For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,6

he has no note, no phone call, nothing from any supposed kidnappers. And for some reason, he thinks you are Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, and Woodward and Bernstein all rolled up into one. So, you want to write it for us, or what?”

“What’s the deadline?”

“I can give you a week.”

“A week!”

“Yeah, with a breaking story it would have been less, but I don’t think anybody else has this yet. A week’s as far as I can go.” He actually thought he was giving me a break. In a week, I might find my way back out to my minivan.

“How much?”

“Money?”

“No, how much sour cream fits into Tom Cruise’s swimming pool? Yeah, how much money?”

“I’ve been told, uh, to go to a thousand dollars.”

I stared at my headset for a moment. A thousand dollars? That was about five times the average paycheck from a local newspaper.

“What did you just say?”

“You heard me, Aaron. You can draw from that whatever conclusions you choose. Now, do you want the story or not?”

I don’t think well on my feet. And the fact that I was currently sitting down didn’t help.

“Sure,” I said, idiot that I am.

Chapter 5

I called my mother back about an hour later. It took me that long to recover from the shock of my latest journalistic assignment. She was physically well, but emotionally shook up. Apparently the Shop-Rite near her house was selling orange juice after the stamped expiration date, and she had given them hell about it. It was almost on par with the lawn service fertilizer scandal of ’97.

I still had a couple of assignments with deadlines approaching, and I made phone calls on them until the kids got home. Ethan barreled in first, flinging the front door open, stomping into the house and hanging his backpack on one of the banister rungs currently unoccupied. We run a tidy household around here.

Normally, I don’t like to brag, mostly because I have so little bragging material when I’m talking about myself. But my son is a different story. He is a remarkably handsome boy, having inherited his mother’s big brown eyes, thank goodness, and her even, pleasant features. He even stood a chance, according to his pediatrician, of achieving something nobody in my family had ever dreamed of—average height.

Right now, Ethan’s face was expressionless. He was thinking about something other than being home. He didn’t notice me until I hung up the phone. Nobody can ignore you better than an 11-year-old boy. Except maybe a 13-year-old girl, but I’ll get back to you on that in six years.

“Hey, Skipper. How you doin’?” Best to show them you’re their friend. They can smell fear.

“Hi, Dad.” Kids with Asperger’s Syndrome, like Ethan, tend to have unusual vocal expressions. Some speak with little inflection. Others mumble. Ethan’s voice is unusually high. Nobody knows why.

Asperger’s is a form of high-functioning autism. The kids speak quite well, compared to more severely autistic children, but their social skills are underdeveloped. They don’t read body language. They don’t understand idioms. They tend to have physical “tics,” or what the experts called “stimming,” which is a way of saying that they flap their arms or continually run their fingers through their hair as a way of getting the physical stimulation they lack in everyday life. They need more sensory input than the average person, and so they create as much of it as they can, wherever they can. But the worst thing is that they don’t really read another person’s tone of voice in a conversation, so they can’t understand sarcasm. It is a huge handicap for a child growing up in my household.

Ethan was diagnosed with Asperger’s when he started kindergarten, and since then, we’ve attended conferences, enrolled him in a yearlong transitional class between kindergarten and first grade, learned the meaning of an “IEP” (Individualized Education Plan), something that school systems do for children with “special needs,” asked for and gotten an adult aide (called a “para-professional”) to help get him through the school day, and gotten him Occupational Therapy for his slowly developing fine motor skills, and social skills training and speech therapy, so he can learn how to use speech in a conversation. He also takes Ritalin twice a day to help him concentrate, and anybody who thinks we’re unnecessarily medicating our kid can share a week with him with no medication and see what they think when they’re done.

He is the sweetest 11-year-old on the planet 85 percent of the time. But when