The rest of the afternoon was busy, but not anything out of line, and no crises appeared to make things even more hectic than they were. They left Teresa in her wheelchair, but in the bedroom so she could at least be a little help to her mother in putting things away, while John got back in the Toyota and went over to the Publix to stock up on groceries.

For years he’d pretty much lived like a bachelor and hadn’t kept a lot of food around the house, only what he expected to use in the next few days. He also tended to eat out a lot, and when you got down to it he really wasn’t much of a cook. He was aware he pretty much had bachelor tastes, so was a little lost on what to buy, but tried to get at least a few things he thought a kid might like to eat as a treat. He wished he’d asked either Sally or Teresa what the girl liked, but he hadn’t, so he knew he had to wing it. It probably didn’t matter; just about anything had to be better than hospital food.

He didn’t want to say Teresa’s life was going to be bleak the next few weeks, but boring was a good possibility. She was going to need something besides the TV set to occupy her mind, and he didn’t even know what she liked to do. She struck him as a little old for the cartoons and other crap on some of the kids’ networks, from what little he’d watched them, but they’d probably hold her for a while. After that – well, it was after that and he’d have a chance to figure something else out in plenty of time.

School work might be a possibility, he thought. He knew that kids her age were supposed to be in school, but in her condition there was no way she could go, at least not for a while. He didn’t think he wanted her exposed in public very much anyway, at least as long as the potential hassle with the hospital administration was going on. It would be better if she just stayed out of sight. He didn’t know much about what the situation might be with a family agency, and whether they might want to take her away from her mother, but it was a possibility he’d have to look into. He doubted it would happen while she was living at his home, and he wondered if children’s services agency intervention might have had something to do with Sally moving on in the past. He hadn’t talked with her about it and wasn’t sure he wanted to.

But, there were home-schooling programs, he knew without investigating them. Plus, he remembered when he was back in Bradford there was a kid who had been laid up at home for weeks, and the school made up study packs and stuff for her. The thought brought back memories; it had been years since he’d thought of her. Oh, yes, he thought, Diane Caldwell, and it must have been in the eighth grade. Now that he’d brought up the name, he remembered she’d been just too sick with leukemia to go to school at all in the ninth grade, and she’d died halfway through the school year. Strange he should think of her; it had been years. Maybe he’d have to mention her to Sally; she might remember her.

But, as far as the school issue went, he’d have to talk to Sally about that, too. If he had to bet, it would be that Sally hadn’t formally taken Teresa out of school, but just blew town with her. That offered all kinds of potential for trouble, especially if Sally was trying to keep someone from Miami finding her, which seemed pretty likely to him. Maybe he ought to talk to Annamaria about it; she had kids, and was likely to know at least a little something about it, and maybe she could front for him a little; she’d be more likely to do the intelligent thing in this situation.

One thing seemed sure: they’d have to do something about the school issue pretty soon, or else there would be trouble with whatever the children’s services agency was if they were to find out about it.

There was plenty to talk to Sally about, and some of it he didn’t think should be discussed in front of Teresa. He could see there was going to be lots of fiddling around to get through the next few weeks, and he would have been willing to take a bet that he hadn’t seen the end of the trouble.

That evening, John made up a pan of Hamburger Helper. He usually liked it but didn’t make it very often, since it was way too much for one meal and the leftovers tended to dry out in the refrigerator. Still, both Sally and Teresa seemed happy with it, and everything but the aroma was gone when they finished. It looked like they were both going to be eating more than he’d figured. Well, he could make that work; it just meant cooking more.

Much of the rest of the evening was spent in setting up the bedroom, finding places for things, and doing some laundry. Teresa was getting visibly tired before the end of that chore, so they called a halt early. Sally helped Teresa get ready for bed – it wasn’t simple with the casts – and John gave her an over-the-counter painkiller to help her get to sleep. Within minutes, she was out like a light, at least as far as they could tell.

“I’ll tell you what,” Sally said as soon as they were out in the living room, “I’m sure glad to have this day over with.”

“Me, too,” John said. “Now maybe we can get things going a little more smoothly, but if there’s anything I’ve learned in this life, it’s that it can be one damn thing after another.”

“I’m exhausted,” Sally shook her head. “I know we got out of that hospital deal a lot more easily than I thought we would, but it still has me pretty well wiped out. John, I don’t know about you, but I’m just about ready for the hot tub.”

