Page 17 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

I did not have a single word in my entire vocabulary for that.

I stood at the window after his taillights turned off my street, and then I picked up my phone.

RUE: I know now.

REGINA: Know what?

I looked at the door he had walked out of, and at the cabinet above my stove that closed all the way for the first time in four years.

RUE: Why I want him…

I settled back onto the couch and started explaining to my best friend about how my evening had just gone.

Chapter 6

Bobby J

Ellis Tire and Service had been putting tires on my trucks since before I owned any. Even back when I was twenty-four and driving for Delbert Yates with a fresh record and nobody else willing to run me a line of credit.

I had a flat on the F-250 Thursday morning, so I pulled into the bay like I had a hundred times. It was then I saw who was behind the counter and remembered whose daughter I;d been kissing.

"Mr. Ellis."

"Bobby Jo." He did not look up from the invoice he was writing. "Front right?"

"Yes, sir. Picked up a screw out at Ridgeway."

He wrote the ticket and slid it across the counter while the shop radio played gospel low.

"How's Rue?"

"Probably still mad at me."

He did not find that as funny as I did. He set his pen down and looked at me over the top of his glasses, and I understood we had arrived at the part of the morning I had been dreading since I turned in.

"I knew your daddy," he said bluntly. He wasn’t the type to mince words, I could tell.

"Most people did."

"He put a set of tires on layaway here in ninety-eight and never came back for them." He said it without heat, which made it worse. "I watched that man get chance after chance in this town. From his boss, from his mama, from your mother. From me, one time, which was one time to many for my taste."

My jaw set. "I ain't my daddy."

"Didn't say you were."

I snorted. "Didn't have to."

He kept right on looking at me, ready for me to collapse under his gaze.

Not a chance old man, I kept on standing.

"My daughter has never once brought a man home," he said. "Thirty-two years. And I'd be lying if I said the first one showing up in my driveway didn't scare the hell out of me."

I nodded in agreement. "I understand that."

"I don't believe you do. Not yet." He picked his pen back up. "Kenny'll have you out in twenty minutes."

I sat in the waiting area with a cup of coffee I didn’t even fucking want. The whole time my ears burned the way they had when I was seventeen and somebody's mother pulled her kid out of my truck in the church parking lot.