The atmosphere around the house was pretty glum when John walked in through the kitchen door after parking the Suncoast van in the garage.

Sally had probably heard him coming, because she met him in the kitchen. “John, what are we going to do? I can’t let Hector find us!”

“Just settle down,” John told her. “This isn’t over with yet.”

“But John! I can’t let anything happen to her! She’s gone through enough already. I’d get out of here if I could think of a way to do it.”

John put his hands firmly on her shoulders. “Sally, the situation isn’t that bad yet. You’d be a fool to try to run away again, with Teresa in a wheelchair, and no car, no money, and no place to go, right?”

“Yes, but . . . ”

“Look, did you actually tell that person at the school where Teresa had been going to school?”

“Well, no, but they’d find out!”

“If you didn’t tell them, then there’s nothing for Hector to find out yet. We’ve got some time to work this out.”

“But how?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Mandy came in from the living room, where she’d been talking to Teresa, hopefully trying to settle her down. “We probably don’t have a lot of time to come up with something,” she reported. “I’d be willing to bet that they’ll wind up reporting Teresa to the local social services agency for not being in school.”

“You’re probably right on that,” John sighed. “But if I had to guess, if whatever agency they report it to is like everything else I know about government, it’ll take a while for it to work its way through their inboxes and bureaucracy to the point where they can do anything about it.”

“Well,” Mandy conceded, “you’re probably right on that.”

“Can you take a guess on how long it’ll take them?”

“Well, probably not today, but that’s just a guess based on general experience. I don’t know anything about how efficient the social service agencies are around here, or what kind of backlog they might have. If I had to guess, I’d say the end of the week, maybe.”

“Good, that buys us a little time,” John said. “Now, on the way over here I had an idea, but have you been able to find any local home-schooling outfits on the Internet?”

“I don’t know,” Sally admitted, a little calmer now. Not much calmer, but a little. “Teresa has been looking for something on the computer but she hasn’t found much.”

“Well, we do have a solid gold fallback position on that, at least as far as I know,” John replied, and spent a little time explaining his idea about the correspondence school. “The problem with that is that the outfit is in Michigan, and it might take a little time to get it set up. The hell of it is that it sounds like we have a little time, but not a lot. We’ll work something out in the next couple days. I honestly don’t think it’s a good idea to actually have Teresa in a school building right now, anyway. It’d be too difficult in a wheelchair in a school full of strangers, what with all the other issues involved.”

“I wouldn’t mind being in school,” Teresa put in; John hadn’t noticed her wheeling her way into the kitchen. “It’d be nice to hang out with some other kids, and maybe make some friends like Carlos. It’d be hard to do if I’m stuck here. But you’re right that I probably shouldn’t try it for at least a few days.”

“Good thinking on that,” John agreed, “and assuming you’re still around when school starts up again in the fall, having you in a regular school would be the best thing to do. By then you’ll have been out of that wheelchair for a long time and should be back to normal. As I see it, the trick is to get you through the rest of this school year any way we can without having to reveal where you’re living to your old school. That’s why I kind of like this correspondence-school thing. Any request for your records leads to a blind alley.”

“They’d still have our address,” Sally pointed out.

“True, but that address could be somewhere else, maybe like a post office box in Tampa or something. Hell, we could have the post office box in some out-of-state town where I have a salesman, and he could forward your stuff to us. As far as that goes, it would take some time, but if push came to shove we could all go up to Bradford, register Teresa in school there, and as soon as her records show up we could transfer her back down here. If I had to bet, I’ll bet Emily could work out something so it could all be done under the covers. Hell, she might even be able to work out something where we didn’t have to go to Bradford. The point is that this problem is solvable, Teresa, Sally. We just have to do it and get through the next few months.”

“But how?”

“I don’t know yet. The answer is there, we just have to find out what it is. Now, settle down, everyone. We’re going to make this work. Maybe I need to ask our attorney.”

“I didn’t know you had an attorney,” Mandy pointed out. “You were griping the other day that you needed to find some shyster to deal with the trucking company that got Teresa banged up in the first place.”

