Page 18 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

Thirteen years of keeping my nose clean and I still couldn’t get rip of my reputation or my damn daddy’s.

For the rest of the day at work, I had an attitude the size of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I told Cody his forms were sloppy when they were fine. Eventually, I stood in the shop rearranging a rack of tools that didn’t need it until Hamilton leaned on the door frame.

"You gonna tell me, or you gonna keep beating up that rack?"

Looking over, I knew he wasn’t gonna leave till I spilled my guts. A sigh left me before my words did. "Went by Ellis Tire this morning. He gave me the speech."

"Which one?"

"The one about my daddy."

Hamilton nodded and didn’t say anything for a minute, which is how he operated when he was about to say something I wouldn’t enjoy.

"When's the last time you talked to Danny Joe?"

I put a socket back in the wrong slot on purpose, because throwing it at my best friend would’ve started a real fight.

"Bobby Jo."

I shrugged. "March. Maybe February."

He shook his head "Motherfucker, it's September."

Raising a brow, I wondered where he was going with this,"I'm aware what month it is."

"So you're mad at a man you ain't even talking to." Hamilton shrugged when I turned around. "You been arguing with him in your head for twenty years and he ain't heard one word of it. Might be worth saying some where he can hear."

I sighed. "Mind your business."

"You are my business. You sign my checks."

I threw a rag at him and he caught it before walking out with a grin. I hated him about four hours, which is how long it took me to call and get on the visitation list for Saturday.

Irondale was two hours Dillwyn Correctional Prison, and I made every mile of it with the radio off.

I kept getting hung up on the same memory.It replayed in my head over and over the entire way.

I was six or seven and Danny Joe had me out on the river in a jon boat at daylight, showing me how to work a plastic worm along the bottom, and he was patient about it in a way that matches nothing else I know about him. He let me steer his old Ford around Ledbetter's field that summer with my hands at ten and two while he worked the pedals and told me I was doing fine.

That man had existed, and that was the part nobody could warn you about. That you could mourn something or a version of someone that was barely ever there.

Then the rest of it played behind my mind like a movie in a darkened theater. Him gone four days and Mama saying he was working over in Lynchburg. The coffee can where she kept the light bill money going empty twice. Arguments behind a bedroom door with the television turned up. Me at fifteen, watching my mother work a double and then come home and iron my school clothes, understanding for the first time that she had been carrying every bit of it alone for years.

I pulled into that parking lot with no idea which one of them was going to walk out to the table.

He was thinner than I remembered, gray through the beard, and there was a stiffness in how he sat down that made him look every bit of sixty-one. A woman two tables over was crying quietly and pretending she was not.

"Hey, son."

I nodded, expelling a breath I didnt’ realize I’d been holding."Hey."

"How's the business?"

"Good. Eleven trucks now. Poured the new lot at Ridgeway Baptist last month."

"Eleven." He shook his head. "Lord."

"Mama's good too. Scans were clean in June."