She's never going to take him seriously, he knows that now. It's not like she ever did, even before this. He knows he's something of a joke to her - a joke with a bad ending that left her knocked up.

She's always going to see him as just a kid.

Because Loretta never needed anybody. She and her friend Rhonda, they both go after young guys, younger than them anyway. And when they first met, Loretta just seemed so effortlessly cool and bohemian, with her wild stories about rock bands she followed across the states, and all the drugs she tried and all the people she met. She was so different to everyone he knew, to his own tight-ass parents.

Of course, when he got her pregnant, he thought that finally she'd see him as something else - not just that young guy she'd seduced - but a man, a potential father.

(Although, admittedly, the idea of taking on that much responsibility freaked him out when she'd first told him.)

Loretta's kind of held him at arms length ever since, and still calling him "Jerry", never Jerome, and never letting their relationship progress. Their child remains a secret of course - what would his family say? - and it's getting harder to watch the boy grow up into someone just like him.

Someone trusting. Even gullible, maybe.

So when Jerome takes little Barney out to the Natural History museam for his sixth birthday, and the kid manages to ruin a national monument and almost get them arrested, he knows in his gut how Loretta's going to react.

He's not wrong. She yells words that even he doesn't understand and Barney pulls away from him, obviously wanting to escape the scene and go play with his brother.

But when Loretta's stream of expletives are exhausted, Jerome bites back his anger, his humiliation at being berated like he's a child himself, and he goes to find Barney, hunkers down next to him and directs his fingers at the boy's eyes, then to his own.

"You were pretty legendary today, kid," he says with a tight grin, and the boy nods eagerly.

And then he walks away, knowing that those are probably the last words he'll ever get to say to his son.