Hell to Pay (What Doesn’t Kill You, #7): An Emily Romantic Mystery

by Pamela Fagan Hutchins

  I want to introduce you to this amazing creature, my son.

  In eighth grade, Clark received a commendation in all four of the standardized TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) subjects. He participated in band and lacrosse. He played a primary role in his middle school play, The Naked King. And yet he almost drove his parents crazy with constant, inexplicable Clarkisms along the way.

  Back then, his counselor asked us to teach Clark responsibility for his own actions using Love and Logic Parenting[1] in conjunction with the assistance we all gave him on organizational skills. The staggering amount of assistance we gave Clark with organizational skills, which he absolutely hated, whether it came from the counselor or from us. But the counselor claimed great success with the Love and Logic methodology.

  We were supposed to clearly state to Clark that he is responsible for a certain behavior (i.e., turning in completed homework) and that if he chooses not to do the behavior, he is choosing the consequence that goes with it (i.e., yard work).

  Logical, right?

  Loving, too?

  Sure . . . but it didn’t work on Clark at all. Not a single bit.

  It worked amazingly well with his non-ADHD siblings, though, so it was not a total waste. To give you just a taste, I offer up this very one-sided Instant Message conversation between my husband (stepdad) and me (mom). This exchange is about yard work Clark was supposed to do as a consequence for not turning in completed homework.

  mom 4:39pm: i told him to go outside and start the yard work/mow at 4:10. then i took a long shower

  mom 4:39pm: i started getting ready in the bathroom

  mom 4:39pm: at 4:33 i heard noises in the kitchen

  mom 4:39pm: it was clark

  mom 4:40pm: “getting a snack”

  mom 4:40pm: i said go back outside you should have done the snack before you started the yard work

  mom 4:40pm: he said no, i haven’t gotten started out in the yard yet

  mom 4:40pm: i said impossible, no snack takes 22 min

  mom 4:40pm: he said he made a sandwich

  mom 4:40pm: i said that doesn’t take 22 minutes, 22 minutes is a 3 course meal

  mom 4:40pm: he then said he’d go right outside

  mom 4:40pm: but he came right back in and said he had no gas so he was going to pull weeds instead of mow. i said ok. he asked me to show him which plants are weeds so i did

  mom 4:41pm: he came back in 1 minute later and said there are thorns

  mom 4:41pm: i said get gloves if you are concerned about thorns (as you know there were barely any stickers on those plants and no thorns)

  mom 4:41pm: he went looking for gloves

  mom 4:41pm: couldn’t find any (he said)

  mom 4:41pm: he went back outside WITH HIS GIANT LACROSSE GLOVES ON, with the fingers that have the size and flexibility of Polish sausage

  mom 4:41pm: at this point, i became frustrated

  mom 4:41pm: i told him to get the gloves off and get outside

  mom 4:41pm: i explained to him that it was 4:36 and that we were leaving at 6:30 for his sister’s concert and that I was dropping him at his dad’s

  mom 4:41pm: because he had at least 2 hours of work to do in the yard as he had known since last night

  mom 4:42pm: and he couldn’t go to the concert without a shower, but there wouldn’t be time for him to shower because he had to finish

  mom 4:42pm: and that after this i couldn’t trust him to stay at home alone and do the yard work without supervision, so he had to go to his dad’s

  mom 4:42pm: AND this was after a very difficult 5 minute conversation trying to get a straight answer out of him about his grades and what his teachers said about any need for extra credit in his classes given all the homework he hadn’t turned in

  mom 4:42pm: i had to stop him over and over when he would say something nonresponsive designed to make me think he had actually talked to the teacher, and i’d say, that’s not what the teacher said, what did the teacher say, and it turned out he hadn’t talked to the teachers at all!

  mom 4:42pm: so then he started crying because he wasn’t going to get to go to the concert

  mom 4:43pm: and i only yelled one time, which is a miracle at this point

  mom 4:43pm: and i said stop with the tears, this was your choice to waste 40 min, i told you that we had things to do that you might not get to do if you didn’t get finished so maybe you’ll learn from this but if you don’t it will be the same tomorrow

  mom 4:43pm: but either way, get outside and get going on the yard work

  stepdad 4:44pm: i am still here, take a breath

  stepdad 4:44 pm: LACROSSE GLOVES? you have got to admit, that is pretty funny . . .

