33 The Return of Bowie Bravo by Christine Rimmer

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