Page 49 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

Neither one of them ever announced a thing.

My father had not simply decided one morning that Bobby Jo was good enough. Nobody handed him that conclusion. Bobby Jo had walked into that shop over and over for six months, and my daddy had done the harder thing.

He’d let himself find out he was wrong.

Sue Ellen sat down in the chair beside me and put her hand on my stomach without asking, because that is a thing women do to you once you get past a certain size, and I had stopped fighting it in March. The baby kicked hard enough beneath her palm that she felt it.

“Oh.” Her hand went still. “Oh, that’s a boy right there.”

“That is a boy who has been standing on my bladder since Thursday.”

She laughed, but then her eyes went shiny, and she kept her hand where it was.

“You know what I keep thinking about?” she said. “My son has spent his whole grown life trying to be the opposite of his daddy. Every single choice that boy made, he made it against something.” She patted my stomach. “Sometimes I think he forgot he was allowed to just be happy about a thing.”

I looked across the yard at him. He had his cap on backward, and Marcus’s little girl was telling him something extremely serious. Bobby Jo had gone down on one knee in the gravel to hear every word of it.

I knew exactly what Sue Ellen meant, because I had been doing the same thing from the other direction.

Thirty-two years of being the daughter nobody had to worry about. Thirty-two years of making sure I was never the one they talked about after church. Bobby Jo Maddox started out as the first messy choice I ever made in my life.

Except he wasn’t a mess.

He never had been.

The mess had been mine, and I had been putting it on him.

Around six, Hamilton disappeared. Ten minutes after that, Regina started checking her phone in a way that was extremely unlike her.

I narrowed my eyes at her. “What did you do?”

“Now Rue Boo… Why do you always assume I did something?”

“History…”

“That is very hurtful and also fair.”

Bobby Jo came up behind my chair and rested his hand on my shoulder. “Come ride with me a minute.”

I looked up at him. “Where?”

“Not far.”

I looked at Regina and found her looking at the sky, suddenly interested in a cloud over the ridge.

He drove out past the county line and turned up the gravel to the overlook. By the time I realized where we were, my chest had already started doing something.

Somebody had been out here.

A quilt covered the picnic table, and two mason jars with candles sat on top of it. Hamilton’s truck was nowhere in sight, which told me everything I needed to know about Hamilton.

Bobby Jo helped me up the little rise with one hand tucked beneath my elbow, and for once, I let him.

“Last September,” he said, “you sat right there and would not look at me for about twenty minutes.”

“I was terrified of you.”

“I know it.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I was trying not to scare you off and doing a bad job of it. And I didn’t have one clue what I was doing, Rue. I thought I was having supper with a schoolteacher.”