I need Brett and Angie over here at my place, now.”

“They’re out on a call.” A call. Sweet Lord. They were out on a call. Mina chattered on. “Scary, huh, in this weather? But evidently, Redonda Beals and Emmy Ralen just had to go out for their morning walk today of all days. The storm started. Redonda took a fall. Broke her arm in two places. It’s pretty bad, evidently. Dr. Brett is seeing what he can do about it until the weather clears and she can be airlifted to Grass Valley.”

“Can you reach them, tell them I’m going to need them over here, and fast?”

“They should be back soon—I mean, unless the snow keeps up like this.”

“Mina, hello. I asked if you would call them.”

Bowie moved closer, frowning. “Let me talk to her.”

Glory put her palm over the mouthpiece and told him drily, “Thanks, I can handle this.”

He stopped coming toward her, but he kept on frowning.

Mina was gabbing away again. “Now, Glory, I have kids of my own. I know how long labor takes. And I know sometimes you feel it’s urgent when really it’s going to be quite a while.”

Oh, great. Just what she needed. Lectures on childbirth from Mina Scruggs. “Mina, forget it. Are they at Redonda’s? I’ll look up the number and call them myself.”

“Glory, there is no reason to get snippy.”

“I am having my baby, Mina. I am having my baby now.”

Mina made a humphing sound. “How far apart are your contractions?”

As Mina said the operative word, another one hit—worse than the first one. It started at the top of Glory’s stomach and it moved downward, a deep, clutching, hard pain, gathering and pressing as it moved. She groaned and almost hit her forehead on the counter as she doubled over with the force of it.

“Glory! Glory, you still there?” Mina called from the other end of the line.

Bowie took the phone and growled into it. “She’s having a contraction. A strong one. You need to get Brett here right away…” Mina said something. He made a low sound. “Who am I? Bowie… That’s right, Mina. Bowie Bravo… Yeah. Right. I’m back in town. Surprise, surprise. Now don’t you be messin’ with me. Get my brother over here and get him here right now.…”

Glory tuned out the rest. She was too busy riding that contraction all the way to hell and back and swearing a blue streak as she went.

She didn’t normally have a filthy mouth, but there was something about giving birth. It brought out every bad word she’d ever heard and some she couldn’t believe she knew.

When that one finally passed, Bowie had already hung up. He reported, “Mina will call them and tell them. They’ll get in touch.”

Her hair was already damp with sweat. Ugh. She swiped it back off her clammy forehead. “When, damn it?”

“She said she’d call them right away.”

“Okay. Great.” With care, pressing a hand to her back, she straightened up.

He looked down at the phone he held and then up at her. “Do you want to…go to your bedroom, get a little more comfortable?”

Oh, God. Having her baby. With only Bowie to help. “Bet you wish you’d picked another day to make your big appearance, huh?”

He stared at her for what seemed like a very long time. And then he said, “Well, I’m here. And I’ll do what I can. Now, answer the question. You want to lie down or something?”

“Uh, no. Not right this minute.” She bent at the waist and rested her head on the counter again. It was cool and smooth and felt good against her cheek. “I’ll just stay here for now, wait for Brett to call, beat my head against the counter when the next contraction hits.”

He looked stricken. “Don’t even joke about it.”

“Right.” She blew out a hard breath through puffed cheeks. “Sorry.”

He held up the phone. “How about your mom? Should I call her?”

Her mom. Good idea. Rose Dellazola knew a lot about having kids. She’d had nine of her own and been there at the births of every one of her grandchildren. “Yeah, please. It’s number two on the auto dial—and Bowie?”

“Yeah?”

“Tell her if she brings Aunt Stella, I will personally kill both of them.” Her maiden aunt, who lived with her mamma and her dad, was extremely devout. At births, Stella Baldovino spouted scripture and counted off the rosary—like she did pretty much everywhere she went.

He started to dial.

“Wait.” Her cheek still pressed to the cool polished surface of the counter, she held out her hand. “I can do it.”

He regarded her doubtfully. “Glory…”

She fisted her hand and pounded the pretty blue-speckled black granite that Matteo had ordered installed for her birthday last year. “Give me the phone. Now.”

He handed it over. She braced up on her elbows and punched the right number. It rang three times and then the answering machine picked up.

“Hello,” her mother’s recorded voice chirped. “Dellazola residence. We do want to talk to you. Please leave a message and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”

Terrific. Her mom, her dad, her great-grandpa and Aunt Stella all lived in that house together. And they all had to choose today not to be home. Where had they gone in a blizzard?

She didn’t even care to know. “Mom,” she told the machine. “I’m having the baby. And I mean right now. When you get this, get over here to my house. I need you—and do not bring Aunt Stella. I mean that. Just don’t.” She turned the phone off and felt the next contraction coming on. “Bowie?” she moaned.

