Page 13 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

"It's four thirty."

"Ain't what I asked."

She looked at her car, then at me. "No."

"Red, White and Brew has chicken fried steak that'll make you forgive this yard. I'll run you back for your car."

Hamilton made a noise into the cake pan. Rue ignored him and walked to my truck.

She was quiet for the first half of the drive to the diner. We walked in getting a few looks before tucking ourselves into a booth close to the corner and almost out of sight. She ordered a patty melt, which surprised me, and she ate a third of it before she folded her hands.

"Can I ask you something?"

"You've been working up to it since the yard."

She took a breath. "What actually happened?"

I’d been waiting on that question all week. I’d decided a long time ago how I would answer it if somebody ever asked me straight instead of behind my back.

"I sold pills and I sold weed out of a garage on Ferrell Road from the time I was nineteen till they picked me up at twenty-two. I wasn't using...drugs were never my thing. I knew good and well it was against the law." I turned my glass on the table. "I did fourteen months, and I've been on the other side of it for thirteen years."

She did not flinch, which I appreciated more than I let on.

"Why?"

"My mama had cancer. She was a school cook with a plan that covered about half of what she needed, my daddy was gone, and I was nineteen and dumb enough to think fast money was the same as a solution." I shrugged. "She's been in remission eleven years. She makes a pound cake that'll ruin your whole week."

"Bobby Jo…"

"Don't." I shook my head. "I know how that sounds. Plenty of folks got sick mamas and don't start selling dope, Rue. That part's on me. I'd rather you hear it from me plain than hear somebody in town tell it prettier."

She was quiet for a second.

"Your daddy," she said. "My father called you Danny Joe's boy."

I took a sip of water, hating how my father had entered the chat. "Yeah. He would."

"How long has he been gone?" Rue pushed her glasses up a bit.

"Ten years this past March, and it wasn't his first time. He's been in and out since I was about nine, and the part in between wasn't much better than the part inside." I wiped a ring of water off the table. "Everything I built in this town, I built with his last name on the side of these truck."

She understood it before I finished saying it. I watched it happen behind her glasses, and it was the first time anybody had ever gotten there without me spelling it out.

"Do you still talk to him?"

I took longer than I should have.

"Sometimes."

She didn’t ask me what sometimes meant, and she didn’t tell me he was still my father, or any of the other things people say when they want to feel helpful for free.

She just reached across the table and put her hand over mine.

She’s so fucking soft, I thought immediately wondering what her skin would feel like under me.

Her fingers barely covered my knuckles. There was still some chalk dust on her sleeve and a red pen mark on her thumb, and she didn’t say one word.

That did something to me more than that kiss hadn't.