He looked a little uncomfortable at that. "I mean, that was what we did with each other."

This lay between them for a minute or two.

"When Joe found out, he got real mad, yelling that she was cheating on him. Velma pointed out that he wasn't missing anything-it wasn't as if she wasn't doing it with him, too, whenever he wanted it. Joe didn't see it that way and divorced her. Velma-well you should know the way she sees things, I guess. She thought that he was being just terribly unreasonable about it all."

Pam nodded. That was exactly what her mother would think in a situation like that.

"He wanted to take Cory Joe, but Velma realized that she could get back at him by keeping custody, so she did. Judges always favored the mother, her lawyer told her. He was from over in Fairmont. She didn't have any money. She couldn't pay his bill, so he wrote it off for nooky. Could have been disbarred, if he'd been caught playing those games."

Rodney Trimble looked at the girl. She was as white as a sheet. He'd never actually seen that happen, before. But she was so pale-complected to start with.

"Maybe she really did think it was the lawyer, the second time. She'd never gotten caught when she was doing it just with me, all those years through high school, but she got pregnant with Cory Joe real soon after she married Joe Lang."

Pam looked at him. "Thank you."

Rodney watched her leave, walking down the corridor from the sun room where they had been talking to the street exit. He hoped she was feeling a little better. He'd invited her to come back again if she felt like it. She seemed like a nice kid.

That's why he hadn't mentioned the other obvious possibility. People being people and Velma being the kind of girl she was. The one that had never seemed to occur to anyone but him. He'd adopted Laura Beth's two kids and given them his name before they came back from LA. They hadn't had any more of their own.