“I may have found one. We’ve got an appointment this afternoon, Sally. My car insurance agent put me on to him an hour ago, and it sounds like this guy may be able to do some good on this. If nothing else, he may be able to come up with the funds to settle Teresa’s hospital bill, so that’ll be off your neck. When we’re there we’ll ask him about this school issue. It may be that he can breathe hard on the school and make them understand that Teresa has to be admitted without a record from her other school. I don’t know, and we won’t know more until this afternoon. Now, let’s just settle down, keep calm, and not do anything rash, all right?”

“All right,” Sally conceded, “but we don’t dare do anything that might let Hector find us. That’s why I wanted to get the hell out of Florida in the first place.”

“I don’t know a whole hell of a lot about that issue, but the chance of him tracking her through her school records would be a possibility wherever you go, so running away from here solves nothing, and at least here you have some support. You’d be on your own anywhere else.”

“Yeah, I guess I hadn’t thought about it that way. All I could think about was to keep her away from him.”

“I could be wrong, but my guess is that if we can get through the next few months it will no longer be an issue. He’ll have found someone else to harass. For now, you’re still out of sight and maybe we can keep it that way. We probably can if we don’t do anything stupid.”

“I don’t want to have to run and hide again,” Teresa said. John looked at her; there were tears rolling down her face. “I like it here, and I’m starting to make some friends, at least Carlos, and he said he’d bring his sister over this afternoon so I could get to know her a little. I don’t want to have to keep starting over again and again. Isn’t there some way we can stay here, or at least somewhere around here?”

John turned and bent down to her. “I’d like for that to happen,” he said quietly. “I’ve come to like you and would like to keep you around at least a little. I know moving all the time has had to be rough on you. I’m hoping we can work out some way you can stay here, or at least stay in the area, but there are some other problems that have to be solved first. One of them is getting you out of that wheelchair. The best solution is for you and your mom to stay here at least until that happens, and maybe we can solve some other problems while we’re dealing with that one.”

“John,” Sally put in, “I really appreciate all you’ve tried to do for Teresa and me, but I feel like we’ve already asked too much of you.”

“That hasn’t happened yet,” he replied firmly. “Believe me, when that time comes you’ll be the first one I tell. Mandy can tell you that. Like I just told Teresa, the two of you can plan on staying here at least until she’s up and around again. Hopefully by then we’ll have some of these other issues ironed out. If you feel you have to move on by then, well, so be it. But I’m with Teresa. She’s a kid, and she deserves to be a kid at least a little bit, having friends, a stable home, and things like that. Those things are going to be hard to give her if you’re on the run all the time.”

“Jesus, John,” Sally shook her head. “What did I do to deserve to have a nice guy like you take us in?”

“You got lucky,” he said, “and you deserve a little good luck in your life after all the bad luck you’ve had.”

“I hate bring this back up,” Mandy said, “but I think we’re going to have to do something quickly about this school thing.”

“I don’t disagree,” John said, “and I think we need to start looking pretty quick. But I don’t think we need to do something until we talk to the lawyer this afternoon. I’ll bet he’ll have some ideas we haven’t thought of yet. In any case, a few hours isn’t going to hurt. In the meantime, I’m going to get on the phone and see if I can track down this correspondence school in Michigan.”

“Let me see what I can do on the Internet,” Teresa suggested, looking a little brighter. “Carlos says Google is pretty good for finding oddball stuff. It wouldn’t be the same thing as going to school and meeting kids, but like you said, it’d get us through till the end of the school year.”

“You know more about the Internet than I do,” John said. “Get going on it.”

“I sure will, John. And thanks!” She spun the wheelchair around and just about did a wheelie as she headed for the computer.

“John,” Sally said quietly as Teresa left the room. “I sure hope you’re right on this.”

“The right answer to solving a problem isn’t always to run away from it. That’s how you’ve always solved problems in the past, isn’t it? There’s a time to run, but there’s a time to stand and fight. You and Teresa aren’t alone in this. I’m not what you’d call rich, Sally. Not even what you’d call well off. But, when things go sour, I tend to stand and fight them out, because sometimes it works out best that way. If I hadn’t had reason to fight it out when Ven-Churs went belly up, I’d probably be nothing more than an EMT today. I didn’t run and hide. I stood and fought. It worked out in the long run, even though there were some problems along the way.”

