The summer of 94 was not a fun one.  Bobby tried everything he could to occupy himself.  Which usually meant getting into trouble.  I also spent time with Tim's father.  I would go and sit with him for an evening about once a week.  We had grown very close, since my father lived out of state.

During some of these visits, his housekeeper would come.  Her and I did a lot of talking.  Then she started to tell me about a man that she thought I should meet.  I told her "Anne, I don't want another man.  I was intending to spend the rest of my life alone.  Men just complicated things for me. And I had been stepped on one too many times."  But she wouldn't let up.  His name was Terry and he had just started working for the local police department.  She knew him because the assistant chief of police ate lunch at her house almost every day.

She kept telling me that Terry was a great looking man. And that we would make the perfect couple.  He had a great personality, and a sense of humor.  He was tall and looked great in a  uniform.. He was in the process of a divorce himself.  And she thought of me when she found out.  I kept putting off her invitations to her house, claiming I didn't have time or was already busy with something else.

On one of these visits, while the housekeeper and I sat on the porch, Bobby helped himself to four hundred dollars that was in Anne's purse.  She just happened to notice it before she left the house.  With only the four of us in the house, we knew who had taken it.  So we confronted Bobby about it.  He said yep he had taken it.  And started pulling the wadded up bills from his pockets.  Bobby then turned around and walked out of the room. When I hollered at him to come back in and explain himself and apologize. The only response we got was a Screw You.  And he slammed the door to one of the bedrooms.  There wasn't much use in arguing with him.  It would have ended in a huge physical fight.  And Anne was just happy to have her money back.

What I didn't know was she was telling him about me.  He was going to rent a house that was next door to her.  And was just waiting for me to show at her house to introduce the two of us.

We went through just about everything.  Or so I thought.  Bobby stole things from just about everybody that he crossed paths with.

He started with change that his grandfather kept in a little wicker basket that had a lid.  I didn't find out about it until he put a note in the basket in the place of the change.  And it read... "Bobby this money is not yours, KEEP YOUR HANDS OUT".  That seemed to have stopped that one.

Most of the things that Bobby did  I would not find out about until after it was done and over.  And if that wasn't enough, nobody wanted to press charges against him.  Nobody wanted to be bothered or have to take a afternoon off work to go to court.  I tried to make him work off things that he had done wrong.  But that usually ended in disaster, a bigger mess than to begin with. I tried restricting privileges, paddling, time outs... anything I could think of.

We had stopped counseling, it was a waste of money and time.  He told the shrink what they wanted to hear.  They were not listening to me.  Couldn't believe that this well mannered and behaved child would do the things that I was telling them.  Between doctor bills, medications, hospital stays, time off work, close to sixty thousand dollars had been spent or lost.  This didn't include the things that I had to pay for to be fixed or replaced.