Word: andreas
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That November, Andrea, Noah and baby John moved into the 38-ft. trailer, setting themselves up in a recreation-vehicle community in Seminole, Fla. While Rusty worked, Andrea spent her days taking Noah and John to the beach, the park and the children's museum. Rusty was head of the household. Andrea was his partner. Their parenting skills differed, he says, but their philosophy didn't. They showed the boys the value of books, sports, the arts. Andrea taught them to shuck corn and snap green beans. She wanted them to appreciate the colors of rainbows. She let them make...
...Florida, Andrea became pregnant twice, miscarrying the first time but conceiving again by the time Rusty's project ended and they drove back to Houston. She began to call herself "Fertile Myrtle...
...months later, in 1998, Rusty came across a newsletter by an itinerant evangelist named Michael Woroniecki, whose advice had influenced him in college. Woroniecki was selling a motor home converted from a 1978 GMC bus that he, his wife and kids had used for their traveling crusade. Andrea and Noah, 4, preferred the bus to the trailer, so Rusty bought it. Noah and John slept in "the hole," a luggage compartment accessible from the cabin through a trapdoor. The 350 sq. ft. of living space would also house Paul, who would be only 17 months old when brother Luke...
...even as her brood expanded, Andrea was busy caring for her father, who had Alzheimer's and had never fully recovered from a heart attack a decade earlier. During the holidays, with her kids in tow, Andrea usually took charge, dishing up plates of food for relatives even as her own meal went cold. It was always Andrea who visited; she rarely allowed relatives to visit her, even though they lived just 30 minutes away. "We got as close as they would let you," says her brother Andrew Kennedy. "They were very private." Some thought she was embarrassed...
...stresses seemed to converge in 1999 after the family took the bus to the Grand Canyon. Andrea seemed tired and preoccupied on the drive home to Texas, recalls Rusty, who assumed she was suffering from aftereffects of the flu, which they all had had. But then she slipped into a deep funk. On June 16, 1999, crying and nearly hysterical, she called Rusty at work and asked him to come home. He found her in the back room of the bus. She was slumped in a chair, biting her fingers, her legs shaking even more uncontrollably than her hands. Rusty...