Daddy By Design?: Daddy By Design? / Her Perfect Wife. Kate Thomas

enough, the men he worked with began whistling and laughing and calling out his name in a teasing way.

      “Why don’t y’all just shut up?” he yelled. But they didn’t. Pointedly ignoring them, muttering “Bunch of third-graders,” he turned over the next envelope…and frowned. The postmark was from his hometown of Southwood. And the return address was that of the Southwood High School Fighting Rebels Reunion Committee.

      Reunion? He’d graduated twelve years ago, so this wasn’t an anniversary year, like ten or fifteen. What could this be, then? He opened it and read the letter inside. And laughed. This was just like home. They’d let the ten-year mark slip up on them and pass…so they were having their ten-year get-together next month. How messed up was that?

      Bemused, Trey read on. According to the letter, the committee hoped to make the reunion into a town-wide celebration by inviting the alumni from every year of the school’s existence to attend. About fifty years’ worth, as near as he could remember. Sounded like fun. And a nightmare. Trey put the letter down and caught sight of one he hadn’t noticed before in his pile of mail. The Tampa return address curdled his stomach and made him want to bang his head on the workbench in front of him. Bobby Jean Diamante. Nothing like an old girlfriend to liven things up.

      Trey sighed, caught up in kaleidoscopic reflections of his and Bobby Jean’s shared past. In high school, when she and Trey had been an item, when he’d been captain of the football team and she’d been head cheerleader, when they’d both lost their virginity to each other, she’d been Bobby Jean Nickerson. Then at eighteen, she’d thrown Trey over and married a rich man from Atlanta, who’d made her Bobby Jean Whiteside.

      After not too many years of wedded bliss, the much older man had died. Some said mysteriously. Shortly afterward, Bobby Jean married a slug who’d run through her money. So she’d left him and had been forced to marry again. The last Trey had heard—his source being his mother—Bobby Jean had taken up with, then married, some really rich but hard-nosed guy from up north. His mother kept saying Mr. Rocco Diamante had mob connections. Lovely.

      Between husbands, Bobby Jean was hell-bent on starting up again with Trey. She always called him her one true love. And somehow, although he never intended to get sucked in by her scheming, he did. Maybe it was the way she went about it that left him no choice. She always involved his poor mother or pulled some public stunt that left him no choice except to get involved on some level. Some stunt like at the upcoming reunion, maybe? How perfect would that be? Trey grimaced. He could see this one coming. Like a freight train. He really, really didn’t want to be involved with Bobby Jean. But she went after him whole-hog and it never ended well. Once he disentangled himself and his family from her clutches, only embarrassment and gossip were left behind.

      So what was she up to now? Trey picked up the scented envelope and opened it. On flower-embossed stationery, Bobby Jean—a staggeringly beautiful red-head, no doubt about it, but an overblown magnolia of a woman—told Trey how very excited she was to learn of the reunion. He read about how she was separated now and how her husband wasn’t taking it very well. He was harassing her, she said. So she was looking forward to getting away from Tampa and going home for a weekend…the weekend of the reunion.

      Trey cursed out loud, wondering what size concrete shoes he might wear. Bobby Jean was on the run from an unhappy mobster husband. Who didn’t know he’d follow her right to Southwood—and right to Trey? He repeated his curse, only this time more emphatically. Life was no longer good. It was also about to become very short, if Bobby Jean had her way. But her next sentence curdled Trey’s blood. She wrote that she understood from talking with Trey’s mother last year that he—meaning Trey—still hadn’t married. Aw, man, not my poor mother. The mobster husband didn’t have to be a genius to trace that call and get the name and number.

      Trey had to go home. He couldn’t leave his mother to face that alone. He could just see her now, a petite, brown-haired woman who wore glasses, worked at the local bowling alley, and loved to bake and do needle-point. She’d become a mother at the age of thirty-eight and a widow at the age of fifty, due to an unfortunate farming accident. Her only child was Trey, and she’d never lived anywhere but in Southwood, Georgia.