“Me, too,” he agreed, “but just between you and me, I think maybe we’d better not use it till Teresa has those casts off, at least, not when she can see us in it. That’s something she’s not going to be able to do for a couple months, but once she gets the casts off we’ll be damn glad we have it. She’s going to be sore until she can get her leg muscles built back up.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” she replied. “I was going to suggest the same thing myself.”

It didn’t take them long to get in the tub, letting the bubbler work them over. “Well, now that Teresa is asleep, there are things we need to talk about,” John said.

“Right,” she replied. “What was that deal with the tow company you were talking about? Did you get some feedback about our picking up my stuff this morning?”

“Oh, shit, did I ever,” John told her. He went on to tell her about the phone call he’d gotten from the tow company, and his reaction to it. “I’ll tell you what, Sally,” he said after he’d finished, “I don’t know if I would have gone through that song and dance to sneak Teresa out of the hospital if it hadn’t been for that. That got me really pissed off, and I’m not sure it’s over with yet. I had Annamaria trying to set us up with a lawyer this afternoon, because I’d be willing to bet we’ll need one before this is over with.”

“Boy, isn’t that a sack of shit?” she shook her head. “I’m with you. There’s not much there, but I’ll be damned if I want to let them just steal it from me.”

“I’m just glad we used your old address and my office phone number,” John replied. “I mean, if I’d known they were going to pull that shit they would have gotten a completely fake phone number. Guess I wasn’t thinking on that one, Sally. I’m sorry.”

“That’s just as bad as what they tried to pull at the hospital.”

“Yeah, we may not be out of that, either,” he sighed, “but with any kind of luck you’ll be a little harder to track down. I mean, there are people at the hospital who know who I am, but I don’t think any of them will connect me with you. That might count for something. That’s something else I want to get a lawyer working on. I mean, they knew from the moment we hauled Teresa in there she was going to be a charity case, or at least a Medicaid case, so whoever that fuckwad was, he shouldn’t have been pulling that shit.”

“I’m afraid I know more about Medicaid than I want to,” she sighed. “Boy, they bury you in paper. How does the hospital get away with charging like that, anyway?”

“The simple answer is because they can,” he told her. “Admittedly, part of the reason is to build up a cash reserve to handle charity cases that come in the door and they have to treat under the law. But they do charge like hell, and if you don’t have insurance and don’t have Medicaid, they really get you in the ass.”

“I try to not use doctors or hospitals any more than I absolutely have to, since they do charge so much. It seems obscene.”

“Hell, it is obscene,” John said. “I don’t have to work with that part of the system, so I don’t know all the ins and outs, but I know a little about how ambulance billing works and I’m assuming everything else works pretty much the same way. The way the system is set up, they about have to do it, and the government is in no position to try and change things. See, Sally, the thing of it is, if you have health insurance, the health insurance agencies will only reimburse a percentage of what the actual charge is. So the hospitals have to run up their fees to cover their costs, so they’ll get something like the actual expense back from the insurance company. Once the insurance company has paid them off, they can write off the rest. The Health Care Finance Administration, who runs Medicaid, works the same way.”

“But if you don’t have insurance, they make you pay the full price, right?”

“You got it,” he said. “It doesn’t pay to be too poor not to have health insurance. Of course, in all too many cases paying for the health insurance will leave you poor, anyway. And being poor is an invitation for people like that asshole administrator or those idiots at the tow company to take advantage of you. But we have an ace in the hole because you have a friend who’s willing to call in a lawyer. That should make the difference, especially if we can find the right one. After I find him, we may have to approach the hospital administration well over the head of the guy who was trying to fuck with you and get this straightened out, but the lawyer may say the smart thing to do is to leave well enough alone.”

“I hope that takes care of it,” she said. “I have the feeling there’s something else you think we should be talking about.”

“Yeah, Teresa and school,” John said. “While we can fudge things about that for a few days, I think we have to at least look like she’s getting approved schooling. Because we’re getting near the end of the year I’m wondering if we can get away with some sort of a home-schooling setup, but I don’t know anything about it. I’m going to ask Annamaria to do some research on that tomorrow. Now, without getting into the details, I’m guessing you didn’t check Teresa out of whatever school she was going to.”

“No,” she shook her head. “There wasn’t time. I needed to get out of town pretty badly, and I’m not sure I want her old school to know where she transferred to, at least not right away.”

“Trouble?”

“Bunches of it,” she said. “Not only was my job going to hell, there was a guy who was really getting pushy, and to top everything off, he wanted a piece of Teresa. I wasn’t about to let him have that. He was tied in with one of the local gangs down there – they have a lot of them – and I figured it was best to get out of town while I still could.”

