The 8 Mistakes of Amy Maxwell

by Heather Balog

  The

  8 Mistakes of Amy Maxwell

  Heather Balog

  The 8 Mistakes of Amy Maxwell

  Heather Balog

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 2014 Heather Balog

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Cover design and Photography by: Anita B. Carroll of Race-Point.com

  ISBN 978-1500664770

  Published 2014Published in the United States of America

  I’d like to thank everyone who made this book a reality. Thank you to Tyna for reading this book endlessly, tirelessly and putting up with my constant plot and name changes. Thank you to Anita B. Carroll for my fabulous cover that I LOVE. Thank you to Jessica for all her suggestions and reading every draft of this book. Thank you to my children for the endless material they have provided me with. And most of all, thank you to my husband who encouraged me when I was ready to throw in the towel. You’re only sort of like Roger. Love you.

  ~*~

  They say that when you are dying, your life flashes before your eyes. Call me a cynic, but I always thought that was a bunch of malarkey. Now that my life is actually flashing before my eyes and I’m looking back, I’m inclined to believe it.

  I guess I should have seen it coming. There were signs along the way; indicators that something was amiss. I mean, I had suspicions, of course, but I dismissed them. Because sometimes, I live in my own little fantasy world and it’s difficult for me to see what’s real and what’s imagined. But this time, I was right. I was really right.

  If I think about it, I’ve made about 8 mistakes. Oh, no…not in my lifetime. Please, if I counted up all those mistakes, well, we’d be here much longer than 300 some odd pages allows. I’m talking about the 8 mistakes that led me to this point, right here, right now. Hog tied to a chair on a desolate mountaintop in a deserted cabin.

  I can just see my sister Beth rolling her eyes, “Oh please, Amy…you are so melodramatic…” No, I am not being dramatic. Got news for you Bethie, this is real. And I’m pretty sure I’m going to die. All because of my 8 mistakes.

  It all started back in September, the day of my six year old son’s birthday party.

  ~ONE~

  “Roger,” I call out to my husband in a hushed tone, gently poking him with my left foot. No answer. “Roger!” I repeat, this time with firmness, using my “I’m getting rather annoyed with you” voice that I usually reserve for the children. Still, I get no response from Roger.

  At this point, I’m not sure why I’m whispering. Evan is done with his nap and is happily banging away on his xylophone a foot away from where his father’s head is lolling off the couch. Roger doesn’t even flinch. My heart skips a beat as I examine Roger’s chest and realize that I don’t see the usual rise and fall. I drop my laundry basket.

  “Roger!” I shout as I urgently shake him. But it is to no avail. He doesn’t budge. I feel for a pulse, finding none. I let out a bloodcurdling scream and my other three children race into the room.

  “Mommy, what’s wrong?” asks Lexie, concern crossing her face.

  “It’s your father!” I manage to squeak out. “He’s… dead!”

  “Did you check his pulse?” inquires 13 year old Allie in a matter of fact tone. She clutches her cell phone in her hand and it is, as usual, attached to her ear.

  “Yes! He has no pulse!” I cry out. “Hang up and call 911!”

  Rolling her eyes, she mutters resentfully, “Kaitlyn, I’ll have to call you back. My dad is dead.” She ends her phone call and dials 911, while the other children sob quietly at their father’s feet. We wait for what seems like hours, but in reality, it is only 10 minutes.

  The ambulance arrives and the 21 year old, very hot, very muscular paramedic, who looks suspiciously like the neighbor’s pool boy, Raul, climbs out of the rig. He is wearing uniform pants that accentuate his sculpted gluteus maximus and a wife beater tee that displays his rippling tanned biceps. I sharply suck in my breath as he edges past me to get through the front door. Once inside the house, he kneels next to the couch and examines Roger. After a moment, he gazes up at me with his pensive chocolate brown eyes and shakes his head grimly. “I’m so sorry ma’am, but he’s gone.”

