33 The Return of Bowie Bravo

by Christine Rimmer

  Johnny nodded. “She’s pretty ugly. All red and wrinkled.”

  “Most babies are like that. But personally, I think she’s gorgeous.”

  “You maybe need glasses, huh?” Johnny tipped his dark head to the side, frowning. “Are you a drunk and a crazy man?”

  Bowie wanted to laugh. He also felt the burn of a more painful emotion sting the back of his throat. “Not anymore,” he said. “But I used to be.”

  The boy seemed to consider that answer. And then he shrugged. “Mom says I can have milk and two graham crackers and then do my homework.”

  “Need any help with that?”

  Johnny blew out a disgusted breath. “I’m not a baby.”

  “Well, I’m here if you need anything.”

  The look the kid gave him then was more puzzled than anything else. The big brown eyes said, Why would I need anything from you? And then he turned for the door to the kitchen.

  Bowie should have left it alone then. He knew that. But somehow, he just had to say, “I’m going down the street to say hi to your grandma Chastity. Do you want to come with me?”

  “No,” the boy said. He neither paused nor looked back.

  What did you expect? He hates you, remember?

  Once Johnny disappeared into the kitchen, Bowie got up and climbed the stairs. He knocked on the door to Glory’s room.

  After a minute, Rose opened the door wide enough to put her head through the crack. She whispered, “Everything okay?”

  “Just wanted you to know I’m going down to Ma’s. Back in an hour or so. Johnny’s in the kitchen.”

  “You look good,” his mom said when she opened the door to him. “Healthy. Strong.”

  She looked pretty much as he remembered her, tall and slim in khaki trousers, a button-down shirt and a thick wool cardigan. Her short brown hair had more gray than before, and the lines bracketing her mouth and fanning out from the corners of her dark eyes were etched deeper than they had been. She was a practical woman who took care of business and of those she loved.

  She stepped aside and he went in, accepting the hug she offered, then pulling back, holding her by the shoulders as she beamed up at him.

  He said, “Good to see you, Ma.”

  “Take off your coat. Come on back.”

  He shrugged out of his jacket and she hung it in the closet by the door.

  The Sierra Star Bed and Breakfast was as he remembered it. Homey and welcoming. A couple of people he didn’t recognize sat on the sofa in the living room reading the town’s weekly paper, The Sierra Times. Guests. They glanced up and smiled as his mom led him to the kitchen, her private domain at the back of the house.

  She offered lunch, but he told her he’d eaten. He shook his head when she raised the full coffeepot in his direction.

  So she poured herself a cup and sat in the chair opposite him. “Serafina Teodora, huh? It’s a big name for a little baby.”

  “After Matteo’s mother,” he said.

  Chastity made a low sound. “The saintly Serafina, who made sure her son had no other women in his life until she was in the ground.”

  “Come on, Ma, cut it out. I always liked Matteo. He was a fair man. Kind. And Glory and Johnny both thought the world of him.”

  “Did I say a thing against him? Not I. I liked Matteo. He and I were friends.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “You were too busy getting into trouble to pay any attention to how often Matteo showed up around here.”

  “Here? You mean at the Sierra Star?”

  Chastity nodded. “Believe it or not, Matteo even confided in me back in the day. We shared some really good…talks.”

  Bowie wondered what she was getting at. “What kind of ‘talks’?”

  “Private ones.”

  “Sheesh, Ma. Be a little mysterious, why don’t you?”

  “It hardly matters now. What matters is that Glory was happy with him. And he was good to Johnny. Wanted to adopt him. Glory kept putting him off on the adoption question, though.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “See? There are real benefits to keeping in touch.”

  He let the dig pass because he was still stuck back there with the idea that Matteo had wanted to adopt Johnny. Bowie wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Not surprised, really. And not particularly happy, either. “For Matteo to adopt my son, Glory would have had to come to me, to deal with me.”

  His mom looked at him sideways. “I give her more credit. I say she knew it would be wrong to cut you out of Johnny’s life that way.”

  “Maybe you forgot. She didn’t even give him my name.” On Johnny’s birth certificate, Glory had told Brett to put Dellazola as the last name.

  “But she did put you down as the father, didn’t she?”

  “Why are we talking about this, Ma?”

  “You’d rather we discussed the weather? All right. It was snowing. Now it’s not.”

  He laughed. “Smart-ass.”

  “Don’t call your mother names.” Her old cat, Mr. Lucky, jumped into her lap. She scratched him under the chin. “People will think that you’re badly brought up.”

  “I hate to break it to you, but I have a feeling they think that already.”

  Her expression grew serious again. “You’ve got quite a job ahead of you.”

  “I know it.”

  “Not only with Johnny.” She stroked Mr. Lucky’s caramel-colored coat. “Glory’s got that big heart of hers hardened against you.”

  “That’s not news—and it doesn’t matter, about Glory’s heart. It’s over between her and me. I just want to help her out if I can because I owe it to her. And because she’s the mother of my son.”

