Page 26 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

I told her Rue was about five feet tall in shoes and kept a cardigan on the back of her chair at work, and that she had argued with me about Steinbeck for twenty minutes at a picnic table and won.

Mama didn’t say one word. She sat there with her tea getting warm in her hands and let me keep going, and about four minutes in I heard myself and clammed up.

"Go on," she said.

"That's it."

"Mm."

I wiped my hands on the rag and did not look at her. "Mama, she's Black."

Sue Ellen looked at me for a long moment. "And?"

I felt about nine years old."It ain't a thing to me. I just wanted you knowing that first."

"I raised you. I know what's a thing to you." Then she set her cup down hard enough to rattle it. "Ellis! Charles Ellis, from the tire shop?"

"That's her daddy."

"Her mother's the nurse. Claire." Mama sat back. "Well, Lord."

"Now you got it."

"Now I got it." She looked at me a second longer. "So what are you standing in my kitchen scared of?"

"It's this town." I put the rag down. "Her daddy already can't stand the sight of me, and he's got cause. Her mama's worried, and she's got cause too. And on top of all that, she's gonna walk into Food Lion with me and every person in there is gonna have something to say, and none of it sticks to me. It all goes on her." I looked up. "She's spent thirty-two years being the good one. Church every Sunday. Never a word said about her. And I'm fixing to cost her that."

Mama set her tea down.

"You ain't asking me if I approve," she said. "You're asking me if you're allowed to want her."

She got up and went to the window over the sink, and she stood there a minute looking out at the yard.

"Before your daddy," she said, "there was a boy named Samuel Carter."

I did not move, and waited with baited breath to hear what my mama wanted to share with me.

"I was nineteen. He worked at the mill with my brother and he had the prettiest laugh I ever heard on a man." She giggled but kept her back to me. "We went together most of two years, and there was a while I thought that was my whole life."

"You never told me that."

"You never asked me anything about before, and I didn't volunteer." She turned around then. "His mother wasn't sure about me and mine wasn't sure about him, and my daddy had opinions he shared loud. And this was 1986 in Irondale. People drove past his car sitting in front of my house just to get a look. I got tired."

"What happened?"

"Nothing happened. That's the whole thing." Her mouth went crooked. "I let it get hard enough that I let go, and he moved to Greensboro, and a year later I met Danny Joe at a dance."

I sat there on her kitchen floor and could not think of a single thing to say.

"Now look at me." She pointed the spoon at me. "I don't regret you. Not one day of my life, not for one second. Don't you ever confuse what I'm telling you about that."

"Mama."

"I mean it. I'd walk the whole road again to get you." She put the spoon down. "But there's people you lose because life takes them from you, and then there's people you lose because you were too scared to hold on."

She looked at me.

"That second kind stays with you different."