Read 33 The Return of Bowie Bravo for Free Online Page A

clutched her rosary to her chest. “I am hurt. Terribly hurt. Glory said she didn’t want me here. Why wouldn’t she want me here?” And then she started quoting scripture. “‘And I will cleanse them from all their iniquity, whereby they have sinned against me; and I will pardon all their iniquities, whereby they have sinned, and whereby they have transgressed against me.’” She turned her dark eyes on Bowie then. Probably because he was the biggest sinner in the front hall at that moment. “Jeremiah, thirty-three,” she declared in a noble tone, “verse eight.”
    Mamma Rose, who was taller, thinner and prettier than her sister, patted Stella’s shoulder. “Now, Stell, you can’t go taking it personally. You know how Glory is.”
    Stella pursed up her lips and fingered her rosary. “Yes, I do, sadly enough.”
    Rose put an arm around her and gave her a quick squeeze. “You know what they say? This, too, shall pass away. ”
    Stella’s reply to that was an injured, “Hmmph.”
    A minute later, the two women went upstairs and Glory’s dad joined Brett and Bowie in the kitchen. Brett and Little Tony seemed right at home in Glory’s house. Brett got a fresh pot of coffee brewing and Little Tony went through the cupboards and the fridge looking for snacks, coming up with some packaged cookies and a box of mini chocolate doughnuts.
    They sat for half an hour or so, drinking coffee, eating the doughnuts and talking about the weather and the New Bethlehem Flat High School basketball team. Nobody seemed to want to get around to the big, fat elephant in the room—which was what was Bowie doing there and where the hell had he been for all this time?
    And then Mamma Rose appeared. She loaded some food and juice on a tray and took it back upstairs.
    Once she was gone, Little Tony finally broached the delicate subject. “So, tell me, Bowie, how you been for all these years?”
    Bowie said he was doing okay, that he lived in Santa Cruz, up in the mountains.
    “You find work?”
    “I did. I’m a carpenter now.”
    “As in construction?”
    “I build mostly furniture.”
    “Any money in that?”
    “I make a living.”
    “Good. Good. And it’s great to see you back in town.”
    “Yeah,” Brett agreed. “Good to have you back.”
    Bowie figured that was probably the warmest welcome he was going to get—except maybe when he went down the street to say hi to his mother. He told himself to be grateful that a few people seemed glad to see him. For the rest of them, he would either earn their respect—or get along without it, as he’d been doing for all of his life.
    Later, after Brett and Little Tony left, Bowie sat in Glory’s kitchen for a while, wondering what he ought to do with himself now. The women were all upstairs with Glory and the baby, doing whatever women do after a baby comes. The kitchen clock and the Timex watch he’d used to time Glory’s contractions both agreed that it was quarter of one. What time did school get out? Two? Three? Four?
    He took off the watch and put it back in the drawer where he’d gotten it and then he wandered around downstairs for a while. It was a great house. He’d always admired it. The place was well over a hundred years old and still standing strong. There were built-ins—that little desk area in the kitchen, the dining-room china cabinet and the waist-high bookcases on either side of the family-room fireplace. The bookcases, like the mantelpiece, were hand-carved with flowers and vines.
    Eventually, when he ran out of quality woodwork to appreciate, he put on his jacket and went outside. The storm had dropped about six inches of new snow, white and pure, stretching out over the wide field at the back of the Rossi house, all the way to where the pines started. Since the house was at the end of Jewel Street, where the street hooked to the northeast and then came to an end, there was a good deal of open land around it on the north and east sides. His breath