  “He had a good life,” I sob as Raul wraps his muscular forearms around my shoulders and draws me closer to his body. “It was probably all the pork roll, egg and cheese sandwiches he ate! What am I going to do now! I’m all alone!” I wail as I bury my face in Raul’s sprawling chest. I inhale deeply and discover that he smells like sun tan oil and coconut. I start to quiver.

  “It’s ok,” he murmurs in my ear. “You can use the life insurance money to hire a nanny for the kids and come live with me. I have a beach house in Bermuda and a ski chalet in Swiss Alps…”

  “Oh Raul,” I moan. “I can’t do that. I must take care of my husband’s affairs and funeral…”

  “No need, darling,” Raul explains. “It’s been taken care of.” I blink and see that Roger’s body is no longer on the couch. The children are gone and the house is neat and tidy. Raul scoops me into his arms and lifts my face to kiss me….

  Roger snorts loudly, interrupting my daydream. His right arm and leg are precariously hanging off the couch.

  Why can’t he put his whole body on the couch instead of dangling all over the place like a floppy fish? I smile to myself as I imagine Roger as a trout, his flaccid fish body and puckering fish lips.

  Sighing heavily and shifting the overflowing basket of laundry to my other hip, I lean over, intending to tap him on the shoulder. Only I don’t end up being as gentle as I planned. I trip, lose my footing, and punch my sleeping husband in the face. (In my defense, his leg shouldn’t have been blocking my path.)

  “Ouch!” Roger yelps as he bolts upright. He rubs his cheek and gawks at me as if I have just shot him in the chest at point blank range. “Jesus Christ, Aim!” Evan begins to wail at his father’s obvious overreaction, so I drop my laundry basket and scoop up the crying 2 year old child.

  I glower at Roger, annoyed that he has startled our son. “I’m sorry! I tripped over your damn foot for God’s sake. There’s no reason to shout…” I start bouncing Evan up and down on my hip to quiet his screeches. Once this kid gets going, it could be hours before he calms down. I swear he needs Ritalin already.

  “Oh, please,” Roger retorts while struggling to stand. This proves to be quite difficult as the couch is pretty lumpy from the kids jumping on it and using the cushions to smack each other in the head. Roger falls into the abyss several times in his attempts to get up. I purse my lips together to prevent myself from laughing at him. He scowls at me as he finally gets to his feet. “Was this like when your hand ’just slipped’ and you punched me in the nose the other night?”

  I feel my face turn bright red as I recall Friday night at the movie theater. For the first time in ages, we were actually on a date. During the previews, I made the unfortunate mistake of glancing lovingly at my husband as he adoringly ogled the hot young blonde thing in daisy dukes who was leaning over the seat in search of her wayward cell phone.

  I swear I had only meant to swat at him, but I ended up cold cocking him right in the nose, resulting in an immediate gush of blood. The blonde bimbo gasped and sympathetically offered Roger tissues that were tucked
in her bra (which he accepted with that annoying goofy grin of his). As she brushed her fake boobs against his body and pinched the bridge of his nose, she pointed out that she was a nurse, but I insisted we leave the movie theater immediately to get him home. I don’t think I called her a slut, but Roger swears I did. It was one of the many things we fought about on the way home from the first non-animated movie we were going to see in about 8 ½ years.

  After Roger handed the shocked babysitter a twenty (I don’t think she was expecting us so soon, as she was cozy on the aforementioned lumpy couch with her tongue rammed down her heavily pierced boyfriend’s throat), he stomped off to bed and refused to discuss the incident any more.

  I admit, I’m extremely jealous at times, not to mention, unfortunately klutzy. But who can blame me, really? I’m incredibly self-conscious of my flabby post baby belly, jiggly arms, dimpled legs and pancake boobs, as most mothers are. I breastfed all four of my kids until they were at least 9 months old, making sure I ate the proper amount of calories during pregnancy and breastfeeding. The ice cream floats and hefty portions of my meals were necessary to ensure their healthy futures. They also made up for the lack of coffee and wine. I have sacrificed heavily over the last 14 years in my perpetual state of baby rearing. The least my husband could do was not gawk at 21 year olds with asses so tight you could bounce a quarter off of them. But, I digress.

