“Are you going out with us tonight?” Tami asked.
“Who all’s going?”
“Wolf, Sarah, Tim, and I.”
“No. I wasn’t invited,” I said, shocking her.
“Well, I’m inviting you.”
“No, you go ahead. Five people is awkward. I’ll be fine.”
“I’m sure they didn’t intend to exclude you,” Tami said with a little concern in her voice.
Wanna bet?
“No, really, I have lots I need to do,” I said.
“If you change your mind …” she left hanging.
I just smiled.
◊◊◊
Peggy and my mom were having way too much fun, so I called Pam and took her to Granny’s West for dinner.
“My dad got a job in LA. He leaves in a couple of weeks. He wants to see Coby before he goes,” Pam said.
“Have him talk to my parents. I don’t want to get in the middle of it.”
“That’s what I told him.”
“I hear you got an offer on the house.”
“Finally. Mom was starting to worry it would never sell.”
“The rumors of wild parties hurt the resale value,” I shot back. “Hey, speaking of wild, how’s your sister doing?”
“She agreed to go to counseling.”
“Holy cow, what did you just say?”
“It was either that, or Devin was sending her packing. Apparently, she finally figured out that the prenup was ironclad, and she wasn’t going to be able to break it.”
“Wait, I missed about twenty steps leading up to this. What happened?” I asked.
“You heard she got herself banned from Range Sports, right?” Pam asked, and I just blinked. “Then the ranch foreman threatened to quit. I think what finally did it was when Sandy moved out.”
I’m sure I looked stunned.
“Didn’t you know that? I was positive I’d told you all about it,” Pam said.
“Hell, no! I want details.”
“My dear sister got it in her head that since she married Devin, she was equal to him as the owner. When they got back from their honeymoon, she started to go to work with him. At first, it was no big deal. Cora would sit in on meetings, and Devin was impressed that she wanted to learn the business.
“Then she began going to meetings without Devin. Cora started making suggestions; still no big deal. You know my sister, she couldn’t stop there. She decided that she knew better than his employees. It took a while before word got back to Devin because everyone assumed he’d sent Cora to the meetings. In a way, he had, but not as the decision-maker.
“What got her caught was when she screwed up the latest catalog. The marketing people had finished it and forwarded it to Devin and the Board of Directors for their final approval. Cora went through it and made several changes, some of them pricing. She felt they were charging too much for certain items.
“When Cora sent it back to marketing, they thought it had been approved by the Board, so they didn’t look at it and forwarded it to the printers. They direct-mailed the catalogs to their existing customers and the stores. The first clue that something was wrong was when their call center was slammed with orders,” Pam shared.
“Oh, dear God! What did they do?” I asked.
“Devin held an emergency meeting with the Board. At that time, they didn’t realize it was Cora; they assumed the printer had made a mistake. They decided to honor the prices and write it off for anyone who had already ordered. Then moving forward, they would explain the error and give them a discount to keep their business.
“Then she did something similar with the fall line. Cora decided she didn’t like the colors for their most popular hunting jacket. They ran five thousand units before the mistake was caught. When that happened, Devin had the errors investigated, and Cora was found out. The Board gave him the choice of resigning or banning her from the company.”
“He couldn’t have been happy about that,” I said.
“No, he wasn’t. There for a while, we all thought he was going to divorce her.”
“I think I had their marriage lasting three months in the pool,” I admitted.
Pam gave me a smirk.
“I said it would last more than a year. I need to check, but I think I won. You underestimate my sister’s greed. I knew when she figured out she’d be broke if they divorced, Cora would straighten up and make Devin a good wife.”
“Why did Sandy move out?” I asked.
“My sister decided to ‘help’ her. Cora thought Sandy could use assistance with how she dressed, who she hung out with, you name it. She nagged her to change into a Cora clone. Sandy had enough. She was going to college anyway, so she flew out early and enrolled in summer school.
“Devin went through the roof. He told Cora either she straightens up and flies right or she’d be gone. Part of the agreement was she had to get counseling to figure out if she was crazy or not. It looks like the jury’s out on the crazy part,” Pam said with a smirk.
“Do I get a vote?”
“No. There’s no question how you’d vote. Just consider us lucky that Cora didn’t end up moving here. I can only imagine what she would want to do to Coby.”
“You forget, my mom would deal with her.”
“Yes, your mom would keep her in line.”
I was proud of Pam. She’d stepped up and spent much more time with our son than I had expected she would. I suspect Pam surprised herself. I could also tell that her therapy had helped her. Pam was no longer as timid if someone confronted her. Part of it was that her dad was no longer around her all the time. When I found out he’d hit her, and she was so scared, I wondered what else was going on.
If Cora was any indication, he’d ruled those girls with an iron fist. As soon as Cora gained some freedom, she became a wild child.
Something I never doubted with Pam was that she loved me. We just didn’t love each enough for us to be more than we were, at least for now.
Pam was also a little needy. She had a way about her where she was hesitant but sought my approval. That was demonstrated best in our discussions about if I liked or loved her. While I found them endearing, I suspected that it related back to her father. Would he show her affection or not? I don’t think she was ever sure.
I was always glad to show or say that I cared because she was so sweet and naïve. Perhaps the best way to describe her was innocent. It saddened me to know that her father had struck her. It would have been like me hitting Duke when he was a puppy. Cal was one man I’d lost almost all respect for. I knew she still loved him because that was just how she was wired. I would bite my tongue when he came up in conversation, for her benefit.
“David?”
“Yes?”
“Where did you go just then?” she asked.
“I was thinking about you and Coby and how much I love you both.”
“David?”
“Yes?”
“I wanted to thank you.”
“What for?” I asked.
“You saved me and our baby.”
“I could have done nothing else.”
“I know.”
◊◊◊
Chapter 12 – Twins? Sunday June 19
We landed in North Carolina and got our luggage from the baggage carousel. I hadn’t expected press to be waiting for us at the rental-car booth. Luckily, there were only three of them.
“We were wondering if you could give us a moment of your time.”
That had to be the most polite approach I’d ever seen. I gave Moose my American Express so he could get the car Caryn had rented for us. Paul stood off to the side so he could see everything and catch it on his bodycam. I’d switched to the baseball-cap version of bodycam so I wouldn’t have to wear the birth-control glasses this week.
“How can I help you?” I asked.
“The Herald Sun and News & Observer both ran feature articles on you in today’s papers. They were talking about your participation in the Under-18 National Team tryouts. You were touted as one player to watch, even though your primary sport is football.”