Page 45 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

Well shit…

Chapter 14

Bobby Jo

You can’t just pick up a phone and call a man in prison. He either calls you or he don't call at all.

So, I put sixty dollars on my daddy’s account Tuesday morning and carried my phone in my hand all day like a teenager. Around ten after six it rang with the recording asking if I would accept the call.

"Hey, son."

I took a breath. "Hey. I got something to tell you."

"Well, tell it. I got fourteen minutes."

"Rue's pregnant."

The line went quiet long enough that I checked the screen. "I'm gonna be a granddaddy?"

I sat down on my own porch step, because I hadn’t heard that word out loud yet from anybody. Waylon came over and put his head on my knee like he knew.

You’re gonna be a big brother, boy,I thought about my pittbull with a baby tumbling around on a carpet. Best buds.

"Yeah," I said. "Reckon so."

"Well, hell." His voice had gone up half an octave. "Well, hell, Bobby Jo."

Then he got quiet, and when he came back he had that careful sound. "So why do you sound like somebody died?"

I told him all of it. The test sitting on my desk. The truck. The bedrooms. The four minutes I’d spent trying to solve a problem nobody had asked me to solve. Then I got to the part where I told her we would get married, and she asked me why, and I managed to give her the wrong answer twice.

“You love her?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said quietly.

His voice stayed steady. “She know?”

I frowned. “Why does everybody keep asking me that?”

“Because you ain’t answering it,” he said, like the answer should’ve been obvious.

I gave the phone a look, my mouth opening before closing again.

I didn’t have one thing to say to that.

"Let me tell you something." Danny Joe's voice dropped. "I told your mother I loved her about nine thousand times. In the kitchen, in the car, off a jail phone more than once. And every time I said it, I believed it."

"I know you did."

"Didn't matter. What she needed was somebody who came home, and what she got was a man who kept explaining himself." He let that sit. "Now listen. You take care of that baby whether Rue marries you or hates you or moves clear across Virginia and don't return your calls."

"I know it."

“That’s being a daddy. That’s the bare minimum, not the whole damn thing, and it ain’t got nothing to do with whether that woman should marry you.”

I sat on my step with my dog's head on my knee.

"And don't you make that woman marry you," he said, "just so you can prove to this county you ain't me."