  “Once again, it was an accident and I apologize for that,” I inform Roger as I retrieve my laundry basket. Skillfully tucking both the baby and the basket under my arms, I head up the stairs. “Everyone will be here in less than an hour so if you could please make sure that Colton comes inside and at least washes his face…” My voice trails off as I hear Roger groan.

  During his nap, he has apparently forgotten about our son’s 6th birthday party taking place at our house this afternoon. I have single handedly cleaned the entire house from top to bottom (as best as one possibly can as four kids mess it up in your wake), sent the invitations, hung the decorations, ordered the food, and commissioned the pony, clown and bounce house. I put together goodie bags, assured my neurotic neighbor that there would be no peanut products served and that all the food was gluten free. I made a frickin’ piñata, for cripes sake. And Roger has the nerve to groan when I ask him to make sure his son’s face is clean?

  Fighting the urge to make a snarky comment as I leave my husband in the living room, I stomp up the stairs and into Evan’s room, dump the laundry basket on his bedroom floor and Evan onto his changing table. He fights me as I attempt to pull his drool soaked t-shirt over his head. “No!” His muffled protests fall upon deaf ears.

  In true bad mommy fashion, I’m not even listening to him as he babbles away. In my head I am going through my mental to do list. About five minutes ago, I discovered that I lost the post it note on which I had written my actual to do list, causing a mini panic attack. Roger is constantly mocking my post it note dependence, threatening to find me a twelve step program, but quite honestly, I think the post its are the only things that keep me sane.

  All at once, I realize the most important thing that was on my list and my hand flies to my mouth. I forgot to bake the cake. Shit. I will have to run and get a cake from Stop & Shop. I wince as I realize, Beth will love that. For my niece Jillian’s 5th birthday, my sister Beth not only baked the castle shaped cake from scratch (of course), she painstakingly added the castle details with fondant and cake paint. It was a work of art. I was planning to dump the contents of a Betty Crocker mix in a bowl and hopefully get the damn thing to rise evenly on all sides. Beth would have had a good chuckle.

  Beth is perfect. Well, at least, according to my mother and everyone else that knows her, she is perfect. I just know she has a fatal flaw hidden somewhere, and I’ve been fruitlessly searching for it the past 30 something years.

  From the first moment I can remember, Beth was always faultless and I was always the mess. Beth was the graceful dancer, the accomplished pianist and the perky cheerleader. I broke my elbow doing the hokey pokey and my violin teacher asked me never to come back because I made her cat run away. Beth got straight As, graduated valedictorian and went to Princeton.

  I struggled through school with a C average, came close to flunking out from cuts my senior year of high school, and then dropped out of community college after one semester.

  Beth spoke French, travelled abroad and built homes with habitat for humanity, where she met the fabulously wealthy, altruistic and strikingly handsome, pre-med Derek.

  Beth married Derek after a socially acceptable engagement of 2 years, had a house built to their specifications and spent the next 5 years as DINKs (dual incomes, no kids) before producing their 2.2 children, who were also beautiful, well mannered, and of course, perfect.

  Because of my lack of college education and my parents not “being made of money” as my Dad constantly reminded me, I worked part time at Red Lobster and racked up thousands of dollars in parking fines as I parked downtown in New Brunswick every weekend to party with my friends who had not dropped out of college.

  I met Roger when I was dating his derelict step-brother and fell in love. Or so I thought. We eloped to Vegas in a hormone, slash, alcohol induced fury. Did I mention that he was 14 years older than me and engaged to someone else at the time? Oh yeah. That didn’t go over too well with the folks.

