I smiled at the lemon meringue, unable to help myself. “Always,” I agreed readily, despite my dislike of opening up about my personal life.
“Yeah, well if you have any problems, you send him my way. That boy needs a father.”
I spun around on my heel and pointed my dishrag at RJ. “Hey, now. That’s too far.”
RJ held up his hands in surrender, but his words were as sharp as ever. “You know it’s true, Ruby. He’s going to turn wild in that home of yours. Your mama ain’t no help.”
“If you’ll excuse me,” I told him briskly, “I’m going to see if Reg needs help.”
He made a sound of acknowledgment, but I could tell he wasn’t happy. It didn’t matter to me how I’d wounded his sensitive feelings. He was the one coming after me and my parenting. He should know better.
Not that I could even blame him. Nosiness was how this whole damn town worked. Everybody was in everybody else’s business. My thoughts flickered briefly to Dolly Farrow and how I’d aired her business earlier.
“Hey, Reg,” I greeted the gigantic black man that could cook just about anything you asked for. I had no idea why he stuck around this town when he could have gone anywhere with his culinary skills.
He always said something about loving the wide-open space out here. He claimed to get claustrophobic in big cities. But I hardly believed him. This town made me itchy.
Not that I would leave either. I made my choice seven years ago when I’d found out I was pregnant with Max. Freshly graduated from high school, with all my hopes and dreams in a giant dumpster fire, I settled at home with my mom and decided Clark City would have to do. For me and my little guy.
“Mick giving you problems?” he asked intuitively.
Letting out a steady breath I rubbed my temples soothingly. “RJ’s out there,” I explained.
He made a sound in the back of his throat. “Trouble on the best friend front? I hardly believe my ears.”
I glared at him and his faux sense of surprise. I loved RJ like the father I never had, but he also irritated the bejesus out of me. “He’s not my best friend.”
Reggie gave me a look. “Uh, huh.”
“Coco’s my best friend. You know that.”
“Yeah, and she’s also a bad influence. You should stick with the old man.”
I snorted. He was right. My real best friend since kindergarten was a bad influence. But in the best way. If it wasn’t for her, I’d have locked myself away in my mother’s double wide a long time ago and probably starved to death.
No, that’s not true. Meals on Wheels would have found me. But I would at least be a cob-webbed version of myself. And Max didn’t deserve that.
“What’d he say?” Reggie asked with genuine curiosity.
“He’s just trying to give me parenting advice per usual.”
“This whole town tries to give you parenting advice, have you noticed that?” I blinked at him. Was he serious? Had I noticed? He laughed again. “Not too many single moms around here I guess.”
I shrugged. I was raised by a single mom, so it wasn’t strange to me to raise Max by myself. And in the part of town I was from, there were plenty of single-parent homes. They weren’t always moms. Dad’s shared the statistic too. And grandparents doing the worthy work of raising their grandkids when the parents stepped out. There were plenty of statistics available for the trailer park on the wrong side of the tracks.
I wasn’t even the only single mom in my graduating class of twenty-three students. Another girl, Lauren Debrovsky had gotten knocked up at college and moved home her junior year.
The town’s excitement surrounding my surprise pregnancy was more than normal due to the mystery of the father. A secret I would never tell. But a secret every person speculated about no matter how stalwart my silence on the matter.
It made Max and I quite the topic of conversation around here. Again, I was used to the talk. My mom, Maxine Lorraine Dawson was a tank of a woman. She’d managed the local strip club for my entire life after the owner had kicked her off the pole for getting knocked up with me.
Refusing to give me up, she’d happily moved to the office where she’d found her true calling in life—corralling strippers to get “their tight, no-good asses on the fucking stage already.” A phrase I’d heard repeatedly during the hours I spent there with her before I was old enough to stay home by myself.
“I guess not,” I agreed with Reggie, deflecting away from the quiet conjecture he asked about.
The problem was that I’d gotten pregnant so close to graduation night. There was a house full of suspects, but nobody had come forward to claim little Max as their own. And thankfully, he took after me more than his father. After infancy, I was positive I’d be found out.
But Max shared my dark, riotous hair and pale complexion. He had my slender nose and round jawline. And right now, with three missing front teeth, his dark-rimmed glasses and the cutest sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of his nose and cheeks, he looked more like my grandpa in his old age than anyone in our town. Granted, he was tall for his age and way too fast. He was an exceptional athlete—something nobody would ever say about me. But so far, that hadn’t been enough to give away his paternal genes.
