I knew who the father was. I knew exactly who he was. He’d just deployed to somewhere in the Middle East.
“No,” I told her, my face heating in shame. She assumed it was because of the number of anonymous bed partners I’d had. In reality there had only been the one.
And like I said, he’d just deployed halfway across the world. This wasn’t exactly news I could drop over Skype.
“All right then, stay here. We’ll figure this out, Ruby cube. College can still be an option if you’re willing to work hard.”
I started crying all over again. College—that was the real reason I was mourning. It had never been a question of keeping the baby. While I knew I had options where I didn’t end up being a teen mom, I also knew that the life growing inside of me was mine. And I was responsible for bringing this baby into the world. And now I was the one responsible for protecting him or her, sheltering him or her from this big, bad world, for raising this baby to be the person I could not be.
I wrapped my hand around my now empty belly and that fierce protectiveness that had kept me from making a choice I would have regretted every single day for the rest of my life had sparked to life that day. I knew I’d made the right decision bringing Max into this world.
My mom was right. He’d changed my life in the very best way. Finances were always tight, and it could be difficult living with my mom, but I had never known happiness existed like this. I had never known you could love someone so much and so wholly. I had never known what it was like to be loved like this until I had my very own little person.
The trailers in Meadowbrooks varied in states of dilapidation. The occasional well-kept mobile home stood out like a sore thumb amidst the rest of the hovels. Mom’s was somewhere in between the worst of the worst and the Better Homes and Gardens version that were mostly toward the front of the park.
I pulled beneath the carport and shut off the car. Max already had his seatbelt off and the door opened before I could pull the keys from the ignition.
For all her faults, Max loved his grandma. I heard him yelling for her the second he reached the top of our short wooden deck. He ripped open the flimsy door, a wide smile on his sweet face.
“Grammy!” he shouted enthusiastically. “I saved my strawberry milk for you!”
I chuckled to myself at their weird tradition. Max would order a strawberry milk every single day at school and then kept it in his lunch box with an ice pack until he could deliver it to my mom first thing after school. My mom apparently loved strawberry milk—a fact I didn’t know until Max started school last year. It was by far the oddest thing about her.
Maybe.
Okay, it was one of her many oddities.
She was already sucking strawberry milk through the straw when I finally walked in the house. “Hi, Mom,” I greeted, feeling the usual release of stress as soon as I was safely inside my home.
She barely took a break from drinking her milk. “Heard that Cole kid’s coming back,” she said gruffly. “Don’t suppose he’ll want to settle up at Misty’s now that he’s made something of himself in this world.”
My stomach turned at another mention of Levi. “How much does he owe?” I asked out of genuine curiosity. Levi didn’t seem like the strip club kind of guy. At least he didn’t back when I’d known him. He had always had a girlfriend and he was never the overly wild kind. Sure, he did some stupid stuff when we were kids, but a strip club seemed like a stretch.
She made a sound in the back of her throat. “More than any eighteen-year-old kid should owe an establishment of Misty’s repute.”
“He’s not eighteen anymore. I’m sure he’s learned to pay his debts by now.”
“I’m sure he has not,” she countered. “In my experience, men don’t learn lessons. They just learn how to cover their tracks better.”
My mother, the expert on everything male. Her accurate assessment would have been laughable if she hadn’t worked at Misty’s for thirty years. Turns out, you do learn a thing or two about men in that environment.
She was right about Max’s father anyway. In the midst of morning sickness and feeling sorry for myself, I’d wondered aloud if I would have to share custody of my child. She’d said, “Ruby baby, he’s surely gotten a taste of the world. He ain’t coming back.”
And he hadn’t. Although, to be fair, not for the reasons she’d assumed.
She still didn’t know who Max’s father was. And she assumed I didn’t either.
“You know what? Maybe I’m thinking of that friend of his. The bird one.”
I set my purse down and tried to imagine who on earth she was talking about. The bird one? “Finch?” I guessed.
“Yeah, Finch.”
“He still lives in town, Mama.”
“I guess he does,” she grumbled.
“So, Levi Cole never ran up a tab with Misty’s?”
