Page 32 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

"Did you? You should’ve said hey."

"You were with somebody." She smiled. "Bobby Jo Maddox?"

I kept squaring up the stack of papers in my hands. "Yes."

"Huh. I didn't know that was your type."

I looked up. "What exactly is my type?"

Her face did something complicated. "I didn't mean anything by it."

I snapped. "Then it shouldn't be any trouble to explain it."

She remembered something she needed in her classroom. The copier finished its run and I stood there in an empty workroom with my heart going like I had run stairs.

It didn’t stop there.

The woman at the pharmacy counter told me she hoped I knew what I was getting into.

Excuse the hell outta me, I knew my nose had wrinkled up at her voice. It was the voice people use when they are being helpful at you. A deacon's wife asked after my mother twice and then asked whether I was still teaching, which is a thing people ask when they want to know whether you’re still respectable.

Then my daddy called on a Tuesday night.

"I need to tell you something before you hear it some other way," he said. "Roy Tackett was in the shop today."

"Okayyyy."

"He asked me how I felt about my daughter running around with one of them Maddox boys." My father's voice was flat as a level. "Then he said Bobby Jo always did have a taste for something different."

Everything in my chest went cold.

"What did you say?"

"I told him his balance and rotation would be ready at four and he could take his white ass outside my shop to wait."

I didn’t know what to do with that. My father had not given Bobby Jo one inch since the day he met him, but he’d put Roy Tackett in his place and I loved him for it.

"Daddy."

"I ain't telling you to quit anybody." He sighed. "I'm telling you people are watching, Rue. And they're gonna keep watching, and some of them ain't gonna be nice about it. I want you ready."

He meant it as armor.

What I heard, lying in bed that night with my phone face down on the nightstand, was that every person in my town was looking at me.

Regina caught it four days later.

"You haven't said his name all week."

I shrugged."I've been busy."

"You said his name nine times a day for a month and a half. Now it's been a week." She shut her office door. "What's going on?"

I shrugged again. "Nothing is going on."

"Rue."

I sat down and took my glasses off, which is apparently what I did now instead of answering questions.