  “Oh, come on, you don’t really believe that, do you? I certainly don’t.”

  He reminded himself that his mother never did have her head screwed on straight when it came to love and romance. After all, she’d loved Blake Bravo. Loved him big time, and loved him long enough to give him four sons.

  Chastity spoke again. “I know what you’re thinking. Stop.”

  He said, “Glory loved her husband. I’m old news.”

  His mom looked into her coffee cup, but then set it down without taking a sip. Mr. Lucky jumped from her lap and strutted off down the hall. “How long you here for?”

  “As long as it takes to work things out with my son and to see that Glory’s back on her feet and managing okay with a new baby to look after.”

  “I wouldn’t say she’s on her own. She can’t walk down the street without tripping over a relative.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Oh, yes, I do,” his mom said too sweetly. “Probably better than you.”

  Back at Glory’s house, he found Mamma Rose at the cooktop in the kitchen with a very fussy Sera on her shoulder. “Stella and Glory had words,” she said with a shrug. “So Stell went home. Then Angie left, too. She’s got the boys and Brett to look after.” Angie and Brett had two sons—Jackson, who would be six in a couple of months, and Graham, who was two. Rose stirred a big pot of pasta sauce. “Johnny’s upstairs in his room.…” Sera let out a yelp, then yawned, then yelped some more. “Stir this,” she instructed. “I’ll take this baby back up to her mamma.”

  “I’ll take her up,” he volunteered.

  Rose sent him a doubtful look. “You sure?” He already had his arms out. “Well, you did deliver her. I guess you can manage to carry her upstairs well enough.” Rose handed over the tiny pink-blanketed bundle.

  Sera was light as a breath of air. And still squalling—until he had his arms around her. Then she did that thing again, same as the moment she was born. She blinked and looked up at him and her mouth was a
round little O.

  He grinned down at her. “Hey, how you doin’ there, Sera?”

  Rose took the diaper off her shoulder and put it on his. “She likes you.”

  Carefully, he lifted the tiny form and put her against his chest. She made a soft, cooing sound. And then she burped. He patted her on the back.

  “Gently, now,” said Rose.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He sent Glory’s mom a grin.

  Rose asked the question that seemed to be on everyone’s mind. “How long you staying in town?”

  “Not sure yet.”

  Rose looked like she maybe wanted to say more, but she only told him, “Watch the baby’s head, now. She can’t hold it up by herself yet.”

  He turned for the door to the stairs.

  On the second floor, he saw that Glory’s door was closed. So was another one across the hall—Johnny’s room, he was reasonably certain. Because Sera was quiet in his arms, he was tempted to try Johnny’s door first, take the baby in there, maybe let her brother hold her for a minute.

  And maybe make the first small step toward getting to know his son.

  But first things first. He needed to talk to Glory, to try and settle a few things while he had the chance. Over the next few days, it was going to be a challenge getting her alone. The Dellazola women would be looking after her and Sera round-the-clock—which only proved what his mother had said. She had family to take care of her and he wasn’t really needed.

  Didn’t matter. He would find ways to make himself useful. What mattered, he kept telling himself, was that he was here, finally. And he wasn’t going away until he’d righted all the things he’d made wrong.

  He steadied Sera on his arm and gave Glory’s bedroom door a tap.

  “It’s open,” she called.

  He went in as she reached out and switched on the lamp. She lay in the bed, which was all made up now with clean sheets and blankets.

  “Bowie,” she said grimly at the sight of him. Her expression asked the question she didn’t actually put into words. You still here? She sat up against the pillows. Her hair looked a little better, not quite so tangled and stringy, like maybe she’d run a comb through it a couple of times. She wore a soft blue pajama top. He didn’t know what she wore on the bottom because the blankets covered the lower half of her body. A white bassinet waited by the bed.

  He carried Sera over to her. “She was fussing.…”

  “Here.” Glory held out her arms. With care, he passed the baby to her. She started unbuttoning her pajama top.

  Bowie took that as his cue to go to the bay window and looked out at the dark street in front. In the light of a streetlamp, he stared at a tangle of snow-covered blackberry vines on the far side, at the edge where the shoulder dropped off into the river gorge below. When he was a kid, during the long summer days, he used to pick the blackberries that grew on those vines. They were always small and covered with dust.

  After a minute or two, he figured she’d had enough time to fiddle with her top and put the baby to her breast, so he turned to her again and found her watching him. He stuck his hands in his pockets. “So how are you feeling?”

  “Like somebody ran me over with an eighteen-wheeler.” She smoothed Sera’s blanket, touched her round cheek with a brush of a finger. Then she glanced up at Bowie again. Her soft look turned instantly wary and her wide, full mouth drew tight. “Got something on your mind?”

  He went for it. “That barn out back?”

  “What about it?”

  “I looked in. On the workshop side, there’s a cot and a woodstove. I’d like to stay there, while I’m in town.”

  She raked her fingers back through her hair. “If you’re staying for a while, can’t you just go to your mom’s?”

  “I need a place to work.”