“One thing you can say about gang members,” he said, hearing that part of her story for the first time and wondering just how much of it to believe, “they usually aren’t bright enough to try to track someone down through school records.”

“You could be right, but I don’t want to bet on it,” she said. “Damn it, I was trying to keep Teresa safe, and this had to happen.”

“Well, you could be right,” he said, “but if that hospital administrator is the asshole I think he is, if we see him again I’ll bet he has some bleeding heart from some children’s services agency with him. If we don’t at least look like we’re trying to get Teresa some schooling, that could be more trouble. Probably the best thing to do is to try to head them off at the pass before they track us down, if they ever do.”

“You’re probably right,” she said, “and it at least might give her something to do besides stare at the TV set all day.”

“Daytime TV, it’ll rot your brain,” John agreed. “Of course, that goes for you, too. Maybe we ought to think about something for you to be doing, too.”

“I could work on house cleaning,” she suggested. “I’ve had to do it often enough. How long has it been since this place has had a thorough cleaning?”

“A thorough professional job?” he shook his head. “I’m not really sure. After Susan left, I had a professional service come in and go through the place from top to bottom, and I’ve had them in a couple times since. But thinking about it, I’ll bet it’s been a couple years.”

“All right, I’ll work on it as I can. It’s the least I can do to pay you back for all you’ve done for me so far. The house doesn’t seem to be in real bad shape, but there are always things that need doing.”

“I’ll take you up on it,” he said. It really was something that needed to be done and he’d put it off longer than he should have. It would at least give her something useful to do while he was gone, as he would have to be much of the time.

“You know,” she said, “there’s a question I’ve asked you twice, and you’ve managed to slide past answering it two times now.”

“What’s that?”

“I still can’t believe that this is the third night, now, that I’ve been naked in the hot tub with you, of all people, and you’ve never made a move on me. I would have never believed it.”

All of a sudden the discussion had started to show signs of going someplace he didn’t want it to go, but he’d realized it had been bound to come up again sooner or later. It seemed pretty clear to him that she was trying to prop the door open to the idea of having sex with her to thank him for what he’d done for her. For any number of good and solid reasons, he wanted to avoid that. This was probably the time to nip it in the bud, or else it would just keep coming up again and again and get to be a pain in the ass.

“To tell you the truth,” he said, “a few years ago I would never have believed it myself. But then, a few things happened that changed the way I looked at things.”

“Did getting divorced three times have something to do with it?

“Well, some,” he told her. “The bottom line is that I finally came to the conclusion that I didn’t need to be married, and getting into a relationship wasn’t a real good idea for me. I mean, I can prove it, four times over. Sally, in spite of all the wife trouble I have had and the lousy reputation I had for messing around, I’m at least a little proud to say that I never messed around with someone else while I was married. Not that both Lisa and Susan didn’t do it on me, although I don’t think Mandy did. Like I said, I was getting set to get married again when I realized that my new fiancée was stepping out on me, so I said the hell with it, and with her, too.”

It still burned his ass a little, although it wasn’t something he wanted to say to Sally. Two of his marriages, plus his whatever the hell it had been with Julie, had broken up when the woman decided to head elsewhere for fun and games, temporary or permanent, and John had been the one pissed off about it. It had been especially crude and nasty with Susan; she’d come home after spending a weekend with her old boyfriend to find the locks on the house changed and her stuff rather roughly dumped on the curb. At least Lisa and Julie – and Mandy, when it came right down to it – had the good sense to get out of the house before they dropped the bomb on him. But Mandy had taught him a lesson: he’d had pre-nups with Lisa and Susan before they tied the knot, which said to him now that he hadn’t expected them to last in the first place.

When you got right down to it, what it proved was that he had a really lousy taste in women, at least when it came to picking them for long-term relationships. That had a good deal to do with why he’d now sworn them off.

Admittedly, Sally seemed cut from slightly different cloth than his previous wives. She was a survivor, doing what she had to do for her daughter, and not a gold-digger, which is what he thought of both Lisa and Susan. That made things a little different.

But when you got right down to it, Sally wasn’t all that appealing to him, either physically or mentally. She seemed pretty flighty and he suspected she could disappear without warning like Mandy had done. That meant that under the circumstances he didn’t want to expose himself to the risk of a long-term relationship with her, even if everything else looked favorable, which it certainly didn’t. The risk of something like that happening was bad enough as it was, and sex would make it a whole hell of a lot worse. He didn’t need it that badly, by any means.

