Life Expectancy

appeared and slowly descended on a silken thread from within the shade of one of the overhead lamps. Projected by the cone of light, the eight-legged shadow on the floor between us and the maniac was the size of a dinner plate, distorted and squirming.
        "Answering evil with evil just means everyone loses," Lorrie said.
        "I'm not answering evil with evil," he replied not angrily but with exasperation. "I'm answering evil with justice."
        "Well, that's very different," Lorrie said.
        "If I were you," I told the maniac, "I'd wonder how to know for sure that something I'm doing is justice and not just more evil. I mean, the thing about evil is it's slippery. My mom says the devil knows how to mislead us into thinking we're doing the right thing when what we're really doing is the devil's work."
        "Your mother sounds like a caring person," he said.
        Sensing I'd made a connection with him, I said, "She is. When I was growing up, she even ironed my socks."
        This revelation drew from Lorrie a look of troubled speculation.
        Concerned that she might think I was an eccentric or, worse, a momma's boy, I quickly added: "I've been doing my own ironing since I was seventeen. And I never iron my socks."
        Lorrie's expression didn't change.
        "I don't mean that my mother still irons them," I hastened to assure her. "Nobody irons my socks anymore. Only an idiot irons socks."
        Lorrie frowned.
        "Not that I mean my mother is an idiot," I clarified. "She's a wonderful woman. She's not an idiot, she's just caring. I mean other people who iron their socks are idiots."
        At once I saw that with the language skills of a lummox, I had talked myself into a corner.
        "If either of you irons your socks," I said, "I don't mean that you're idiots. I'm sure you're just caring people, like my mom."
        With disturbingly similar expressions, Lorrie and the maniac stared at me as though I had just walked down the debarkation ramp from a flying saucer.
        I thought that being shackled to me suddenly creeped her out, and I figured the maniac would decide that a single hostage was plenty of insurance, after all.
        The descending spider still hung over our heads, but its shadow on the floor was smaller, now the size of a salad plate, and blurry.
        To my surprise, the killer's eyes grew misty. "That was very touching- the socks. Very sweet."
        My sock story didn't seem to have struck a sentimental chord in Lorrie.
        She stared at me with squint-eyed intensity.
        The maniac said, "You're a very lucky man, Jimmy."
        "I am," I agreed, although my only bit of luck-being cuffed to Lorrie Lynn Hicks instead of to a diseased wino-seemed to be turning sour.
        "To have a caring mother," the maniac mused. "What must that be like?"
        "Good," I said, "it's good," but I didn't trust myself to say more.
        Spinning gossamer from its innards, the spider unreeled a longer umbilical, finally dangling in front of our faces.
        With dreamy-voiced eloquence, the killer said, "To have a caring mother who makes you hot cocoa each evening, tucks you in bed every night, kisses you on the cheek, reads you to sleep____________________
        "
        Before I myself could read, I was almost always read to sleep because ours is a bookish family. More often than not, however, the reader had been my Grandma Rowena.
        Sometimes the story was about a Snow White whose seven dwarf friends suffered fatal accidents and diseases until it was Snow alone against the evil queen. Come to think of it, a two-ton safe fell on Happy once. That was a lot cleaner than what happened to poor Sneezy. Or maybe Weena would read the one about Cinderella-the dangerous glass slippers splintering painfully around Cindy's feet, the pumpkin coach plunging off the road into the ravine.
        I was a grown man before I discovered that in Arnold Lobel's charming Frog and Toad books, there was not always a scene in which one or the other of the title characters had a foot gnawed off by another meadowland creature.
        "I didn't have a caring mother," the maniac said, a disturbing note of whiny distress entering his voice. "My childhood was hard, cold, and loveless."
        Now occurred an unexpected turn of events: My fear of being shot to death took second place to the dread that this guy would harangue us with a