LITMIR.BIZ

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       “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

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