John was actually a little relieved to get home and find that another crisis hadn’t erupted while he’d been gone. There’d been a lot of that going around the last few days and he was starting to feel a little shell-shocked. Teresa was sitting in her wheelchair in the living room watching a kid’s show, and Sally was busy in the bathroom, doing some heavy cleaning. “You’re really going to it,” he commented.

“It’s something to do, and it needed to get done,” she shrugged. “Actually, I was thinking about knocking off for a while and getting some lunch.”

“Good God, is it after noon already?” John replied. He thought back; he’d gotten an early start, but there had been some running around and the business with the tow trucks had eaten up a lot of time. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

“Why don’t I get started on something?” Mandy offered. “It can be something simple, like soup and sandwiches.”

“Fine with me,” Sally agreed. “I need to get cleaned up a little before I’d want to sit down at a table anyway.”

John followed Mandy back out to the kitchen, where she started pawing through cabinets. “Wow, John,” she said after a moment, “there’s not much here.”

“I’m a bachelor,” he snorted. “I eat out a lot. Washing dishes after I drive through some place consists of finding a trash can.”

“Looks like peanut butter sandwiches and mix and match soup,” she replied, ignoring his response. John was a little surprised at that; he expected some kind of sly dig that he needed a woman around the house. Well, right now that wasn’t an issue – he had three of them, after all.

It didn’t take Mandy long to throw lunch together. The soup turned out to be a mixture of canned beef vegetable and beef noodle, which didn’t taste too bad, considering. The four of them gathered around the table, Teresa in her wheelchair, of course. “While we’re all here,” Mandy spoke up, “we probably ought to do some planning for this afternoon.”

“I need to get my butt back over to the office and get some work done,” John sighed. “I’ve got a bid I’ve been trying to work on for days, but something always seems to come up to keep me from working on it. It’s really starting to be a pain in the butt.”

“With the four of us here for a while, maybe after lunch Sally and I ought to go get some more groceries,” Mandy suggested.

“Yeah, might not be a bad idea. I’d say, keep it simple, though. Teresa, you’re going to have to have some input on that. There’s no reason you can’t have something you like to help make you feel at least a little bit better.”

“I can think of a few things,” the girl said. “I really like box macaroni and cheese, and Mom says it doesn’t cost much.”

“Don’t worry about the cost,” John told her. “You and your mom are my guests, and ramen noodles are something I don’t allow in the door. There’s no reason you can’t eat right, any of you.”

“John, are you sure?” Sally asked. “I don’t want to put you out more than I have to. I feel like we’re already asking too much of your good nature.”

“Let me be the judge of when too much is too much,” he told her. “This whole deal is putting me out a little, there’s no doubt about it, and having Mandy here is just going to add to it. But I’m not going to shove any of you out the door, especially you and Teresa, at least not till she gets those casts off. We’re just going to have to work together on this, and I still need to put my primary attention at the business. That’s why I need to get back to the office and get some work done this afternoon. At least someone should be here when Raul shows up to work on the disposal.”

“If you’re going to Suncoast again, that means I have to get at least some of the stuff out of my car to go for groceries,” Mandy said. “And we probably shouldn’t leave Teresa here alone for a while.”

“I can take care of myself for a while if I have to,” Teresa protested.

“Not just yet,” John said. “At least not while we’ve got other stuff in the air we don’t know about, like that bubblehead from the hospital or the towing business. After that cluster . . . ” he caught himself just in time “ . . . uh, bomb this morning, I doubt we’ve heard the last out of them. I suppose we could get Max over here to sit with you for a few minutes if we really needed to, but I don’t want to have to ask him any more than necessary.”

“Max is nice,” she grinned. “He’s sort of what I imagined a grandfather would be like if I had a grandfather.”

“Max is all right,” John agreed. “He has a few quirks, but then, everyone does. But like anyone, I don’t want to ask more of him than I have to.”

“Well, we don’t have to go for groceries this afternoon,” Mandy put in, dragging the conversation back on track. “We could wait until you get back this evening.”

“That could be after bedtime for you guys,” John replied. “You wouldn’t believe the stack of stuff I have to do. I’m way behind. Maybe I could stay here for a while with Teresa, while the two of you take my car and go get groceries.”

“That would work,” Mandy agreed. “But John, we really need to get a lot out of my car so I can use it for something besides hauling stuff around. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet, but I suspect it’s going to involve Nevada sooner or later. Are you going to have any problem if I leave a pile of it in your garage for a while?”

