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