  mom 4:45 pm: ask me tomorrow and maybe it will be funny then . . .

  mom 4:47 pm: ok i admit it, it’s funny

  Besides a lack of organizational skills, another hallmark of the neuro-atypical[2] mind is creative problem-solving. Solutions that don’t seem logical to the rest of us, necessarily, but make perfect sense to the child. Clark gives us lots of examples of this trait, sometimes in a dangerous way. Let’s just say you don’t want to send him out with any type of cutting implement without a clear set of instructions, a demonstration, a run-through, and constant oversight. Which begs the question: Why the heck don’t I just do this job myself, if he isn’t learning anything from it?

  Ah, but he is, Grasshopper. We must be patient. Very, very patient, my inner kung fu master says.

  (Hold me.)

  Note that it truly is a miracle that Clark survives his mother; yelling only once in this lengthy exchange was quite an achievement for me. Intellectually, I know yelling does no good, except to occasionally keep my head from exploding off the top of my neck.

  Our learning from the scenario above? That Love and Logic doesn’t overcome the wiring of an ADHD brain. Some behaviors just aren’t choices for Clark. Some are, though, and one of our challenges is to keep him from gaming our system by using ADHD as an excuse for bad choices, especially as he becomes more parent-savvy.

  Lacrosse gloves . . . it was pretty funny.

  Click here to continue reading The Clark Kent Chronicles.

  * * *

  Techniques to help parents have more fun and less stress while raising responsible kids of all ages, from the Love and Logic Institute. http://www.loveandlogic.com/. ↵

  For purposes of this book, neuro-atypical will describe people on the autism or ADHD spectrums. Conversely, I will use neuro-typical to describe people that have neurological development and states consistent with what most people would think of as normal, particularly with their executive functions and their ability to process linguistic information and social cues. ↵

  Excerpt from Hot Flashes and Half Ironmans (Women's Health and Athletics)

  I don't ask much.

  They say youth is wasted on the young. They are full of it.

  Youth is too full of angst and drama for me. Give me middle age, wisdom, and a healthy libido any day. Give me some crappy life experiences so I’ll recognize awesome when it lands in my lap. Give me cellulite and wrinkles so I can get the hell over myself. Give me boredom so I can appreciate a challenge, and give me a failed marriage to humble me. Give me hot flashes and migraines so I can enjoy feeling good the rest of the time.

  And then, then . . . give me a hot day in June. Let me fill our beater Suburban to its capacity with tweens and teens, some of them mine, some of them his. Let us pick up my second and last husband at the airport after a long and tiring business trip, let us giggle all the way home and nearly burst with the pressure of our shared secret. We have a surprise for him, you see.

  We whisk him home to his bicycle and tri bag.

  “What’s this?” he asks, dark circles under his camouflage-colored eyes. Eyes that are sparkling now between the red lines.

  “Here!” his daughter Liz cries, unable to hold it in any longer. She waggles her hand at Clark and Susanne, who pull t-shirts on over
their heads. The hand-ironed custom logo is slightly askew on each of them. It reads “The Eric Ralph Hutchins First Annual Invitational Triathlon” above a (really bad) picture of Eric.

  “Those are great, guys, thanks,” he says as Liz hands him his and he slips it on.

  But that’s not all. “Put your swimsuit on, honey, because the race starts in fifteen minutes,” I say.

  Now he’s grinning ear to ear. We all jump on our bikes and pedal over to the Marilyn Estates pool. We swim ten thrashing, splashing, laughing laps of the tiny rectangle of water. We race our motley crew of bicycles around the block. And we finish by running figure eights around the trees in the park by the pool. Fifteen minutes later, we each get a trophy, with awards for first (Liz), second (Eric), poutiest (Susanne), goofiest (Clark), and best-looking, AKA last (me). We’ve attracted quite a crowd, and they cheer as the kids present the awards.

  My husband doesn’t seem tired anymore. He looks like the luckiest middle-aged man in the history of the world. Although he doesn’t look middle-aged, which makes me the luckiest middle-aged woman ever.