“No, not really, so long as it’s stacked up pretty high so the garage can still be used as a garage. When you’re in Nevada, I want to get the Jag back here, since there’s no point in leaving it at the office longer than necessary. That’s assuming it’ll run long enough to get it here, of course.”

“Good,” Mandy said. “Maybe I’ll get to work on it this afternoon after Sally and I go get groceries. That’ll loosen up the car situation a little bit. Maybe we can take a little extra time to get something else if anyone needs it.”

“Nothing I can think of,” John shrugged, “but the three of you will have to work that out among yourselves.”

“I can think of a few things Teresa and I really need,” Sally shook her head, “but I don’t have enough money to even think about getting them.”

“If you need it, get it,” John said flatly. “We’ll worry about the money later. Just don’t go overboard.”

“John,” she replied sadly, “I don’t know how I’m ever going to be able to pay you back for all you’ve done for us already.”

“You’re working on it,” he told her. “It wouldn’t be cheap to get the thorough housecleaning this place needs. That’s going to go a long way toward evening things up.”

“John,” Mandy snorted, “how did you get to be so nice?”

“Time passes, and things change,” he shrugged. “None of us are exactly the people we were in high school.”

After some more talking around about it, they decided that Sally and Mandy would take John’s car to Publix and Target to stock up on things as soon as they were done eating, and try to not let it go too long since John had to get back to work. John even offered to clean up the lunch dishes and get them in the dishwasher to get them going as soon as they could. He was barely finished eating before the two women were gone.

“So, Teresa,” he said to the girl still sitting at the table in the wheelchair, “what do you want to do this afternoon?”

“What I want to do isn’t going to be the same as what I can do,” she sighed. “I keep looking at the pool and wishing I could go swimming, but I know it’s not going to happen.”

“Yeah, I’m afraid that’s out,” John smiled. “Even if we dared to let those casts get wet, they could sink you if you tried to swim with them.”

“That might not work very well,” she agreed. “I can swim a little. I had a pool class in one school I went to, even though I wasn’t there very long.”

In the brief time John had known the girl, he’d not had an opportunity to talk to her, and he really had hoped to get some one-on-one time with her sooner or later, just to learn a bit more about her. This looked like it might be the chance; if Sally and Mandy were like most women, their shopping trip could drag out for hours. But now that he was able to talk to Teresa, he was a little lost for something to say. That seemed a little strange; he’d never had much trouble talking to girls when he was a teenager. Of course, the thought crossed his mind, most of the time he’d talked with girls when he’d been a teenager he had a goal in mind, but those days were long in the past. “So,” he said, reaching for something, “do you like school?”

“Most of the time,” she shook her head. “It’s hard when I have to go to a new school, even though I’ve had to do it a lot. I’m always a stranger. Sometimes I really never get to know anyone when we have to move on.”

“Have you ever been able to spend a long time at a school?”

“I was in the same school for almost three years back when we were in Memphis, but I was real little then, and it was hard to leave the kids I knew,” she reported. “I haven’t been in the same school for a full year since. Sometimes it’s been two or three schools.”

“That has to be hard,” he said. “I went to Bradford all the way through school, up till I went to college. I saw kids come and go, and I could see it was never easy for them.”

“No, it’s not. Every time I go to a new place it’s all kids I don’t know, and they’re always working on stuff I mostly hadn’t had at my old school. It always seems like just about the time I get comfortable I have to move on again.”

“What kind of grades do you get?”

“Oh, OK, I guess,” she shrugged. “B’s and C’s, mostly. I’ve always felt I could do better if I wasn’t trying to catch up all the time. Usually I start out the year pretty good, but then after we move my grades drop off a little.”

“I guess that’s to be expected,” he sighed, remembering something he’d been thinking about earlier in the week. With everything else that had been happening, he hadn’t paid attention to it, but now he realized he should have been. “I don’t know if your mom has talked to you about it, but we’re going to have to do something about getting you into school. I thought maybe it might be a little difficult for you to go to a strange school in a wheelchair, so I’ve been going to look into some kind of home-schooling affair to get you through the rest of the year. After all, you’re going to be in those casts until about the time school gets out, and then you’re going to have trouble walking for a little while. But, I’ve been so busy that I just haven’t had time to look into it. I’ll try to get to it the first of the week.”

