Page 46 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

The recording came on and said we had one minute.

Rue

"He was happy," I told Regina. "He got up and started talking about trading his truck and moving his granddaddy's tools out of the third bedroom, and for about ninety seconds it was the best day of my life."

My best friend had the nerve to stare at me."Then what's the problem?"

I threw up my hands. "Then he said we'll get married. Like he was reading it off a list."

Regina set her mug down. "And you asked him why."

"And he said because I'm pregnant, and because it's his child, and because he isn't going to be a man with a child out there he doesn't take care of." My throat went tight. "He never said one word about me."

"Okay," she said. "That's a real thing to be hurt about and I'm not going to talk you out of it. Now can I say the other part?"

I put my head back against the couch. "I can't stop you."

"You have spent two months waiting on that man to prove he's not his daddy." She said it gently, which didn’t help. "The town says it, your father says it, and then you said it right here in this house and you have been sick about it since. Now he does the one thing Danny Joe never did in his life, which is stand up and say that's mine and I'm taking care of it. You looked at it and saw a man doing his duty."

"That's not fair."

"Some of it is." Regina leaned forward. "At some point you have to decide whether you're with Bobby Jo or with his father's mistakes."

I did not say anything for a while.

"You don't have to marry him," she said. "You don't have to do one thing you don't want. But don't make that man serve a sentence his daddy already got."

Bobby Jo

Charles Ellis saw my truck pull in Wednesday and knew before I got the door open.

"I know," he said when I got to the counter.

"Figured you did."

"Her mother told me." He set down his invoice. "You come to tell me that, or something else?"

I took a super deep breath and then I stared that man in the eye. "I love your daughter."

It was the first time I’d said it out loud to a living soul. I said it in a tire shop to a man with every reason to put me out on the sidewalk.

He did not say anything, just quirked an eyebrow and stared back like I was slow as the day is long.

"I ain't asking your permission to love her," I said, "and I ain't asking permission to be in my child's life either, because I'd be in it regardless." I put my hands on the counter. "I'm asking you to understand one thing and then I'll get out of your shop. That baby didn't make me want your daughter. I was already there."

Charles Ellis looked at me a long moment, and then he came around from behind that counter, which he’d never once done for me.

"You think this is about you working with your hands?" He held his own up. "I put tires on cars for a living. My daddy pumped gas."

"I know it ain't that."

"It ain't the other thing either, whatever the hell Roy Tackett said in my lobby." His jaw set. "I spent thirty-six years building one steady thing for Claire and that girl. One house, one job, same pew. You know what steady buys? A child who never had to wonder what she was coming home to."

I nodded. "Yes, sir."

"And I don’t want my daughter spending hers sweeping up behind a man who can't hold himself together. That's what I’m worried about, and I ain't apologizing for it."

"Neither do I," I said. "Want that for her."