Page 37 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

"That has never once stopped him from being my daddy."

Regina huffed a laugh and leaned her head back against the tub. I wiped my face with the heel of my hand and looked at the three tests lined up on the mat and made myself say the real one.

"He's going to think I did it on purpose."

"Who is?"

"Bobby Jo." My voice cracked on his name. "Regina, we had one fight, and I said the worst thing I’ve ever said someone, and we haven’t spoken in nine stupid days. And now I'm going to knock on his door and tell him I'm pregnant. What does that look like?"

Regina was way to logical for her own good. "It looks like a woman who had sex with her boyfriend and got pregnant, which is the most ordinary thing in the world."

"He's going to think I'm trying to hold onto him."

"That man has known you two and a half months and he’s never once been wrong about who you are." She turned her head. "He's not going to think that."

"What if he doesn't want it?"

Regina was quiet a second.

"I don't know," she said. "I'm not going to sit on this floor and lie to you about what Bobby Jo might or might not do.”

"That's not comforting."

"It's true, though." She squeezed my shoulder. "Here's what I do know. A baby doesn't mean you have to be with Bobby Jo. And being mad at Bobby Jo doesn't mean he doesn't get to be this baby's daddy. Those are two separate things and people spend years tangling them up. Don't you start."

That was the counselor in her talking and I let her words linger in my mind for a long while.

I picked up my phone around ten and found name was right there. It was in my recent calls, from nine days ago, when he had called me at lunch to ask what kind of pie I wanted him to pick up.

I got my thumb about half an inch from it.

I just couldn’t do it.

Not on the phone, anyway. Not standing in my bathroom with three positive tests on the mat and nine days of silence behind me. He deserved to hear it from me in a room, with my face right there in front of him, so he could look at me while I said it.

But before that, there was somebody else.

I set the phone down and looked over at Regina, and my chin started going.

"I need my mother."

Regina did not make a joke. She got up off that floor and held her hand down to me.

"Then call your mama."

Chapter 12

Rue

My mother came straight from Roanoke and was in my kitchen forty-five minutes later, still in her scrubs with her badge clipped to the collar. Regina had squeezed my shoulder and gone out the back door the second headlights hit the window.

"What's wrong?" Mama said. "You scared me half to death on that phone."

I couldn’t get one word out of my mouth. Instead, I slid the test across the kitchen table.

She looked down at it, and then back at me. Then back down at the test a look of disbelief on her features.

I sat there waiting to find out what my life was going to be like now. My mother pulled out the chair across from me and sat.