and John Claude Lee, my cousin and eventual law partner, got the marriage annulled after paying Allen five thousand not to contest the action and to keep his mouth shut that it ever happened. When Allen turned up again two years ago, I learned that Daddy could have kept that money in his pocket. I was never legally married to him because he hadn’t bothered to divorce his second wife.
“I guess that little girl I’ve seen you with is… what was her name again? Brittany?” I said.
“Tiffany Jane,” he corrected me. “She’s a cutie, ain’t she? Gonna break a bunch of hearts some day.”
“And the little boy?”
“Tyler. And yeah, ’fore you ask, he was in the oven when me and Katie got married.”
“Did she get a DNA test?” I asked sweetly, remembering that the last time I’d seen him, he had gone to extraordinary (and illegal) lengths to get out of paying child support for little Tiffany Jane.
“Didn’t have to. Anybody can look at him and see he’s mine.”
“So you and Katie are still together?”
“Well, naw. Turns out she’s better at having babies than taking care of ’em. We split. Split legal, too. This time, I’m the one getting child support.”
“
“You don’t have to sound so damn surprised.”
“What’d you do?” I said coldly. “Bribe a judge?”
His laugh sounded hollow to me, but his words actually rang truthful when he said, “I didn’t want my kids growing up like I did. Besides, they ain’t got a Uncle Jap and Aunt Elsie to run to. I may not’ve done right by my first two young ’uns, but these here, they’re gonna have a daddy that takes care of ’em twenty-four/seven.”
“Yeah? How you going to raise them when you’re off racing or crewing every weekend?”
“I don’t do that no more. You’re looking a man on his way to being a millionaire.”
“Huh?”
“It’s the gospel truth, Deb. I—
“You call me Deb or Debbie one more time and you’re getting it in the eye,” I promised him. To show that there were no hard feelings, I handed him a bottle of water from my tote bag.
He brushed the sand from his mustache and beard and rinsed his mouth several times till he had spat out all the sand, then gave a rueful shake of his shaggy head. “You always did fight dirty.”
“And you were always a slow learner. So what’s this about getting rich?”
“I got me a gutter business,” he said proudly.
I was bewildered. “Street gutters?”
“Naw, seamless aluminum rain gutters. On houses.”
“What on earth do you know about rain gutters?”
“Right much these days. See, what happened was, remember when me and Adam drove up to Greensboro so I could marry Katie?”
I nodded. I might have been killed that night if he and my brother hadn’t come back to fetch Allen’s truck. They had both been too drunk to talk coherently, but their arrival had scared away my attacker. *
“Well, we got in a poker game the night before and I hit an inside straight flush. It was double or nothing. Adam’s new car against this peckerwood’s gutter machine.”
“Adam’s car was a rental,” I said.
“Well, that peckerwood did’n know it belonged to Hertz, now did he? He just saw a brand new car against his ol’ beat-up van with a gutter machine in the back. My boy Keith, he’d been working with a gutter guy and he knowed how to run it, so I took him on to help me and I went and talked to a developer I knowed, used to race at Rocking-ham. He was building a passel of new houses out between Greensboro and Burlington and I give him such a good price—well, the short of it is, I’ve got a whole fleet of vans now with a big roll of aluminum and what we call a seamless gutter extruder in every van. I’m putting gutters on houses from Hillsborough to Hickory.”
“I thought the housing market was slowing down.”
“Not from where I’m standing, darlin’. Money’s coming in faster’n I can spend it. Bought Sally a big fancy double-wide and—”
“Who’s Sally?”
“That’s the one I was married to when you and me run off together, Wendy Nicole’s mama. She keeps Tiffany Jane and Tyler for me during the week and I got Wendy Nicole learning to be an accountant so she can do the books for me. Keep it all in the family.”
“Does this mean you and Sally are back together?”
“Oh, hell, no. I learned that lesson. Three times was enough.” He grinned. “Four if I count you.”
“Don’t,” I said, even though I knew I was shoveling against the tide.
“And what about you? You still going out with that game warden?”
“No.”
His grin widened beneath that bushy mustache as he glanced at his watch. “I gotta go pick up the kids at the playroom in a few minutes, but how about we get together after lunch?”