Sally shook her head in obvious disbelief. He could just about read her face: this was John Engler, the school horndog, mostly interested in seeing whose panties he could get into? It didn’t make sense! “So no girlfriend or anything?” she asked.

“No, not really,” John told her. “Oh, there’s a girl I go out and play tennis with once in a while, and occasionally we have a couple beers. Even more occasionally we rip up a bed, although we haven’t done it for a while, because we both have to be in the mood and it doesn’t happen very often. But she’s no more anxious to do anything serious than I am, mostly because she’s come to much the same conclusion as I have, and for pretty much the same reasons. It’s nice for once in a while, but only that, and I don’t think there’s any way in hell we could get along in the long run. She’s about as wrapped up in her career as I am in mine.”

“That’s all?”

“Well, no. There’s an escort I see maybe twice a year, Amy. Long story about her, but the bottom line is that any more she only maintains a few carefully selected clients and isn’t looking to add to the list. She’s actually kind of a friend, although I do have to pay her if there’s a bed involved. And then, of course, there’s Nevada.”

“Nevada?”

“Yeah, Nevada,” he shook his head. “Look, I told you about being at the reunion when Jennlynn came out of the closet, remember? I guess I’d realized before then that there was legal prostitution in Nevada, but it really hadn’t hit me, if you know what I mean. Then Jennlynn rubbed my nose in the fact. Then I got home from the reunion, and found out Julie had been playing around all the time I’d been gone, and then capped it by taking off with some guy. That really put me off women for a while. I went a few months without seeing anyone, and was just as glad about it. But then after a while I started to get the itch to do something, but I knew it would lead me right back where I’d been with Julie and the others. Well, one night I got to thinking there was a simpler way to solve that problem.”

“Jennlynn?” she replied, eyebrows raised.

“Well, yes and no,” he shrugged. “She’s pretty damn expensive, out of my range, but she cut me some slack one time for old time’s sake. It was still expensive, but it was worth it, and if she happens to be around when I’m out there we usually sit down and have a cup of coffee and shoot the shit for a while. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen her on a friendly basis more than any of the other Bradford ’88s. She’s actually pretty cool, nothing like the stuck-up God-boxer we knew in high school.”

“I was a stuck-up God-boxer while I was in high school, too,” she wrinkled her nose at him. “But I also got over it.”

“Looks like it to me,” he said, intentionally ignoring the obvious opening. “Anyway, I was real surprised to hear she’d gotten married last Christmas. Emily was out to Nevada for the wedding, and she says he’s a real nice guy, although I’ve never met him.”

“She got married? I didn’t know that.”

“Well, it was kept a little quiet. I mean, they weren’t looking for headlines in the supermarket tabloids or anything.”

“Well, yeah, I guess I can see that.”

“To make a long story short,” John said, getting his story back on track, “the last several years I have made a trip to Nevada several times a year. I often have to go on business, anyway, since the national distributor for Murasaki is in Vegas, God knows why. When I go out there, I spend a fair chunk of change partying. At that, it’s cheaper than paying for high-maintenance wives and lump-sum settlements. The sex is better, and there are not all the attachments that go along with it. I was talking about it with a guy in the bar at the Redlite Ranch, the place where Jennlynn works, and he said, ‘I’m not paying a girl to have sex with me. I’m paying her to go away afterwards.’ That struck me as a pretty good way to look at it. It still does.”

“You’re telling me you like the single life?”

“More or less,” he sighed. “I get enough action to keep me going, and it beats the alternative. Don’t get me wrong. There’s a part of me that would like to be married. It would be nice to have a woman I could share things with, even a family. I can do without a woman who’s just trying to get into my wallet all the time, get what she can and get out. I came close to the kind of relationship I’d liked to have with Mandy, but it’s as close as I’ve ever gotten. Damn it, I can look back and remember a dozen mistakes I made with Mandy, serious ones, where a little love and understanding and forbearance on my part could have made a lot of difference, so my bad on that. And, of course, the same thing was true the other way. The main mistake with Lisa and Susan and Julie was getting involved with them in the first place, and I’m just as glad they’re gone.”

“But you still have a soft spot for Mandy?”

“Yeah. If either of us had been a little less stressed, a little less hardnosed, we might have been able to work it out. But that’s all water down the river, and there’s no point in thinking about it.”

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