Heaven Is A Deal by Michael Gerber

The eleven-year-old and his clan were everywhere, taunting me, laughing at me. It wasn’t that his family was so rich or that we were so poor—it was how our situations were so similar. His father was a pastor, and so was I; his mother was a teacher, and so was Griselda. He even had a big sister, like Hayden. Well, maybe not like Hayden, but you get what I’m saying.

It started to become an obsession—and not the good, wholesome kind, like say abstinence or the Cubs.

“You know it’s going to become a movie,” I sighed glumly to my wife one morning over breakfast. “If only we had a kid.”

“We do,” Griselda said icily.

I thought she was just mad about not knowing a seven-letter word for “giraffe,” so I continued my thought. “No, no—I mean a real kid, one that does what we want it do and likes normal kid things like knives and MMA. A nice, sweet, Godly little boy.”

Guys, you know when you say exactly the wrong thing? Griselda burst into tears and left the room. We’d lost a child several years ago. And when I say “lost a child,” I mean really lost it. It was Christmas time and, with armloads of packages to mail, Griselda had taken our son Kyler with her to the Post Office. The infant had somehow crawled into a Priority Mail box and been mailed by mistake. Nobody knew where he ended up.

“If only we’d asked for Delivery Confirmation…” How many times we’d said that in the weeks afterward! I had my pastor work and egg-candling to comfort me, but Griselda had never forgiven herself, and some days, I felt pretty low about it, too.

Maybe that’s why Griselda became a preschool teacher. It certainly wasn’t because she liked kids. That’s why she was the one who suggested the plan in the first place. I’d just like to point that out, for any members of law enforcement who might be reading: it was all my wife’s idea.

2: IT’S LIKE GOD WANTS US TO

Usually my wife doesn’t enjoy going to Wal-Mart, she thinks it’s snobby. But after Hayden dragged her to the one in Burnt Turtle to get yogurt tops for a diorama, Griselda came back full of fire.

“There are loads of ‘I went to Heaven’ books,” Griselda said, which was news to me. I’ve told you how I feel about books written by humans. “What makes this one special is that it’s by a kid, so people feel mean if they don’t believe it.”