Page 28 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

I walked her out to her car a little after six with a foil-wrapped half of pound cake she had tried three times to refuse.

"Your mother is not what I expected," Rue said.

"What'd you expect?"

"I don't know. Somebody quieter."

"That woman fed nine hundred teenagers a day for twenty-six years. Ain't nothing quiet left in her."

Rue laughed and then leaned back against her car door, and the light was doing something to her face that I was not equipped for. "Can I ask you something? Before I got here, y'all were talking about something. She had that look."

"We were."

"About what?"

"You."

She went completely still. "Me?"

I leaned down and kissed her forehead, because the other thing was sitting right there behind my teeth and I was not ready to turn it loose in a driveway.

"Mostly," I said.

“Well keep your secrets then,” she grinned getting into her car and driving off.

I watched her go, and the organ in my chest twitched.

Yup, I thought. I’m a goner.

Chapter 9

Rue

Idecided on a Tuesday that my parents needed to actually know the man that had deflowered me…you know… instead of knowing about him. By Saturday at five forty I came to the realization that I might’ve jumped the gun.

"Stop pacing," Regina said.

"I'm not pacing."

"Rue, you have passed that refrigerator fourteen times."

"I need things."

"From the refrigerator?"

"Sometimes."

She took the dish towel out of my hands and pointed it at me. "Hamilton’s coming. He'll be sitting right there at that table. We are not sending that man into the lion's den by himself."

"My daddy’a not a lion."

Regina gave a slight cackle. "Your daddy shook his hand like he was serving him papers."

I paused in my pacing. "Would you stop saying that?"

Through the window over my mother's sink I could see my father out at the grill, turning chicken with the concentration of a surgeon. He was doing more than grilling too, my daddy was out there doing entirely to much thinking.

Bobby Jo pulled in at six.