Bravo Unwrapped

Nadine trotted up, bearing a pair of totally retro salads: iceberg lettuce and wedges of tomato drizzled all over with ranch dressing. “Here we go.” She plunked them on the table and bustled away again.

B.J. looked down at her plate—and her stomach actually growled. Amazing. For the first time in a week, out of nowhere, she was starving.

“Back to dinner out with psycho-Dad,” she prompted as she unrolled her napkin, spread it on her lap, grabbed for her fork and dug in.

It tasted so good. She had to make a conscious effort not to groan in delight at the crisp texture of the lettuce, the creamy, perfect consistency of the dressing. She gobbled down several crunchy, delicious bites before it came to her that Buck wasn’t talking.

She looked up from devouring her salad to find him watching her—again.

“Hungry?” he asked, annoyingly amused.

She took time to swallow, lick a spot of dressing off her upper lip and wipe her mouth with her napkin, before replying. “Yeah. So?”

“Last night at the Castle, you didn’t eat much of anything.”

She wisely refrained from comment on that one and instructed instead, “Your father. With lots of detail, please. If I have to write this thing, you have to give me something to work with.”

“You can be very bossy, you know that?”

“And you can be a manipulative SOB—or did I mention that already?” She dropped her napkin in her lap and forked up another huge bite of salad.

“Yeah. You mentioned it.” He stared at her mouth as he lounged back in his seat, keeping one strong arm resting on the table—to the right of his empty drink and his untouched salad. “You’re still steamed because I dragged you into this.”

She paused before stuffing that big bite into the mouth he kept staring at. “How did you guess? The story, please.”

He picked up his drink, rattled the ice cubes as Nadine rushed by—and finally continued. “We took a booth that night. The one right behind you, I think it was. I remember that Ma and my dad sat together. I sat across from them. I tried to be very, very good. And whenever my father would look at me with those scary eyes of his, I’d get this tightness in my stomach, this feeling that I wouldn’t mind so much when he went away again. Little did I know that when he left that time, he was never coming back.”

B.J., having polished off her salad, longed to pick up her plate and lick the last of the dressing from it. Somehow, she restrained herself.

And besides, there was still the bread basket. She grabbed it and peeled back the warming towel to reveal four nice, big dinner rolls. Snatching one up, she slathered on the butter and then tore off a hunk and stuck it in her mouth.

God. Bread. Delicious—and Buck was watching her again, grinning that grin of his. She made a move-it-along circular gesture with her free hand.

He took his cue. “Recently—since a few years ago, when it all came out in the papers and I found out who he really was—I’ve been learning about dear old Dad. Blake kept a home base in Norman, Oklahoma, with a woman named Tammy Rae Sandovich. He had one child with Tammy Rae. A boy, Marsh.”

She swallowed. “Your half-brother…”

“One among many. I met Marsh last year. Great guy. Blake used to beat him—and his mother, too. A lot. So in hindsight, with the information I have now, I can’t say I regret that dear old Dad didn’t show up much, or that he stopped coming around when I was so young.”

B.J. felt a faint twinge of something that might have been sympathy—for Buck, for all the left-behind children of the evil Blake. With that twinge came the urge to reach across the table, to cover Buck’s hand with her own, to reassure him, the way a friend would. It was an urge she took care to suppress.

Nadine set Buck’s second drink in front of him. “Everything okay?”

B.J. swallowed again. “Great,” she said, and popped the last of the roll into her mouth.

Nadine beamed at B.J.—and scolded Buck. “Eat your salad. Steaks are on the way.”

“I’m getting to it, Nadine.”

The waitress clucked her tongue and left them—and Buck reached over and turned off the recorder. Before B.J. could swallow that last chunk of bread and object, he leaned closer and spoke low. “I talked to Ma—about what’s up with Bowie and Glory.”

Okay, she was curious. She washed the bread down with water. “So, and?”

“Glory’s pregnant.”

“Pregnant.” She set down her glass. She probably should have guessed—and was this too close to home, or what?

“Bowie wants to marry her.”

“So he said—more than once. And she said no. Repeatedly. At the top of her lungs, as I recall.”

Buck finally picked up his fork. “It doesn’t matter what she said. He’ll marry her, one way or the other.”

“Not if she keeps saying no.”

“You just don’t get it.”

“That’s right, I don’t.”

“Bowie’s a Bravo.”

“And that explains…what?”

“Everything.”

“Oh. Well. To you, maybe.”

He wore an excessively patient expression. “My brothers and I were raised minus a father. That’s not going to happen to our kids.”

“Ah.” And given her own circumstances, B.J. wasn’t sure she liked the sound of this. “Okay. Just to recap here. Bowie’s a Bravo. So he has to marry Glory—because she’s going to have his baby?”

“Yeah.”

“As in, one and one equals two?”

“That’s right.”

“Buck. Hello. Twenty-first century, U.S. of A.”

He waved his fork for silence. “Look. A Bravo may make mistakes in life. Big ones. But you can bet your favorite pair of sexy shoes that when there’s an innocent kid involved, a Bravo will always find a way to do the right thing.”

A stream of perfectly valid arguments scrolled through B.J.’s brain: that sometimes marriage just isn’t the right solution, that a child can have a productive, happy life without her parents being married. That some people—herself among them—just aren’t meant for marriage, that a bad marriage is never a good thing, for the child, or her parents….

She kept those arguments to herself. This was much too dangerous a subject to get into right now.

Chewing on another roll, she watched him as he ate his salad, thinking, I am now going to turn on the tape recorder and get on with the interview.

But then again…