Page 29 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

He got out in dark jeans, boots, and a gray button-down with the sleeves rolled, because of course he had rolled them, and every tattoo on both forearms was right there in my mother's driveway. He had not hidden one thing about himself, and something in my chest went warm and stupid over it.

He came up the walk with a Tupperware in his hands.

My father opened the door before Bobby Jo got to it.

"Sir."

"Bobby Jo."

Wonderful. We were already having fun.

"My mother sent this." Bobby Jo held out the container. "Pound cake. She said if I came over here empty handed she'd hear about it at church."

My father looked at the Tupperware for a second longer than he needed to. "Sue Ellen still makes that lemon glaze?"

"Yes, sir."

"Huh," my daddy said, and took it.

Hamilton and Regina came up the steps right behind him, Hamilton already talking. I’d never in my life been so glad to see a man I saw all the time.

Dinner started off better than I had any right to expect.

My mother asked about Maddox Concrete, and Bobby Jo told her about the Ridgeway Baptist lot. Then he asked how long she had been at Roanoke River Hospital and what floor and what she did before that. I watched my mother answer three questions in a row and laugh at something he said about hospital coffee. She caught me watching and put her face back on, but it was too late.

My father worked differently. "How many men you got working for you?"

"Fourteen right now. Sixteen in the summer."

"How long you had it, again?" He asked and I could tell he was trying to catch Bobby Jo in some sort of lie.

"Bought Delbert Yates out in twenty-fifteen. Ran it with two trucks and my cousin for about three years before that."

"Good money in concrete?"

"Some years."

My daddy set his fork down.

"And that record of yours?"

The table went quiet enough that I could hear the ice settling in the pitcher.

"Daddy."

"It's all right," Bobby Jo said.

"It’s not all right," I murmured.

"Teach." He said my newly acquired nickname, without taking his eyes off my father. "It's a fair question and he's gonna get a straight answer."

He gave it to him. Possession with intent, twenty-two years old, fourteen months served. He said the charge and the years the way a man reads off a bid, and then he said the part I had not expected.

"I don't expect nobody to skip over it because I own a business now. A man can be different than he was and still be the one that did it."

My father did not say anything for a moment.

Then he said, "What are your intentions with my daughter?"