treated me well. I learned good English and had chemistry forced on me. Luckily, I came to find it interesting."

"Did you spend a long time with them?" Shelley asked.

"Almost three years. Then the thing they most wanted in the world finally happened. The wife got pregnant long after they'd given up on ever having children of their own. I stuck around until the baby, a cute, fat little boy, was born. But it was obvious that they'd lost all interest in me. Understandable, of course. After six months I was just an unpaid babysitter, so I was moved around to lots of other people."

"Nice people, I hope," Jane said.

Evaline shrugged. "Not many of them were. They were just in the game to make a little money, most of them. But because of the people I'd been with first, I realized I was tons smarter than most of the foster parents and the mobs of kids they kept. I was able to buffalo them. I think I downright scared some of them. When I got out of the welfare system, I decided I didn't much want to be surrounded by kids and housewives cashing in on the social services. So with the money I'd saved from waiting tables, babysitting, and doing chemistry papers for the high school kids — that was really profitable — I went to trade school to learn a craft.

"Learned all about electrical stuff first, which bored me senseless and frightened me as well,"

Evaline went on. "Then I tried carpentry, but didn't have a gift for it. And it requires an awful lot of expensive equipment, even if you do love doing it."

"How did you come to being interested in Sheetrocking?"

"Someone desperate hired me to sand. Everybody in the construction business hates that part. I figured it was well-paying work, but soon realized why it's hard to get anyone to do it. It's not the Sheetrock that's hard to put up. Just takes accurate numbers and lots of muscle. The studs are there. It's easy to measure and cut. It's all just numbers. But the sanding part is a nightmare. Plain hard work that has to be done twice. The dust gets in your eyes, nose, and hair, and it leaves a trail of white dust all over your belongings."