Chapter 7

The next several months were busy for me and Sarah. We started a home study course for Sarah with me tutoring her. She found that she loved working on the studies that we downloaded on the computer. It was starting to get to be a problem with Sarah using the computer so much so I bought a high end computer for her. That way she wouldn't interfere when I needed to study and trade my stocks.

I hired a local school teacher to come in twice a week and make sure that Sarah was following the curriculum correctly and that she was learning good study habits. Sarah was learning to be a computer whiz and I often found her, after her lessons were done, working on some subject that interested her at that time. Sometimes I had to force her away from the computer.

Social services took it upon themselves to make my life miserable for a while. As with all bureaucrats they soon lost interest and after six months or so they stopped coming around to check on Sarah. We never heard from the Social Services department again. I shudder to think what would have happened to Sarah if I had just given up and let them take her.

Sarah and I got along great. We treated each other more like brother and sister than teen and guardian. I don' t recall ever having to scold her or her getting mad at something I told her she had to do. She did most of the housework and I attributed that to her father telling her that a woman was put on this earth to do for her man. I was tickles to death that she wanted to do the housework; I am definitely not the best housekeeper in the world.

It soon became clear to me that Sarah needed to be with people her own age. I enrolled her in a youth bowling league, karate classes, dance classes and as many sports as I could. I guess that it goes without saying that I had absolutely no time for a social life. Almost every minute of my day was accounted for. If I wasn't tutoring Sarah I was taking her to the activity of the day. I really didn't mind though; it was great watching Sarah turn into a self-confident woman. Even Bess began to give me compliments on how I was raising Sarah.

Sarah had advanced so well that in two years she was going to go take her place in high school with people her own age. It took a battery of tests to prove that she was doing school work equal to or better than others her own age but she aced the tests and she completed most of them before the time limit that was given. To say that I was proud was an understatement.

I took her to Disney World for a week the summer before she was to start high school and we had a great time She had always been fascinated that people went on cruises so after we were done with Disney World I took her on a cruise for a week.

Right after Labor Day Sarah started school. It was the first time that she had been to school since her father had pulled her out of school in the forth grade. I was more afraid than she was. She had to make her way on her own among teens that had been in the public school system all of their lives. I found that I didn't have a thing to worry about. Sarah had matured beyond most of her peers and she usually came home complaining that the others in school were immature. She often complained that the materials that they were studying she had already covered in her home studies. When I explained to her teachers how her father had pulled her out of school in the fourth grade and she had brought herself up to grade in only two years they were amazed. One of her teachers insisted on giving Sarah an IQ Test and her scores were almost off the scale. As soon as I heard that I thanked God that she had the opportunity to get a real education. It would have been a crime to waste that brilliant mind.

Sarah had blossomed into a beautiful young woman and I knew that I would soon have lines of young men knocking on the door. Just before her sixteenth birthday I took her out and bought her a used car for her birthday on the condition that she take driver's education in high school. I stopped by the DMV and picked her up a learner's permit which would allow her to drive with the supervision of a licensed driver. I took her out one Saturday to give her some time behind the wheel and she did fairly well for being a newbie behind the wheel. We left the house early so that she could get her driving time in before the traffic started to build.

After we had been driving for a couple of hours we stopped at Denny's for a Grand Slam breakfast. Sarah said that we were close to where she and her father had lived and she asked if we could stop and see the old place. I reminded her that the cabin was no longer there and I tried to talk her out of it. I could see that she really wanted to see the old place so I agreed to take her there after breakfast. We finished breakfast and I got behind the wheel for the drive to her old home.

I had heard her say, when she first came to live with me, that they had lived way off of the county road. She saw the dirt drive that led to her old house before I did. The woods had begun to reclaim the drive and several times I had to get out and remove tree limbs or abandoned trash before I could proceed. After driving for about a half a mile on the dirt road we came to the wreckage of what used to be a cabin. The explosion had apparently set off afire and most of what was left was charred and it would have been hard to know that it was a house if you didn't know it before you arrived at the site.

I looked around the site for a while. This was about as remote as I had ever seen. Other than the cabin, there was no sign that man had ever been here. It would only be a couple more years before the woods completely reclaimed the cabin.