“God, John,” Mandy murmured giving her feet some serious study. “That was the worst fucking mistake of my life, not sticking with you back then. Running and hiding screwed things up for me so badly I’ve never been able to make it back up. I’m sorry, John, I’m really sorry. I wasn’t thinking and it really hurt me.”

John was not unaware of the apologetic message of her statement. He hadn’t really been aiming his rant at her, but that was how she had taken it. Still, it emphasized the point he was trying to make with Sally. “That’s spilled milk,” he said, “and I guess I have to say, so be it. The point is, Sally, the problems you have right now can’t be solved by running. They can only be made worse. This is the time to stand up and fight it through. I’m willing to help on that. Now, when Teresa is up and around, if you want to work out some different arrangement, that’s fine with me and I’ll help. But I’d hope it’ll be an arrangement that keeps Teresa around here or at least in one spot for a while so she can have a little stability in her life, OK?”

“I guess,” she replied. “If it weren’t for Teresa . . . but you’re right, I can’t really run off now anyway.”

“Right. Now, it’s getting close to noon, so let’s have some lunch. We’ve got an hour or so before we’re going to have to leave for the lawyer’s office and I don’t want to be late.”

“I guess that’s the smart thing to do,” she said, looking a little brighter than she had a few minutes before. “There’s still some meat loaf left over. Meat loaf sandwiches and canned soup all right?”

“Sounds like a winner to me.”

“Good, I’ll get started on it. It should only take a few minutes.”

There’s that, John thought. What next? Maybe I ought to check in with Annamaria. I’ll have to use the cell phone since Teresa will have the phone line tied up.

“John,” Mandy said quietly, “I think we need to talk. By ourselves.”

John looked at her, and it was easy to see she wasn’t a happy camper, so it was easy to understand what she wanted to talk about. “All right,” he said. “Out on the patio, I guess.”

The two of them went through the living room, past where Teresa was avidly pounding the computer keyboard, and went out onto the screened-in patio. John had no more than slid the glass door closed when Mandy said sadly, “John, is that how you see me? A quitter?”

“Yeah, Mandy, I guess I do,” he said honestly. “When things got tough you ran, and all it did was make things harder for me. I managed to make it through, but it would have been a lot easier if I’d had some support, rather than you causing me more trouble. I missed you a lot afterwards, Mandy, but I came to realize that what you did made you part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.”

“Is that why you don’t seem very anxious to get back with me?”

“Yeah, I guess it has at least something to do with it. Don’t get me wrong, Mandy. I’ve thought about it a lot, and not just the last few days. Part of it might be all right, but part of me probably would be asking myself if you were going to cut and run if times got tough again.”

“John, I know I made a mistake. I won’t make it again.”

“Sounds good,” he said. “But look, I know this situation with Joe wasn’t your fault and maybe you had good reason to get away from him. That’s one thing, and from what I understand I can’t blame you for it. But while I don’t know everything that’s happened with you since you left me, I do know you have a history of beating feet when the going gets tough. I’d have to think awful hard before I’d set myself up to let it happen to me again.”

“But Sally has an even longer history of running away when the going gets tough.”

“True, and it’s the big item on the list that tells me that I don’t want to be much more than ‘just friends’ with her, either. Come on, if she had a car and a few bucks, she’d be on the road now with Teresa, wheelchair or no wheelchair, right?”

“I had a hell of a time keeping her around until you got home. She was trying to get me to take Teresa and her with me when I go to Nevada.”

“That’s my point. It wouldn’t be a good move for her, would it?”

“Not when you consider the alternative,” Mandy conceded. “Granted, things could go wrong, but she stands to gain so much by just hanging in there with you here, for even a little bit.”

“Exactly, and I’m thinking more of Teresa’s benefit than I am of Sally’s. It would be good for Teresa if Sally can learn to stick things out a little, because it sucks to be brought up like that, and in the long run it will just turn Teresa into a runner like her mother. I don’t know a whole hell of a lot about Sally’s history, but I do know there are times she should have stayed put when she hit the road. I do know there are times in her life when running was the right thing to do, at least when she left that bozo who got her pregnant, and maybe this last time. But running doesn’t solve everything, just like it didn’t solve anything for you.”

