Life Expectancy

asked.
        "On the thing, whatever it is, that's between the teeth of the stupid head," Annie clarified.
        Solemnly, Lucy said, "If there's a head, I'm gonna barf."
        "There's not a head in the box, sweetcakes," Lorrie promised. "And there's no bomb, either. They don't deliver bombs in flashy silver-and-red limousines."
        "Who doesn't?" Andy asked.
        "Nobody doesn't," Annie said.
        Lorrie got a pair of scissors from a kitchen drawer and snipped the red ribbon.
        Studying the box, I figured it was just about the perfect size to hold a head. Or a basketball. If I had to bet on one or the other, I'd put my money on the head.
        As I was about to lift the lid from the box, Annie and Lucy put their hands over their ears. They were concerned more about the noise of an explosion than about the shrapnel.
        Under the lid was a layer of folded white gift-wrapping tissue.
        Having climbed onto a chair, kneeling there to get a better view, Andy warned me as I reached for the tissue paper, "Could be snakes."
        Instead of snakes, packed into the box were banded packets of twenty-dollar bills.
        "Wow, we're rich!" Andy declared.
        "This isn't our money," Lorrie said.
        "Then whose is it?" Annie wondered.
        "I don't know," Lorrie said, "but it's bad money, for sure, and we can't keep it. I can smell the evil on it."
        Sniffing at the treasure, Andy said, "I don't smell nothin'."
        "All I smell is Andy's beans from yesterday dinner," Annie announced.
        "Maybe it could be my money," Lucy suggested.
        "Not as long as I'm your mother."
        Together, the five of us took all the money out of the box and piled it on the table so we could smell it better.
        There were twenty-five packets of twenty-dollar bills. Each packet contained a hundred bills. Fifty thousand bucks.
        The box also contained an envelope. From the envelope, Lorrie extracted a plain white card with handwriting on one side.
        She read the card and said, "Hmmm."
        When she passed the card to me, the six eyes of three children followed it with intense interest.
        Never before had I seen handwriting as meticulously scripted as this.
        The letters were bold, elegantly formed, flowing as precisely as if a machine had penned them: Please accept this as a token of my esteem and as proof of my sincerity. I request the honor of a most cordial meeting with you at seven o'clock this evening at the Halloway Farm. The precise location will be obvious upon your arrival.
        The note was signed Vivacemente.
        "This," I told the kids, "is evil money. I'm going to put it back into the box, and then we're all going to wash our hands with a lot of soap and water so hot it hurts a little."
        My name is Lorrie Tock. I'm not the goddess Jimmy said I am. For one thing, I've got a pinched nose. For another thing, my teeth are so straight and symmetrical that they don't look real.
        And no matter how meticulous the surgeon has been, once you've been shot in the gut-well, when you wear a bikini, you turn heads but not always for the same reason that Miss America does.
        Jimmy would have you believe that I am as tough as one of those acid-for-blood bugs in the Alien movies. That is an exaggeration, though it's a major mistake to piss me off.
        On the night that I was born, no one made predictions about my future, and thank God for that. My father was chasing a tornado in Kansas, and my mother had recently decided that snakes would be better company than he was.
        I have to take over this story for reasons that will become clear and that you might already have deduced. If you let me take your hand, metaphorically speaking, we'll get through this together.
        So… Near twilight, under a fiery sky, we took the kids next door to stay with Jimmy's parents. Rudy and Maddy were in the living room when we arrived, taking practice swings with the Louisville Sluggers they had bought in 1998.
        Immediately after us, six of the most trusted neighbors on the block came to visit, ostensibly for an evening of cards, though all of them had brought baseball bats.
        "We play an aggressive game of bridge," Maddy said.
        Jimmy and I hugged the kids, kissed them good-bye, kissed them again, but tried not to make such a big deal of it that we might scare them.
        After