  This. Give me this. Or something a whole lot like it. Give me beautiful days together, active and alive, happy and feeling fifteen instead of closing in on fifty.

  This, or something like it.

  Putting The Fun Into Dysfunctional

  I am a planner. I plan and schedule and plot, much to the delight of my engineer/triathlete husband, who loves to live by a plan. Even more, he loves for me to make the plan and then for us both to live by it. And what he loves most of all is when the plan I make and we live by includes a healthy dose of us bicycling and swimming together. I believe a plan is a structure to make reasonable changes in, while Eric casts his plans in cement. Obviously, I am right, so there usually isn’t much of a problem.

  But I did not plan what happened to us in the Good Old Summertime Classic, a sixty-nine-mile bicycle ride along some of our most favorite cycling roads anywhere. The bike route runs in and around Fayetteville, Texas, and includes the tiny old town of Roundtop. We had trained for it. We had talked about it with joy and reverence. Eric even accidentally went to get our packets a full week before they were available for pickup. (Don’t ask.)

  The night before the race, I developed a PMS[1]/hormonal migraine. Because it was the middle of the night, I took one of my gentler migraine prescriptions, hoping that this pill plus sleep would be all I needed. But when I woke up at 5:00 a.m. to the mother of all migraines, I caved in and went for the elephant tranquilizer. When morning came, I was so nauseous that I couldn’t eat. My husband, a man of immense patience and even greater kindness, suggested we stay home. But we had made a plan, so I got in the car. I theorized that I had no idea now how I would feel in two and a half hours—but I kinda did know, and just didn’t want to admit it.

  I should have listened to my husband.

  On the way to the race, driving in the dark, the unthinkable happened. I had my head on Eric’s shoulder, sweetly sleeping (make that “snoring and drooling under the influence of the elephant pill”), when he let out a tiny swear word. Actually, I believe it started with an F, and was preceded by the word “mother,” and that his voice blasted through my cranium and echoed madly inside my impaired brain.

  “What happened?” I screamed, heart pounding, hand clutching throat, eyes sweeping the road for signs of the apocalypse.

  “I hit a cardinal.”

  OH MY GOD. HE HIT A CARDINAL.

  Since the time he could speak, my husband has proclaimed himself a fan of the Chicago Phoenix St. Louis Arizona Cardinals football team. His screen saver at work has always been a giant Cardinal head logo, until very recently when he finally switched it to a picture of us, under teensy-tinsy little applications of subtle pressure from me. He watched their 2009 playoff game at 2:00 a.m. from his hotel room in Libya through a webcam picture of our TV on his laptop. He collects cardinals and Cardinal paraphernalia and insists on displaying them prominently in our bedroom, which is painted Cardinal red.

  Despite his lifelong obsession, Eric had never seen an actual live cardinal bird until we moved to Houston. Growing up in the U.S. Virgin Islands, he’d caught glimpses of them on TV, and he pictured them as red, fierce . . . and large.

  One day while unpacking boxes in our new house, I saw a male cardinal through the window. Nonchalantly, I called out to my sweetie, “Hey, Eric, there’s a cardinal in our bird feeder.”

  Eric, whose physique looks like you would expect it to after twenty years of triathlon and cycling, pounded into the living room like a rhino instead of his usual cheetah self, wearing an expectant grin and not much else.

  “WHERE IS IT?”

  Lost for words, I pointed out the front window and prayed the elderly woman next door was not walking past our house.

  “It’s awfully small.” (That was Eric that said that, not the elderly neighbor.)

  He was crestfallen. The mighty cardinal was a tiny slip of a bird.

  Back to the car: ear-splitting expletives and wife under the influence. “Honey, I didn’t feel an impact. Are you sure you didn’t miss it?” I asked.

  “They’re awfully small birds,” he said.

  Ahhhh, good point. We drove on, somberly. We arrived at the race. I stumbled off to the bathroom. When I came back, Eric was crouched in front of the grill of our car. I joined him, confused. He held up a handful of tiny red feathers.

  I swear it was the drugs, but I burst out laughing. “You, you of all people, you killed a cardinal?”

