and get it in his head to demand its return. When she tried to pawn it a year later, she would find out the stones were glass.
Daddy no. 2 surprised Loretta by bursting into tears. He buried his face in his hands and wailed as if he’d been stuck with a sharp stick, blubbering on about his lost son. Daddy no. 4 put his arm around his new friend and then put both of their feelings about Loretta into words. He leaned toward her and launched into some very loud and creative name-calling. The other customers in the diner looked their way, wondering what the commotion was about.
Loretta was a firm believer that, if a woman was smart, she acted like a lady by the light of day no matter what she did after sunset. This situation, one daddy crying his eyes out and the other loudly exploring the limits of his vocabulary, was just the kind of thing that got you ostracized by decent folks—the kind of people she planned to be spending her time with as soon as she’d had her baby in University Hospital and elevated her status. Loretta hurried away from the booth and, for the benefit of anyone who might have been listening, said, “I can see that you two do not intend to behave like gentlemen. I shall not stay and risk losing my poise due to your crass behavior.” What she said to herself was “Fuck this. I still got Daddy no. 1 and Daddy no. 3.”
She headed back toward Forrest Payne’s place to cuss him out, and was halfway there when her water broke. She made her way to the best-kept house on the block, thinking that its owners would be likely to have a telephone—not everyone did in 1950. Mrs. Carmel Handy, a schoolteacher Loretta would have known if she hadn’t left school in the sixth grade, owned the well-landscaped brick bungalow she chose to stop at. Miss Carmel answered the insistent knocking at her door and found herself confronted with a very attractive, massively pregnant young woman supporting herself against the doorjamb.
Between groans of discomfort, the girl said, “Hi, I’m Mrs. Loretta Perdue, and I was admiring your front yard and thinking that whoever lived here must be a person of class and would surely have a telephone. I myself have a telephone, but I’m a ways from home and I’m not feeling well. So, if you don’t mind, I need you to call my friend, Mr. Forrest Payne, at his place of business and tell him to come get me and drive me to University Hospital where I plan to have my baby like folks of substance. It’s the least Forrest could do since my situation is entirely his fault.”
Because she had been in the middle of pressing her hair and she didn’t want to stand there with her door open for any passersby to see her with her head half done, Carmel Handy permitted Loretta to enter her home. Careful not to burn Loretta with the still-smoking straightening comb, she helped her into the house. In her foyer, Miss Carmel listened politely as Loretta recited Forrest Payne’s telephone number, all the while thinking how funny it was that this girl was trying so hard to make Forrest sound like anything but the pimp everyone in Plainview knew he was.
Miss Carmel led Loretta to her living room sofa to rest while she made the phone call. But instead of calling Forrest Payne—she wasn’t about to have her neighbors see that man coming and going from her house, thank you very much—she called a nurse who lived down the block.
The nurse brought Barbara Jean into the world right there on the sofa while Carmel Handy made the first of a dozen phone calls she would make that day to tell her friends what had happened in her home and to extol the benefits of plasticizing your furniture. That first call began “Some girl just popped out another of Forrest Payne’s bastards right in my front room,” starting a rumor that would follow Barbara Jean for the rest of her life.
The baby was named Barbara Jean—Barbara for Daddy no. 1’s mother and Jean for Daddy no. 3’s.
When Loretta’s child was first handed to her, she took note of the infant’s lopsided, half-smiling mouth and the almond-shaped eyes, already fully open, that were tilted up at the corners like an Egyptian’s. Loretta recognized that face instantly and said to herself, “Ain’t this