Page 44 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

I told him.

Hamilton sat down on the corner of my desk and stared at the wall for a second.

"So let me make sure I got this. A woman tells you she's pregnant, and inside of five minutes you told her you'd marry her because it's the right thing to do."

"That ain't exactly how I said it."

"How'd you say it?"

I told him how I said it.

He grimaced. "That's worse."

"Do you want to marry her?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"Because she's pregnant?"

"No."

"You love her?"

I looked at him like he had lost his mind. "Yeah."

Hamilton did not say anything. He just sat there on the corner of my desk and waited, the way he does when he wants a man to hear his own self think.

"What?"

"Does Rue know that?"

I opened my mouth.

I went back through all of it. The overlook. The cabinet hinge. Standing in my mother's driveway with her looking up at me asking what we had been talking about, and me kissing her forehead and saying mostly, because the real word was right there behind my teeth and I would not turn it loose.

Nothing. Not once. Not one time in three months.

Hamilton's face changed.

"You ain't never told that woman you love her?"

"No."

He leaned all the way back and looked at the ceiling.

"You dumb motherfucker."

He went out to the yard and left me sitting there.

Three months, I thought.

Three months of showing her. I fixed her door and I told her the truth about my record before this town could tell her their version and I sat at her daddy's table and answered for all of it. Every bit of that was me saying it.

I never once said it.

And the first time I opened my mouth about forever, I made it sound like a sentence a judge handed down, with a pregnancy test on my desk for evidence.

I put my head in my hands.