Page 53 of My Redneck Baby Daddy

The house didn’t go quiet immediately, and I was glad it didn’t. Somebody was laughing in the kitchen, the Beharie baby was fussing, and one of my guys was hollering at the game.

The sight before me had me stunned and someone could’ve pinched me and I wouldn’t have felt it.

My father was standing on my porch in the cold with a duffel bag in one hand and a grocery store pumpkin pie in the other. Thinner than the last time, gray all through the beard, and free.

BJ looked up at him from about the height of his knee. "Who are you?"

Danny Joe couldn’t even get a word out.

I came up behind my son and put my hand on his curls, and behind me I felt it go through the house.

My mother first.

Then Rue, then Claire and Charles, then Hamilton in the doorway with his baby, one at a time, as they worked out who was standing in my door.

"Daddy?" BJ asked.

"Yeah, buddy."

"Who is he?"

I looked at my father. "This is Danny Joe."

BJ's whole face scrunched up. "Like you?"

"Yeah. Like me."

He thought about that with his whole body, the way he does. "And me."

Danny Joe put his hand over his mouth. Tears seemed to be eating at the edge of his eyes.

"Yeah," I said. "And you."

Charles came up beside me and looked at that pie. "What kind?"

"Pumpkin," Danny Joe finally said something..

"We got two already."

"Daddy!" Rue said.

Charles looked at his daughter. "What? We do."

"I'll eat it," Hamilton called from the living room.

"See?"

Then Charles reached past me and pulled my front door the rest of the way open. "Come on in before you let all the heat out."

Danny Joe got four feet inside and stopped, because my mother was standing there with a dish towel in her hands.

Nobody ran at anybody and nobody cried on anybody's shoulder. Thirty-some years is too much for that.

"Sue Ellen."

"Danny Joe."

She looked down at that sad little pie in its plastic dome.