  He glared at me as he picked out the brightest of the small feathers and tucked it reverently into the chest strap of his heart monitor. “I’m going to carry this feather with me in tribute, the whole way.”

  So we got on our bikes: me, wobbly, cotton-mouthed, and somewhat delirious; Eric, solemn and determined. This, the ride for the cardinal, would be the ride of his life. Sixty-nine miles to the glory of the cardinal.

  I made it all of about two miles before I apologized. “I’m anaerobic, and we’re only going twelve miles per hour on a flat. My neck and back are seizing up. I don’t know if it’s drugs or hormones, but I’m really whack.”

  “You can do it, honey. We came all this way. Now we’re riding for a higher purpose.”

  I gave it my best, I really did, but a few miles later after a succession of hills where going up with a racing heartbeat was only slightly less awful than cruising down with a seriously messed-up sense of balance, I pulled to a stop. “I’ve never quit before, but I can’t do it today, love.”

  A beautiful male cardinal swooped across the road in front of us. Eric bit his lip. “I understand. Do you want to flag a SAG [support and aid] wagon?”

  “I can make it back if we just take it easy. I’m sorry, honey.”

  My husband treated me like a princess that day, but all the excitement had drained out of him. This race was not to be, and a teacup-sized bird had sacrificed his life in vain because I’d overdosed on Immitrex and ruined the plan. The waste of it all, the waste of a day, the waste of a life—it was hard to overcome. But Eric tried; I’ll give him credit for that, the man really tried.

  That night, after we did a make-up ride on the trainers while we watched We Are Marshall (interrupted occasionally by Eric’s sobs, because the only thing worse than a dead cardinal is a dead football player), I pulled our sheets out of the drier and brought them into our room. Eric, wearing his new Fayetteville Good Old Summertime T-shirt, helped me put the warm, clean cotton on the bed.

  As we hoisted the sheets in the air to spread them out over the mattress, a tiny red feather shot straight up toward the light and wafted down slowly, back and forth, back and forth, until, pushed by the soft breeze of our ceiling fan, it landed on the pillow on Eric’s side of the bed.

  Above: Actual cardinal feather on Eric’s pillow.

  Steeling myself for the worst, I shot a glance at him to see if he had noticed. I did not exhale. Maybe I had time to brush it off quickly? Too late—he w
as staring at the feather. “Is that damn bird going to haunt me for the rest of my life now?” he asked. But he smiled.

  Now I could breathe. And tease. “Probably. You did senselessly murder a cardinal, Eric.”

  And he laughed.

  Click here to continue reading Hot Flashes And Half Ironmans.

  * * *

  Technically, I suffer from premenstrual dysphoric disorder, but try to say “I’m feeling PMDDy” or “I’m really PMDDing right now.” Yeah. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. PMDD is a severe and sometimes disabling form of PMS. ↵

  Excerpt from What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too? (Writing, Publishing, & Promotion)

  1 • EARN (NO) MONEY ALL BY YOURSELF {On the financial implications of traditional versus indie publishing}

  My personal description of an indie-publishing Loser:

  —Willing to work hard to make little or nothing

  —Comfortable having people whisper “he couldn’t get a real book contract” behind his back

  —Under the right circumstances, would run naked on a beach

  Seriously, y’all, any writers out there? If you’re a writer, chances are you’re not in the game expecting a Spindletop-gusher payday. Sure, it would be nice, but we all know most writers—most traditionally published authors—are working stiffs like the rest of us. For every J.K. Rowling, there’s a legion of also-rans slodging away at day jobs they might not even like. English teachers. Air-conditioner installers. Attorneys by day, like me, and night-and-weekend artists, like most of you reading this book.

  For every traditionally published author working a day job, there are millions of writers who haven’t wrapped their hands around that solidly satisfying brass ring—true writers, writers called by their hearts to lay their souls or their wisdom on the page, yet writers who haven’t earned a single cent on a book sale in any form of publishing. Maybe they’re already living the life, working as journalists, Hallmark-card poets, writers of jingles, dishwasher ads, and Viagra commercials, but the bulk of them aren’t summering in the Hamptons.