“I wouldn’t mind having something different to do. I’m already pretty tired of watching TV.”

“I don’t blame you in the slightest. I don’t watch much TV myself, and when I do, I get tired of it pretty quickly. A lot of it seems pretty stupid to me.”

“A lot of it does to me, too. I kind of like to read, but there doesn’t seem to be very many books around here that I like. What little I’ve seen seems to mostly be about first aid and those kinds of things.”

“Well, I have to tell you I’m not much of a reader,” he admitted. “I never really have been. I don’t read for enjoyment, I read because I want to study something. There’s a big difference. What kinds of things do you like to read?”

“Oh, a lot of things, but I really like reading science fiction and fantasy. I mean, stuff like Mercedes Lackey or Anne McCaffery or Tanya Huff. We weren’t able to take most of my favorites when we had to leave our last place.”

That might make things a little easier, John thought. Better than sitting around watching TV anyway. “Well, maybe I can do something about that,” he smiled. “There’s a couple pretty good used bookstores downtown and another one just a couple miles from here. The next time I get near one I’ll try to stop off and grab you an armload. I probably won’t be able to this afternoon, but maybe the first of the week.”

“Oh, would you please?” she brightened. “That’d be so neat of you!”

“No big deal, it’s just a case of finding the time to do it,” he replied. “We can’t do it this afternoon since I don’t have a car I can use, but maybe sometime I could take you. I don’t see why you can’t get around at least one of those stores in your wheelchair and get yourself a whole lap full of books.”

“That would be so nice,” she grinned. “I don’t get to have a book of my own very often and I really hated to leave the ones I had behind. Mom said you were a pretty nice guy, and I guess she was right. Did the two of you go out or something in high school?”

“No, we were just in the same high school class,” he replied. “I don’t think you could even call us friends back then. We just knew each other, and not very well at that. But in a small school like that everyone knows everyone, and from my understanding our class has done a better job than most of keeping in touch with each other. There’s a woman up in Bradford who makes a hobby of trying to keep up with everybody, so that helps a little.”

“Is that the Emily I heard Mom and, uh, Mandy talking about? I don’t know if I ought to call her by her first name, but I don’t know what else to call her.”

“Yes, it’s that Emily,” John smiled. “And as far as Mandy goes, go ahead and call her by her first name. To tell the truth, I don’t know what her last name is now myself, except that it’s probably going to change again pretty soon. It was Paxton when we were in school, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she winds up going back to it.”

“You were married to her for a while, huh? What happened?”

“Yes, we were married for a while, but we hit some tough times and she found out she didn’t want to try to stick it out. Although it pi . . . uh, got me pretty upset at the time, I guess I can look back and say I don’t blame her. We’re friends again now, although it took a while to get that way.”

“She sure seemed to be surprised to see Mom and me here last night.”

Ye gods, was it only last night? John thought. Yeah, it had to be. Last night sure would have gone differently if Sally and Teresa hadn’t been here – and probably, in the long run, not as well. With the way he’d been ruminating about his life the last few days, things could have come out far differently, and probably not for the best when you got right down to it. But that wasn’t something he wanted to get into with Teresa, at least not at this point.

“I’m sure she was,” he smiled. “But to get back to what we were talking about, you’re what? In about eighth grade?”

“Yeah, eighth grade,” she said. “That’s one thing that’s been bothering me. I don’t want to have to do it all over again if I can’t get back into school this year.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem. We’re just going to have to work out the details. If you got B’s and C’s with having to move around between schools all the time, you’re not a marginal student, so we probably ought to be able to work out something to at least get you out of eighth grade. What do you want to do when you get out of school?”

“I don’t know,” she shook her head. “Whatever it is, I want to be able to find something that will let me stay in one place. I’m tired of moving all the time. And I want it to be a nice place, maybe a house like this, instead of a run-down apartment in a bad neighborhood.”

“I’ll bet you’ve seen a lot of those.”

“More than I want to,” she shook her head again. “I mean, for a long time I didn’t really mind since it was home, at least it was where Mom was. But I slowly started to realize that other people got to live in nicer places than we had, and didn’t have to move all the time.”

“From talking to you mother, it seems like you’ve had to move a lot.”