  Mom cried for about 3 months straight and Daddy just drank Scotch straight from the bottle while mumbling about pedophiles. Roger was a teacher at the time and made a decent living, but it killed them that he was only 10 years younger than they were.

  “Why can’t you find a nice boy your own age?” my mother had wailed in between drying her tears. “You’re only 20. You can go back to college. Remember those cooking classes you liked so much? Why don’t you try them again?”

  “Mom, I can still go back to college. I got married. I’m not dying,” I explained while rolling my eyes.

  “You don’t know anything about him! What if he…” she lowered her voice and her eyes darted suspiciously around the empty room. “What if he has syphilis?”

  “He doesn’t have syphilis, Mom,” I retorted with one giant eye roll as I dragged empty boxes up the stairs.

  “Are you knocked up?” My father cut right to the chase as his fingers twitched. I could tell he was dying for a cigarette. My mother had insisted he quit when my grandfather died of lung cancer and as far as Mom was concerned, he had. We kids knew better. He smoked behind the garage every night when my mother took her hour long bath, and then he doused himself in Old Spice and gargled profusely with Listerine.

  “No, I’m not knocked up,” I had replied defensively. It was just like them to automatically assume I screwed up. They just could not believe I was capable of making an educated decision on my own.

  At first, our marriage was of the whirlwind romance variety that I imagine most marriages resemble at first. We spent the better half of the next week in bed, fucking like bunnies until we ran out of condoms. We ordered Chinese food and pizza and had it delivered as we watched movies naked in bed. We talked nonstop about our dreams of living in a quiet suburban community near my parents and having 2 kids, a boy and a girl. We never seemed to run out of conversation and laughed at couples that in restaurants and stores who didn’t say a word to each other. Since we had only been together for about 2 months before making the decision to get married, we had our entire lives to fill each other in on.

  Roger had a college degree and a real adult job which meant he made real money and didn’t have to look through the couch cushions or under the car seats for loose change when he wanted to buy a coffee. Hell, the man actually had a coffee maker in his kitchen! I could have coffee whenever I wanted! This realization on the first day he went back to work after our honeymoon, sent me into a frenzy of tears as I clutched a coffee mug to my chest in his kitchen…our kitchen. I, Amy Phillips, er, Maxwell, had actually done something right in my life. I found the right man to marry. At least,
I thought so back then. When I was young and naïve.

  Now, I can hear that man in the kids’ bathroom, gargling with mouthwash. Oh, how I despise that sound. Roger can turn the simple task of gargling into a cringe worthy art form. Along with eating soup, chewing and basically, breathing.

  I scoop Evan back into my arms. Despite his initial protests, I have managed to change him into his adorable little sailor suit. Well, at least my mother thought it was adorable. She bought it for him and made a big deal about how much it had cost and how it was handmade by blind nuns and blah, blah, blah, so I have no choice but to pull it out and force him to wear it. Evan is still on the chunky side and in the sailor suit he kind of looks like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man of Ghostbusters fame.

  As I change the baby, I can still hear Roger through the walls. He is now arguing with 6 year old Colton, who is a lover of nature. By that I mean, he is constantly covered in dirt, bugs and all things gross. I have to assume he is a typical 6 year old boy, but I would not really have much experience in that subject since I am the middle child of 3 girls. Beth is 2 years older and Joey is 2 years younger. Joey is actually named Josephine, but my father, desperate for a son, gave her a boy’s nickname, took her under his wing and handed her a baseball glove. She’s been a tomboy ever since, although my father renounced her with a scowl when she had the nerve to grow boobs.

  In case you haven’t noticed, we are all named after characters in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Before my mother was swept off her feet by my debonair father (her words not mine), she was an English lit major. Needless to say, she was extremely well read. She had dreamt of having four girls and naming them after the characters of her favorite book. She probably would have gotten her wish, too, if my father hadn’t put his foot down and slunk off to get a vasectomy. He muttered about “too much estrogen in this fucking house as it is” while he held a bag of frozen peas to his groin for a week.