Page 36 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

Then I walked the rest of the store putting things in my basket. Toothpaste.

A bag of salt and vinegar chips.

Aspirin.

A birthday card for nobody.

Batteries.

A loofah.

By the time I got in line I had eleven items, three of which were pregnancy tests, and I had constructed an entire persona for myself as a woman who simply had a lot of errands.

The cashier was about nineteen. She scanned all eleven things without looking at one of them and asked if I wanted my receipt in the bag.

I felt like I was smuggling something across a border.

I took the first one at seven forty.

Two lines.

I sat on the edge of the tub and stared at it and told myself those cheap ones are wrong all the time, and then I took the second one, and while I waited on it I read the box of the third one twice without absorbing a single word.

Second test.

Positive.

Third test, the expensive digital one that does not give you the dignity of interpretation. It just prints it out in gray letters like a receipt.

I sat down on the closed toilet lid. Then, at some point I do not remember deciding on, I was on the floor with my back against the tub and all three of them lined up on the bath mat like they were evidence.

I called Regina."Can you come over?"

Her voice changed instantly. "What's wrong?"

"Just come."

She let herself in twelve minutes later, which meant she had not obeyed a single speed limit.

"Rue Boo?"

I didn’t say anything. I was still on the floor. I pointed at the bath mat.

Regina came into the doorway and looked down at the three of them, and for one whole second, Regina Beharie had nothing to say.

"I had sex twice," I said.

She blinked at me.

"Baby. Unfortunately, that is enough."

I laughed.

I mean I really laughed, did it so hard I put my forehead on my knees. Then somewhere in the middle all that laughing it turned into sobs. Regina came down onto that bathroom floor beside me and put her arm around my shoulders and didn’t say one word while I cried.

"My daddy is going to kill me."

She gave a small laugh. "You're thirty-two years old."