Life Expectancy

you like Pink Squirrels, Lorrie?"
        Lorrie said yes, and Dad said, "You're driving me so crazy with this, I'm seeing pink squirrels right now, crawling on the ceiling."
        "Hector was drinking beer with lime slices, sitting just one stool away from this bodybuilder. He had biceps the size of hams and the prettiest tattoo of a snarling bulldog on his arm."
        "Hector or the bodybuilder?" my mother asked.
        "Hector didn't have any tattoos, at least not in any place that was visible. But he had a pet monkey named Pancho."
        My mother said, "Was Pancho also drinking beer?"
        "The monkey wasn't there."
        "Where was he?"
        "Home with the family. He wasn't one of those monkeys that likes running around to gin mills. Pancho was family oriented."
        Mom patted Dad on the shoulder. "That's my kind of monkey."
        "So Hector, sitting on the bar stool, he cuts a ripe one-"
        "At last," my father said.
        "-and the bodybuilder takes offense at the smell. Hector tells him to buzz off, though he doesn't say buzz."
        "How big was this Hector?" Lorrie wondered.
        "I'd say about five feet seven, a hundred thirty pounds."
        "He sure could have used the monkey for backup," Lorrie said.
        "So the bodybuilder punches him twice, grabs him by the hair, and smashes his face into the bar three times. Hector falls off the stool, dead, and the bodybuilder orders another boilermaker spiked with two fresh eggs for the protein."
        My father glowed with vindication. "So I was right. Passing gas didn't kill him. The drunken bodybuilder killed him."
        "If he hadn't farted, he wouldn't have been killed," Grandma insisted.
        Finishing her soup, Lorrie said, "So how did Harry Ramirez boil himself to death?"
        Next came the entree-roast chicken with chestnut-and-sausage stuffing, polenta, and snap peas-followed by celery-root salad.
        When, past midnight, Dad rolled in the dessert cart from the kitchen, Lorrie couldn't make up her mind between a tangerine cream tart and a slice of genoise; she took both. She sampled the co eur a la creme, the budino di ricotta, and the Mont Blanc aux marrons, then chose four items from the three-tiered cookie tray.
        She ate a springerle cookie with intense concentration until she realized that everyone at the table had fallen silent. When she looked up, all of us were smiling at her.
        "Delicious," she said.
        We smiled.
        "What?" she asked.
        "Nothing, dear," my mother said. "It just seems like you've always been here."
        Lorrie left at one in the morning, which was early for the Tock family but late for her. At nine in the morning, she had to teach two angry Hungarians to dance.
        The angry Hungarians are a story unto themselves. I'll save them for another book if I live to write one.
        At the front door, as I stood with the aid of a walker, Lorrie kissed me. This would have been the perfect end to the evening… if she hadn't kissed me just on the cheek and if my entire family had not been two feet away, watching and smiling and, in one case, indulging in too much lip-smacking.
        Then she also kissed my grandmother, my mother, and my father, which didn't make me feel so special anymore.
        She returned to me, kissed me on the cheek again, and that made me feel somewhat better.
        When she breezed out of the house and into the night, she seemed to take most of the oxygen with her. In her absence, breathing hurt a little.
        Dad was late leaving for work at the resort. He had delayed in order to see Lorrie off.
        Before he left, he said, "Son, no self-respecting baker would let that one get away."
        While Mom and Grandma cleared the dinner table and loaded the two dishwashers, I settled into a living-room armchair and leaned my head back against the spider-pattern antimacassar. With my stomach pleasantly full and my cast bound leg raised on a footstool, I felt beached.
        I tried to read a mystery novel, one in a series about a private detective with neurofibromatosis, the disease made famous by the Elephant Man. He traveled from end to end of San Francisco in his investigations, always wearing a hooded cloak to conceal his deformed features. I couldn't get into the story.
        With dinner cleanup completed, Grandma returned to the sofa and to her needlepoint. She had begun a