“Right here.”

She cast a quick glance at the kitchen clock. It was ten after ten. “Watch the clock. The second hand. Starting now. Time this contraction…”

“Gotcha.”

Glory started screaming. Bowie moved in close again. He held her up and he watched the clock. She heard herself swearing. Really bad words. Terrible words. It didn’t make the pain any less, but she swore anyway.

When it faded, at last, she asked him, “Well?”

“Fifty-four seconds.”

“Great,” she said, for lack of any other reasonable response. She noted the time. “There’s a pencil and paper in that little desk on the other side of the table. And a Timex watch with a second hand. Get them now.” He didn’t say a word. Just went over there and got what she’d asked for. She instructed, “Write down the time that contraction started and how long it lasted.”

“Got it.” He wrote on the paper.

“Do that every time I have one. Can you handle that?”

“Will do.” He put on the watch and stuck the paper and pencil in a back pocket. “How about a cell phone? Your mom got one? We could try it. Or maybe Angie or Brett has one?”

She shook her head. “My mom never bothered to get one. Angie has one, but they still don’t work here in the Flat. The canyon walls block the signal. You have to go up to the heliport to get any bars.”

“Is there someone else we should call?”

She thought of her three sisters who still lived in town: Tris, Clarice and Dani. She loved them all dearly, but she didn’t see how having them there was going to help her much. She wanted Angie. And Brett. And failing them, her mother.

He said, “My mom?”

Chastity. Yeah. Chastity had been good to Glory over the years. They were friends. And she was definitely the best choice given the options. “Call her.”

He did. “Not answering,” he said after a minute.

Glory said a word so bad that it would have dropped her aunt Stella in a dead faint. “Where is everybody? They’re always underfoot until the moment you need them.”

Bowie left a message. “Mom, it’s Bowie. I’m at Glory’s house. Her baby’s coming—fast. And there’s no one to help. If you get this, she needs you to come over here right away.” He hung up.

Glory shut her eyes and whispered prayerfully, “Please, Brett. Angie. Call me, get over here.…”

The phone rang as if on cue. She held out her hand. Bowie frowned again but he passed it to her. “Angie?” she cried. “Angie, oh God, I’m so glad you—”

“Don’t be alarmed,” said a pleasant recorded voice. “Your credit remains excellent. I’m Amy from Credit Card Services and I’m calling to tell you—” Muttering yet another unacceptable word, Glory hung up.

“What?” Bowie demanded, looking slightly freaked.

“Robo-call.” She passed the phone back to him. “Call Mina again, please. See what the holdup is.” She sighed and laid her head back on the counter as he called the clinic.

When he hung up, he said, “Mina tried to reach Brett and Angie. Twice. It looks like the phone’s out at Redonda’s house. She got dead air when she called over there. She said she’d keep trying.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“Maybe we should just try 9-1-1, see if we get some help that way,” he said.

“Do it.”

He started to dial, then put the phone to his ear. “We’re out, too.” He switched it off and then on again. “Nothing. Deader than a hammer.” He handed it to her.

She listened. And heard only silence. The storm must have knocked down some lines. “No,” she cried. “Oh, no.…” Shoving the useless phone away down the counter, she lowered her cheek to the granite again. “This isn’t real,” she moaned. “This can’t be happening.…”

He loomed above her, wearing that determined look, the same one he’d worn when he stood at her front door. “You don’t look comfortable bending over the counter like that.”

She rolled her eyes and stayed right where she was. “I’m about as comfortable as I’m going to get, considering the circumstances.”

“I think we probably ought to get you to the bedroom, I really do. And shouldn’t I be boiling water or something?”

“Boiling water. He wants to boil water.…” She let out a laugh that was almost a sob. “I’m having a baby and there’s no one to help me.”

“There’s me. I think you’re going to have to work with what you’ve got,” he said with more humor than she could have mustered at that point. “For the moment, I’m it. You’re going to tell me what to do and everything is going to be fine.”

“Tell you what to do?” She pretty much screeched the words. “How can I tell you, Bowie? I don’t even know myself.”

“You’ve had Johnny.”

“Yeah, with Brett there to tell me when to push, with Angie there to hold my hand and coach me through every contraction.…”

“You’ll figure it out. We’ll figure it out.”

Glory yearned to call him a bunch of bad names and scream at him that he didn’t know his ass from up. Unfortunately, he had a point. They would have to figure it out. There was no other choice. She had a couple of books on pregnancy and childbearing. One of them was bound to have a section on emergency births at home. They would refer to the chapter, follow the damn instructions.

She muttered out of the side of her mouth, “I hate you, Bowie Bravo.”

“I know.” He took her shoulders and pulled her off the counter and upright again. “Let’s go.”

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.”