Page 48 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

By the middle of May, I was seven months pregnant, carrying what felt like a bowling ball against my bladder, and Bobby Jo Maddox had somehow become the single most insufferable man in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

“I got it,” he said.

“It’s a paper plate.”

“Still.” He took it right out of my hand.

“I would like you to hear me.” I planted both hands on what used to be my waist and stared up at him. “I am pregnant. I have not lost the use of my arms.”

The yard at Maddox Concrete had been cleared for the company cookout, with folding tables tucked beneath the shade, a smoker going, and about sixty people scattered around once you counted everybody’s children. Marcus’s little girl had been riding Waylon around like a horse for an hour.

Regina leaned toward me with her plate balanced in her lap.

“You picked him.”

“You picked him first.”

She paused, considering that for a second. “Damn. That’s true.”

“Seven months,” Hamilton was saying to Bobby Jo across the table. “You ready?”

“I got the room done,” Bobby Jo replied.

His best shot him a look. “That ain’t what I asked.”

“I painted it twice.”

“Still ain’t what I asked.” Hamilton grinned at him. “First six weeks, you ain’t gonna sleep. Not a wink. Then right about the time you get used to that, they start smiling at you and you forget everything.”

“Jordan slept.”

“Jordan did not sleep. Regina and I have been lying to this county about that child for eight years.”

Down the table, my mother and Sue Ellen had their heads together over the deviled eggs.

“The swelling’s normal,” Sue Ellen was saying. “She’s carrying low, though.”

“That’s what I told her.”

“Excuse me.” I pointed at both of them. “Mama, would you please stop telling Sue Ellen things?”

“Sue Ellen asked.”

“And Claire answered,” Sue Ellen said.

Then my mother’s phone lit up on the table, and there it was on the screen. A text. From Sue Ellen Maddox. With a photograph attached.

“You two are texting?”

“We have been texting since October, baby.”

I think I sat in shock for a full fifteen minutes after that reveal. At some point, I looked across the yard and found my father standing over by the shop with Bobby Jo. Daddy had a beer in his hand, his head tipped back as he laughed.

Out loud.

At something Bobby Jo said.

It had happened so slowly I’d never tracked it. Bobby Jo started stopping by Ellis Tire in December, first for an alignment, then for a set of tires, then for no reason except that he was in town and the coffee was free. In February, my father sent a man who needed a garage pad poured straight to Maddox Concrete. In March, Bobby Jo moved his whole fleet account over to my daddy.