      It was no wonder, then, that her life revolved around him and the many goings-on in her hometown. She was a goodhearted soul. To Trey, she had only one flaw. She liked Bobby Jean. She always said what pretty babies Trey and Bobby Jean could make together. Dorinda Cooper, Trey’s mother, just thought it was so sad, the run of bad luck that poor Bobby Jean always seemed to have with men. Trey could only stare at her when she said that. Run of bad luck? The woman was a black widow.

      Sitting there on the stool, Trey shook his head and refocused on the perfumed letter he held in his hand. No surprise here. Bobby Jean wrote that his mother was just the sweetest thing who thought Bobby Jean would make such a wonderful mother. Trey’s old girlfriend then chastised him for not giving his mama grandbabies and went on to say how she sincerely hoped that the reason he’d never married had nothing to do with any lingering feelings he might harbor for her. She ended the letter by saying she was very excited about seeing him at the reunion. Trey could only wonder if she’d told her husband that, too. He scrubbed a hand over his face. Oh, lordy. Between the two women, they’re going to get me killed.

      Then, because he was sane, and because he was human, Trey considered not going to the reunion. Wouldn’t that be the simplest solution? Sure. Until that irate mobster husband showed up on Trey’s mother’s doorstep. Just the thought of that had every protective fiber in Trey’s body raising its hackles. Aw, damn it all to hell. I’ve got to go. That damned Bobby Jean. Trey knew in his bones that she’d use the reunion to make yet another disastrous play for him. That wasn’t conceit on his part. It was knowing Bobby Jean. The woman could not be without a man. And Trey knew he was the man she didn’t want to be without. In fact, she’d always let him know, even when she’d been married, that she wouldn’t mind seeing him on the side.

      Trey had never taken her up on that offer for a lot of reasons. For one, because she’d never wanted to marry him. She just wanted to sleep with him. To Trey’s way of thinking, that type of relationship—using the term loosely—would cheapen them both. He also hadn’t taken her up on her offer because he wasn’t the type to get involved with a married woman. Even if her vows meant nothing to her, they did to him.

      He was no saint. But he did respect marriage. Still, if he’d felt for her what she said she felt for him, he couldn’t say that he might not have jumped at the chance to be with her. But he hadn’t because he didn’t have feelings for Bobby Jean. Not the ones she wanted him to have, at any rate. Trey actually felt sorry for her on some level. He supposed that meant he did care about her in a “childhood sweetheart” way. After all, she had been a big part of his youthful history and glory. Trey believed he owed her respect, if nothing else—respect she didn’t ever seem to accord herself.

      But all of that aside, he was in big trouble here. Trey eyed his mother’s unopened letter. Even as he opened it, he felt certain he already knew what she’d written. He unfolded her letter and started reading. Yep, I was right. She wrote that he hadn’t been home for any length of time in almost two years, and that she really wanted him to come home for this event. All his friends would be there, people he hadn’t seen in years. Including Bobby Jean Diamante, who was separated now. Trey sighed and shook his head. I’m a dead man.

      He picked up his reading again. The rest was haranguing him, in a loving way, yet again for not having a family. His mother always did this, bless her good heart, saying she hated to think of him being alone now because when she died, he’d be truly alone with no one to love him. How could she rest in her grave knowing that? Trey chuckled, recalling his mother’s lecture the last time he’d been home. It had been more to the point of why she wanted him married.

      You’re thirty years old, Trey, and I’m not even a grandmother yet. How am I supposed to hold my head up at the bowling alley and, worse, the beauty shop? Every lady there except me has a string of grandbaby pictures to wag around and stick under my nose. And me sitting there under the dryer with not the first picture of a child to brag over. How am I supposed to feel when Lula Johnston says “Dorinda, that boy of yours hasn’t made