  “What do you mean work?”

  “I’m a carpenter. I need a workshop.”

  “You want to build furniture out in the barn?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m sorry. This is a lot to take in. And I have to ask…”

  “What?”

  “Well, just like that, you can leave your job and move in here?”

  “I have my own company, okay? I’ve arranged it so I can be away for a while.”

  “Your own furniture company? In Santa Cruz?”

  “Yeah, more or less.”

  She made a scoffing sound. “Which is it? More? Or less?”

  “Look, it’s a long story and we probably don’t need to go into it now.”

  “Oh, well, I hear that.”

  He gave her a long, slow look. And when he spoke, he kept his voice even. “Six months after I left town, I hit rock bottom.”

  “But you weren’t drinking when you left town,” she reminded him angrily. “You’d been sober for over a month.”

  “Well, I started again after I left. That’s how it goes with alcoholics. It takes only one drink and I had that drink. And the next one. And the one after that. The day before my life finally started to change, I ended up drunk on my ass at this weird party up in the Santa Cruz Mountains and—”

  “What does some party in Santa Cruz have to do with your owning a business?” she grumbled.

  He refused to lose his cool. “If you’ll wait until I finish talking, you’ll know.”

  “Fine. All right. I’m waiting.…”

  He drew in a slow breath and continued, “The party ended. I kept drinking. Eventually I passed out on this dirt road, still up in the mountains. Don’t know how I got on that road or when I just fell down and didn’t get up. But that was when I got the help I badly needed. It was on that road that the guy who changed my life found me. His name was Wily Dunn.”

  “He found you passed out in the middle of the road?”

  “That’s about the size of it. He took me home, helped me to quit drinking and get back on my feet. In time, he let me work for him. I learned fast. Turned out I had a knack for working with wood.”

  “So you’re saying you work for him.”

  “I did. Until last November. He died. And he left his company, Dunn Woodworkers, to me—he left everything to me.” He waited for her to say something to that. She only glared. So he prompted, “Does that explain it clearly enough for you?” Her answer was a surly little shrug. But he refused to give up. “So while I’m here, I’d like to use your workshop if you’ll let me. But the main thing is that it would be better, as far as getting to know Johnny, if I lived closer than I would be if I stayed at the Sierra Star.”

  She spoke then. Finally. “You really think you need to be closer than down the street?”

  “I want to be…around. So he sees me all the time.”

  “You can be around and stay down the street.”

  “It’s not the same. If I’m staying here, he’ll see me several times a day. And I won’t have to knock on the front door just to talk to him. I’ll be in and out of the house.”

  She closed her eyes, let out a heavy sigh and then forced herself to look at him again. “You mean you want to eat with us.”

  “If that’s okay, yeah. And I can wash up and shave mostly at the trough by the side of the barn.”

  “Oh, come on, get real. I shut off the outside faucets before the first hard freeze. At the very least, you’ll need hot water and a toilet.”

  “Yeah, well. I can use the downstairs bathroom. It’s near the back door, so I won’t have to be trooping through your house. And it’s got a shower.”

  “So you’ll need to be in the house several times a day—to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner and every time you need the use of a bathroom.”

  “Glory, come on. I’ll stay out of your way as much as possible. And I could…help ou
t around the house, clean up the yard if it needs it, fix whatever’s broken. And fill in at the hardware store, too, if you need someone there while you’re recovering. I know it’s a lot to ask.…”

  “It’s more than a lot, Bowie. It’s too much to ask. Basically, you want to stay here, at my house, for an indefinite period of time. Just admit it.”

  He did want to stay there, yeah. And he didn’t know yet for how long. Coaxingly, he tried again. “Look at it this way, the more time I can spend with Johnny day by day, the less time it will take overall.”

  “The less time it will take for what?”

  “To get to know him. To…work things out with him. To make him see that I’m here now, in his life. That I won’t go away again.”

  She scanned his face as though determined to ferret out darker motives. “Get straight with me, Bowie.”

  “I am being straight with you.”

  “Hah. What are you planning, really?”

  “I just told you.”

  “I will tell you right now that if you think you can take him from me, you are very much mistaken.”

  That was too much. “Stop it.” He spoke with more heat than he’d allowed himself up until then. “That is not what I’m here for.”

  “You just said—”

  “I meant that I won’t…disappear again, that I’ll be available for him whenever he needs me.”

  She made a scoffing sound. “You’re ready for that? Really? To stick with him, to be a part of his life, no matter how rough it gets?”

  “I am. Yes.”

  “If you…make him love you. And then you leave him…” A sheen of tears made her brown eyes glitter. She looked away.

  He felt like a complete jerk, which, if you came right down to it, he had been for a lot of his life. He waited until she faced him again before he vowed, “I won’t do that, Glory. I won’t desert him again. Not ever. No matter what.”

  Her mouth was quivering. Sera fussed at her breast. “Turn away,” she commanded in a torn whisper.

  He went back to the window. Sera let out more fussy little sounds and he heard the box springs shift.