know, this isn’t really meat,” my daughter Hayden said, eying her Ar_y’s sandwich like it was going to bite her back. She’s eleven, and a pistol.
“Sure looks like meat to me,” I said, taking another bite. “Mm-MM. Tastes like meat, too.”
“It’s not. It’s just a goo that comes in big bags. Then they bake it.”
“Oh, bullpucky,” my wife said. Griselda’s the tough guy in our marriage. “Eat your sandwich.”
“I told you we should go to McDonald’s.”
“And I told you that McDonald’s is too expensive,” I replied. “Plus it’s way in the other direction.”
“But—” Hayden’s as stubborn as the man she was named after, Iowa’s legendary football coach.
I stopped her in her tracks. “What’s the Fifth Commandment?”
“Honor thy father and mother,” Hayden mumbled, then started to eat.
“See? Was that so—”
“Blech!” She spit it out. “Tastes like goo!”
“Hayden !” Griselda said, her voice rising. “You eat that supper right now, or Daddy’ll put on Rush for the whole entire drive!”
Check and mate, as they say in checkers. As Hayden chewed glumly, I wondered where she came up with all her nonsense. Like I said earlier, you have to go a pretty long way to get one over on ol’ Mitchell Creepo, but my daughter Hayden is a malarkey-magnet. She’ll believe in anything, no matter how crazy. According to her, Coca-Cola used to have drugs in it, W’s grandpa helped the Nazis, and Barack Obama is a US citizen! Right now, though, she was a very unhappy 11-year-old. “Where do you get all this stuff?” I said, offering an olive branch.
“The internet,” Hayden said. And then, with a pointed look at her mom: “They let us use it in school.”
Griselda has a thing about the internet. After growing up in a permissive, Lutheran household, she believes that parents have a right to control what goes into their kids’ heads. “I’m going to speak to Mrs. Dalbach,” Griselda said, slurping her Coke.
I knew by the way my wife drank her soda that dinner was officially ruined. The best thing to do was to get back on the road, and make the drive to her cousins’ as quickly as possible. That promised to be its own ordeal; Griselda’s family lived in Nine Forks, a town of 1,250, and liked to lord it over us, the “country cousins.” But—as I always reminded myself—even though we didn’t have much, we loved each other, and we loved God, and that’s all that matters.
• • •
Well, Hayden started throwing up not thirty minutes after we left Ar_y’s. A drive that should’ve taken us six hours ended up taking over six and a half, so I was pretty steamed. Griselda was, too. She was convinced that Hayden was doing it on purpose.
“She just wants to prove she was right about the goo,” Griselda muttered as our obstinate first-born staggered along the dark gravel shoulder, retching. After about a hundred miles, Griselda and I got so tired of stopping we just told Hayden to hork out the window.
“If you’re doing this to make me stop listening to Rush, it ain’t working!” I told her defiantly. “Volume going UP!”
I was pretty mad at Hayden then, but that was nothing compared to the next morning. As the ladies put their faces on, I was told I had to go out and clean the car!
“I want to look at our marriage contract,” I half-joked to Griselda. “Show me the part where cleaning spit-up is the man’s job!”
Even though the sign at the Days Inn tried to put me in the right frame of mind (“Jesus made this day perfect, the rest is your fault”) I was not a happy camper as I scrubbed the streaks of dried vomit off the side of our new Ford Explorer. “Remember how good you have it,” I said to myself. “Think about the Crucifixion.” But even with that bit of needed perspective, I pushed so hard on that ice-brush it still smells funny.
As I squirted bottled water onto the SUV and tried to buff some of the scratches out with a newspaper, a guy walked out of the hotel.
“Wild night?” he asked, Lexus chirping.
“Oh, no!” Lord, that was all I needed, it getting back to the good people of Buffalo Nut that their pastor was a roaring drunk. As devout Christians, there are certain things they simply won’t forgive. So I plastered on a sweet smile and said, “Do you know anyplace a dad could sell one slightly used eleven-year-old daughter?”
“Try the internet,” he said, pulling away.
“That’s the problem!” I yelled after him.
So that’s what today was going to be like, I thought, one trial after another. I threw the brush into the way back, and was about to pitch the last section of my complimentary newspaper into the bushes when something caught my eye.
Like I said, as a Christian man, I don’t believe in superstitions—but I do believe in Jesus, and I know it was Him who put the Life & Living section of the Nine Forks Republican-Republican in my hand. As I read the headline, I felt a bit of electricity running up and down my spine, like I already knew it would change my life: “Nebraska Boy Claims to Have Seen Heaven.”
“Surprised they let Cornhuskers in there,” I joked to nobody in particular, and then forgot about it. But in my mind—without any deliberation or malice aforethought as defined by the Iowa Penal Code, I want to be clear about that—a plan was forming.
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