Daisy & Baby

4 - Oh, The Hormones

There are three things I know for sure and certain:

1. The baby hates everything except junk food

2. My friends are having a great time ragging on "asshole gramps" aka Daniel

3. I can't afford this baby by myself

I sit on the couch between Jenna and Corrine, shoveling salt and vinegar potato chips into my mouth while they dig up information about Daniel on the internet. For someone who isn't actually on any social networking sites, he is surprisingly easy to find. Starting with a rather large presence in a mechanic help forum, where he seems to know about as much as diesel engines as I do about Harry Potter.

I want to go back to the forum and try to read through the lines. I want to tease apart the jerk from the man who offers help to strangers in bar parking lots. Figure out if they really are two separate people or if the nice only comes out when sex and alcohol are involved. Jenna and Corrine are more interested in his daughter's Facebook page though.

"This is wrong," I say as they pull up a picture of his daughter on a muddy four wheeler.

"Well it's not my fault her profile is set to public," Jenna says. "Oops, looks like a found a picture of asshole gramps."

My eyes snap to Jenna's computer screen like magnets. I don't want to look but I have no idea how not to look. It's a picture of Daniel hanging onto a rope swing, ready to jump, mouth wide open like he's laughing. He's giving the camera the shaka sign, like he's a teenager and not-

"Thirty eight!" Jenna yells. "What the hell? He's not thirty eight."

Corrine leans forward so that she can read the comments. "Nope, right here, Kenzie says my dad turned thirty-eight today, keep it young."

"He's hotter than I remember," Jenna says.

I pour chip crumbs into my mouth so that I don't start crying. Fourteen years my senior is nearly old enough to be my father.

"Who's that?" Corrine asks.

My eyes jump back to the screen. This one is Kenzie between two boys, one of them tall and lanky, the other big all over like Daniel. "Must be his other two kids," I say. "He said he has three."

"So she's seventeen," Jenna says as she clicks through the tags to look at the other profiles. "They can't be older then nineteen. God, asshole gramps was young when he stopped wearing a condom."

"What if he has even more than that?" Corrine asks.

"What if he has an STD?" I ask. It's been on my mind, the fact that I need to get STD testing done, but I'm surprised to hear it coming out of my mouth. As much as I've told Jenna, I've never mentioned my fear of what else may have caught that night, aside from the pregnancy that is.

Jenna brushes it off. "He's not dirty."

"You don't know that. He sure acted dirty when I told him I'm pregnant."

"Good point, but still... You'll be fine."

"I just don't understand why he was such a jerk," Corrine says. "I mean, it's clear he's in the lives of these kids." Jenna pauses on a picture of Daniel and all of the kids around a deer. They're all camoed out and armed.

I lick the salt and vinegar off my fingers and try not to look too closely at his sons. What's worse than Daniel being so much older than me? The fact that it would be less surprising if it had happened with one of his sons instead.

Jenna clicks through a few more pictures then slams the laptop shut. "What an asshole."

Daniel is wearing the same pants as he wore the night we met. The brown canvas Carhartts with a snag just above one of the knees. He shrugs his jacket off and I'm nearly blinded by a neon green shirt with the word STIHL printed on it. Just looking at it makes me squint my eyes a little and he goes from looking exhausted to looking pissed off about as fast as it takes for me to remember all of the things I'm not supposed to be doing.