“You’re saying there’s no hope for us?”

“I didn’t say that. What I did say, or at least meant to say, is that while I’m willing to consider it, I’d have to think about it long and hard before I decided to do anything even semi-permanent. When you get back from Nevada, we can explore the idea of getting back together. If you’re willing, maybe we can spend a night tearing up a bed now and then, but it’s going to take you a lot of convincing to get me to go much farther than that. Don’t expect to come back and fall into the situation we had before you took off on me.”

“All right, John,” she sighed. “I guess it was a stupid thing to hope for, but after things blew up with Joe, I thought, well, maybe . . . oh, shit. I’ll get on the road in the morning. Is it all right if I leave some of my stuff here in the garage for a while?”

“Yeah, it’ll be all right, so long as you plan on coming back to get it. But Mandy, please understand that I’m not closing the door permanently. It’s just that I’ve been burned badly four times, and after Julie I decided I’m going to be goddamn careful before I get myself into that position again.”

“I can understand that, I guess,” she sighed. “I’m not the only one who’s hurt you.”

“No, you’re not,” he said. “But it does make things a little more difficult. But look, all that said, I’d like it if you could stick around another day or two until this school situation irons itself out. Sally and Teresa may have to be ferried somewhere when I can’t help. Once we make some sense out of that, maybe I can jigger things around to be able to manage it.”

“Yeah, I guess I can do that,” she conceded. “You’re not thinking about getting something going with Sally, are you?”

“To tell you the truth, she scares me more than you do. If it had been just her last Tuesday, I’d have given her a couple of hundred bucks and a ride to the bus station. But with Teresa . . . well, I just couldn’t make myself do that.”

“If you’re not going to get something going with her, you have to figure out some way to get her standing on her own two feet.”

“Right, and I intend to work on that as soon as things slow down enough that I have the time to decide whether to shit or go blind. Everything has been patchwork up to this point.”

John heard the sliding door open. He glanced up to see Sally sticking her head out. “Hey, people,” she said. “Lunch is ready.”

“We’ll be there in a minute,” John told her. As soon as she was headed back to the kitchen, John took his ex-wife by the arm and said quietly. “Look, Mandy, I didn’t say it was impossible. I just said I was going to have to take my time and think about it.”

“I guess what I’ve done gives you the right to do that,” she sighed. “I’m sorry John. Sorry that I put you through all that shit, and sorry that I thought that, well, we could pick up where we left off.”

“Go get your divorce. That’ll give you some time to think about things, maybe get them into perspective. I’m not going to do anything in a rush, and I don’t think you should, either.”

“You’re probably right,” she sighed, “and you’ve said a few things I really ought to be thinking about.”

Lunch proved to be canned soup, along with the meat loaf sandwiches. “I’m afraid that’s the end of the meat loaf,” Sally told them. “I’ll have to come up with something else for dinner, and I suppose that’s going to involve knowing how much time we have.”

“I have no doubt you can come up with something. If not, it’s easy enough to call for a pizza or whatever,” John replied. “Mandy, you’re going to stick around and keep an eye on Teresa this afternoon, aren’t you?

“Shouldn’t be any problem. I need to sort my stuff out a little to get ready to go to Nevada anyway.”

“Teresa, how are you coming on finding that school?”

“I think I found the one you’re talking about, and it might work. But you probably ought to be the one to call them up. It’s not real cheap, John, and from what I can see it looks like they want to work in full semesters, not just picking up in the middle of a term.”

“That could be the case, and we might have to do it that way. We’ll just have to see, and we can’t know more until I can explain the problem to them. In any case, it gives us a solid gold backup position we can use if we have to. I’ll give them a call when your mother and I get back from seeing the lawyer this afternoon.”

“It’d be a lot of work to do a full semester’s work in only three months,” the girl in the wheelchair said.

“Well, with the coming summer it would be more like six months than three, and for at least two of them it’s not like you have a lot else to do. Your mom and I can help you, and maybe Mandy if she’s back from Nevada in time. But like I said, it’s a backup position that will at least work. I’m still hoping we can find some other way to do it that won’t put you out quite as far. I don’t know if the lawyer is going to come up with something, but we’ll know pretty soon.”

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