Heaven Is A Deal by Michael Gerber

“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.