My brows came together as I studied the machine sending bubbles out across the field. My wife didn’t strike me as the bubble-machine type. “You wanted a bubble machine?”
“She loves bubbles. Since she’s kind of the star of the party, she should have a say in it.” Rowen grinned at her daughter, who was going a little cross-eyed trying to focus on a bubble coming at her. It popped right between her eyeballs, and she giggled like it was the grandest thing in the entire world.
“Nice she finally has a name, right?” I said.
Rowen’s eyes lifted to the sky. “Well, it wasn’t like I was just going to name our child when you were unconscious. What if you had woken up to find out you had a child named Winnipeg or Desdemona?”
“I would have loved her every bit as much as I do now.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to take a chance, and besides, it wasn’t like she needed a name during her first week of life. It’s not like we’ve scarred her permanently because we didn’t give her a name the moment she ejected out of my—”
My grimace must have stopped her. Either that or her memory of the whole birth. From what Garth had told me from what Josie had told him, war documentaries portrayed less carnage.
I nudged her. “I’m glad you waited. I’m glad we figured it out together.”
“You and I might be the only ones. The rest of our friends and family were about to mutiny if we didn’t give her a name, I think.” Rowen held out her hands, and almost immediately, our daughter went into them. “But in plenty of cultures, a baby doesn’t get named for days, even years. We were just being multicultural.”
“Sure, we were,” I said.
“What? You think I could have come up with a name like Elodie on my own? That brilliance took the two of our heads coming together.”
At the sound of her name, Elodie looked between us, like she was answering with a yeah, what is it? Her name hadn’t come from flipping through a list of old family names or even because of its meaning or origin—it had been far more simple than that. It was the one name both of us had had on our list of names we’d drawn up at the hospital. For others, that might have seemed an impetuous way to name one’s child. For us, it was just the right way.
“Besides, you were the one who was convinced I was wrong about having a son, so I figured you’d have a list of girl names to bring to the baby-naming table.” Rowen’s gaze moved from Elodie to me.
The look in her eyes stopped my breath. Ever since the accident, some of the looks she’d given me could bowl me over if I wasn’t bracing for them. It was almost as if she was looking at someone she’d buried and later seen risen from the grave.
“I was also just a little preoccupied, looming at your bedside in between visiting the NICU, worried my husband, who had just become a father, was going to ditch us.”
I tightened my arm around her shoulders. “I wasn’t going anywhere. Someone upstairs just figured I’d better learn a tough lesson before I became a dad and exhaustion took on a whole new meaning.” I kissed her temple when I noticed Rowen’s eyes glazing over. They’d done a lot of that ever since the accident. “There was and is no way I’m ever leaving my girls. Ever.”
Rowen looked away long enough to wipe her eyes. “Did you hear that, Elodie? We’ve got Daddy’s word on it now. He’s not going anywhere.”
Elodie made a few spit bubbles to show her support.
“What we always fail to bring up when we talk about that day is the one member of our family who moved on to greener pastures,” I said solemnly, covering my heart.
Rowen slugged me. “Old Bessie had been needing to move on to greener pastures since the Reagan administration.”
I sighed. “I loved that truck.”
“I don’t think you’re having much of an issue conjuring up the same emotion for your new truck.” She stared at our new truck, gleaming in the driveway. “Traitor.”
“I will always carry Old Bessie right here in my heart, but I’ve got to say, heated seats in the winter and a working air-conditioning system in the summer are really great features.”
Her elbow nudged mine. “Yeah, I miss her too. She was a good truck, but she died protecting someone she loved. That’s a noble way to go out if there ever was one.”
“Agreed,” I replied with a nod.
“That guy from the insurance company was adamant that if you’d hit that tree at that speed in anything less than the tank Old Bessie was, you wouldn’t have, well, you know . . .”
My jaw tightened. “I know.”
With a sniff and shake of her head, Rowen bounced Elodie in her lap a few times before rising. “I think we’ve dodged the party long enough. Time to get back to the festivities.” Rowen lifted her eyebrows at Elodie. “After all, the mayor’s in there.”
“Only because one of Montana’s up-and-coming artists is the guest of honor at the baby shower,” I added, taking one last swing before standing beside my girls.
She let out a huff. “Only because the local golden boy drove his truck into a two-hundred-year-old maple tree after falling asleep at the wheel from getting a total of ten hours of sleep in the past month the very same day his wife with a severe heart condition decided to have their firstborn child.”
It wasn’t word for word, and she might have taken creative liberties with certain words, but it was close to the local newspaper’s article that had been printed the week after the accident. There had been no shortage of follow-up articles either. Not because Rowen or I gave a darn about talking to the newspaper about that day, but because in a small town, that kind of stuff was big news. Rowen was convinced the mayor was only there to gather additional intel to pass off to the newspaper for yet another sensationalized article. I didn’t know. I liked giving people the benefit of the doubt, but if we woke up tomorrow to find a detailed description about the Baby Born in Tragedy’s baby shower, I definitely wasn’t voting for the mayor when her reelection came around.