Life Expectancy

cutting off his fingers and hands and stuff, take his nose off. He's a vain bastard, the great Beezo told me, very proud of his nose."
        "All right, but if there's anything more you want, I better start taking notes."
        "That's everything." He sighed. "Gosh, I sure wish I could be there with you."
        "Wouldn't that be wonderful," I said.
        Annie came through the surgery as smoothly as a hot-air balloon sailing, sailing.
        Unlike its donor, the kidney was neither crazy nor evil, and it was such an ideal match for his niece that not one serious post-operative complication arose.
        Annie lived. Annie bloomed.
        These days, she charms, she shines, she dazzles, as ever she did before the cancer dragged her down.
        Only one of the five days-April 16, 2005-remained ahead of me. Life would seem strange thereafter, with no dreaded dates on the calendar, the future unclouded by grim expectations. Assuming that I survived.

PART SIX
        
    I Am Moonlight Walking, the Love of Every Woman, the Envy of Every Man

----
        
         Between baking cakes and taking additional instruction in the use of a handgun, between perfecting my recipe for chestnut-chocolate terrine and negotiating murder-for-hire contracts with insane kidney donors, I wrote the previous sixty-two chapters of this book during the year preceding the fifth of Grandpa Josef's five dates.
        I'm not entirely sure why I felt compelled to write.
        To the best of my knowledge, no pastry chef has ever had a memoir on the New York Times best-seller list. Celebrity tell-alls, hate-mongering political tracts, diet revelations about how to lose weight eating nothing but butter, and self-help books about getting filthy rich by adapting the code of the Samurai to business dealings seem to be what is wanted by contemporary readers.
        Ego has not motivated me. If by some miracle the book were to be a success, everyone would still think that I am biggish for my size, a lummox. I am not a James, and if I wrote an entire library full of books, I still would not be one. I was born a Jimmy, and I will be a Jimmy when they lay me in my grave.
        In part I wrote the book to tell my children how they got here, through what stormy seas, past what dangerous shoals. I want them to know what family means-and what it doesn't. I want them to know how loved they were, in case I don't live long enough to tell each of them a hundred thousand times.
        In part I wrote it for my wife, to be sure she will know that without her, I might as well have died back there on the first of the five days. Each of us has his or her destiny, but sometimes two destinies twine, becoming so tightly braided that if Fate cuts one, she must cut both.
        Also I wrote this to explain life to myself. The mystery. The humor, dark and light, that is the warp and weft of the weave. The absurdity.
        The terror. The hope. The joy, the grief. The God we never see except by indirection.
        In this I have failed. I am less than four months short of my thirty-first birthday, have endured much, have piled up all these words, yet I can explain life no better now than I could have done when Charlene Coleman spared me the fate of Punchinello.
        I can't explain the why of life, the patterns of its unfolding. I can't explain it-but, oh, how I love it.
        And then, after seventeen months of peace and happiness, came the morning of the fifth day, April 16.
        We were prepared in all the ways that experience had taught us to prepare, but we also knew that we could not properly prepare at all.
        The design can be imagined but not truly foreseen.
        Because we lived by baker's hours and didn't want our kids to live by a different schedule, they were home-schooled. Their classes started at two o'clock in the morning and ended at eight, whereafter they had breakfast with us, played in sun or snow, and went to bed.
        Their usual school was the table in the dining room, with occasional field trips to the table in the kitchen. Their mother served as their teacher, and served them well.
        Annie had celebrated her seventh birthday the past January, with a kidney-shaped cake. In a few months, Lucy would be six, while Andy confidently cruised toward five. They loved learning and were demon students in the best sense of the adjective.
        As usual on my special days, I stayed home