“I know Mom doesn’t want to have to move all the time, either,” she said. “Every time we wind up in a new place she always says she hopes it’s a place where we can stay for a while, but it never works out that way. Sometimes neither of us minds leaving. I wouldn’t have minded staying where we just were, but Hector, this guy Mom knew a little, really started making a pain of himself and both of us knew we were going to have to get out of there before things got a lot worse. Hector, well, he scared the shit out of me.”

While John would have liked to have known more about that he wasn’t sure he wanted to ask Teresa about it, at least after what Sally had said about having to move out in a hurry. From what little he understood, it seemed as if Sally had decided to move at the drop of the hat in order to protect Teresa. At least if that was the case, John couldn’t blame her for wanting to blow town, and from what Teresa was saying it seemed that there was some truth to Sally’s story. “That’s not going to be an issue, while you’re here, anyway,” he told her. “I can’t tell you what the future is going to hold, but you’re safe for now.”

“Yeah, when I was still in the hospital, Mom said that having you find her was about the best thing that could have possibly happened to us right then. She said yesterday she thought we were going to be staying with you until I get these casts off, but she doesn’t know what’s going to happen after that. We were going to go to Atlanta, but I don’t know whether that will still come off, or what.”

“I don’t know, either,” John told her, “but that’s two or three months off and a lot could happen between now and then.”

“I sure hope you and Mom can come up with something,” she sighed. “I’d sure just like to be able to stay in one place long enough to have a few friends. Mom doesn’t talk about high school much, but at least you managed to make a few friends there that you still have, and I’m glad Mom was able to make a friend out of you.”

“Like I said,” John replied, hearing the sadness in her words, “we weren’t really friends in high school, but we knew each other.”

“You had to be some kind of friend,” Teresa replied. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have been so quick to help us out. Mr. Engler . . . ”

“John, please . . . ”

“John, if you weren’t a friend of my Mom’s, there wouldn’t have been any reason to help us out. I mean, here we are in the nicest place I’ve ever spent a night in, and whenever anything comes up it’s ‘No problem’ or ‘I’ll take care of it.’ Mom says you haven’t even asked for anything in return, and she’s been a little surprised about it. She told me about the reputation you had in high school, and she’s not sure what to think.”

“I told her, I told Mandy, and I’m telling you, I don’t operate like that anymore,” John told her. “There are both good reasons and bad reasons for that, and they’re not simple. As far as taking you in, well, there never were a lot of Bradford ’88s, and they’re scattered all over the country. We try to take care of each other when we can, and it doesn’t happen often. You know about 9/11, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“One of the kids from the class lost his wife when one of the towers went down. He was sitting in a shelter with his two little boys, essentially hopeless and homeless. But Emily, that woman up in Bradford, heard about it, and sent the two kids from the class who lived closest to him to go get him and take him home. He hadn’t seen either one of them for a dozen years. They, well, they picked him up and got his life back on track. Those two kids and Dave hadn’t been particularly close friends, well, closer than your mom and I, anyway. But Emily called and they dropped what they were doing to go rescue him. Mandy was involved in a deal something like that a few years before that happened. I hadn’t been on the job that long and both of us couldn’t go, so Mandy took off for a week to lend a hand. The only difference between those stories and what I’m doing for you and your mom is that Emily didn’t have to call me first and ask me to help.”

“Yeah,” she said distantly. “That’s the kind of friends I wish I had. I want to be able to stay in one place long enough to make some friends like that. There’s no way we can do it if we’re moving all the time.”

“I hate to tell you this,” he shook his head, “but not every high school class is like that. Our class is from a small place and everyone knew everyone else, so that made a difference. Even then, not every Bradford class is like that, but Emily was the one who started the tradition and is the one who’s kept it alive for us. It involves being willing to give what you can and not expect anything in return. Teresa, while I’m at best a part-time EMT these days, I’ve seen a lot of stories sort of like yours, enough that I’ve learned to do my job and stay out of the complications. The difference here is that while your mom may not have been a close friend, she was a Bradford ’88, so I couldn’t turn my back on her, or on you. I can’t make any long-range promises, but I’ll do my best to see that the two of you are in better shape when you leave than you were when you got here.”

“Mom was right,” Teresa grinned. “You are a pretty nice guy. We’ve sure never met very many people like you before.”

“How nice a guy I am is debatable,” he smiled, “but that’s something we don’t need to worry about right now. How about if I get us a couple cans of Pepsi, and I’ll roll you out onto the patio by the pool so we can catch a little afternoon sun?”

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