no. 4 (going by the order in which she had told them about her pregnancy) at a quiet roadside diner in Leaning Tree after the baby shower. At the diner, she was going to remind him of just how fair she was being and then, when she had him feeling appropriately grateful to her for being such a good sport, she would casually mention just how much easier a new Chevrolet would make life for her and his child. If she worked it right, by sunset she would have a new car and he would travel back to his wife and family in Louisville thanking God that he had knocked up such a reasonable woman.
She seated herself at a booth and drank coffee to come down from her whiskey sour buzz and waited for Daddy no. 4 to join her. When he stepped through the door with Daddy no. 2 right behind him, she knew that the jig was up.
As the men approached, Loretta, always quick on her feet when cornered, made one last desperate move to hold her plan together by playing one daddy against the other. She said, “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’ve tried so many times to tell him that I love you and it’s all over with him, but I was just too scared. He’s so mean; I didn’t know what he might do to me and our baby.” She said it to both of them, hoping each would assume she was talking to him alone and that she could slip out of the diner while they fought over her. Later, she could separately thank both the conquering hero and the valiant loser for defending her honor, assuring each that she loved only him. With luck, after the dust settled, her plans could go forward unchanged.
Loretta was a stunning beauty, and she knew it. She thought it was only logical that men should fight over her, and they often did. When she got sick with the cirrhosis that killed her at thirty-five, the hardest thing for her—harder than dying, Barbara Jean thought—was saying goodbye to her beauty. Loretta died hard and she died ugly. Liver disease whittled away her cute, round face and bountiful figure to nothing—a mean turn of fate for a woman who, as one of her men described her, “looked like she was made out of basketballs and chocolate pudding.”
Daddies no. 2 and no. 4 presented a united front in the diner, with Daddy no. 4 doing most of the talking. He told her she’d never get another dime from either of them, and he carried on as if he were some sort of genius detective for single-handedly figuring out her plot. The truth, blurted out by Daddy no. 2, was that Loretta had been the victim of her customary bad luck. The fathers had ended up seated next to each other at Forrest Payne’s joint, and after they had sucked down enough of Forrest’s watered-down liquor to loosen their tongues, they started bragging about their women. It didn’t take them long to realize that they were each bragging about the same one.
Forrest Payne had pretensions of running a gentlemen’s club instead of a country strip joint and whorehouse, so he greeted every customer at the door dressed up in his signature canary-yellow tuxedo. Then he escorted them to their seats with all the flourish of a French maitre d’. Since he didn’t trust anyone else to handle the door and the cover charge money, Loretta knew it had to have been Forrest himself who had seated the daddies next to each other. This, in spite of the fact that she had left explicit instructions that none of her baby’s fathers should be placed within ten feet of each other. For the rest of her short life, Loretta blamed Forrest Payne for ruining her.
Daddy no. 4 leaned across the table and wagged his finger at Loretta’s nose. He said, “I was too smart for you, li’l girl. You been outplayed at your own game.”
Loretta stared at Daddy no. 4, who had once been her favorite, and wondered what it was she had ever seen in him, with his wide, lopsided mouth and his strange, Egyptian-looking eyes. Then she thought about the ring he had bought for her, a decent-sized ruby with tiny azure sapphires arranged around it in a daisy pattern, and she recalled why she had put up with him. She slid her hands from the table so he wouldn’t see the ring