Life Expectancy

January 18 and 19.
        We were at once convinced that our first child would enter the world on the day about which Grandpa Josef had long ago warned my father: Monday the nineteenth.
        The stakes were suddenly so high that we wanted out of the game.
        When you're playing poker with the devil, however, no one leaves the table before he does.
        Although we all tried not to show it, we were scared to the extent that we needed no laxatives. As time swept us toward that rendezvous with the unknown, the hope and the strength that Lorrie and I took from family mattered more than ever.
        My beloved wife is capable of jerking my chain"I'm in love with someone else"-and therefore I jerked yours.
        Remember: I have learned the structure of story from a family that delights in narrative and understands in its bones the magical realism of life. I know the routines, the tricks; I might be clumsy in other ways, but in writing of my life, I will try my best not to get my head stuck in the bucket, and if the mouse-in-the-pants number comes up, I'm pretty sure I won't be booed out of the big top.
        In other words, hold on. What looks tragic might be comic on second consideration, and what is comic might bring tears in time. Like life.
        So, flashing back for a moment, there I stood in my parents' kitchen, that night in November of 1994, leaning against the counter to avoid putting weight on my cast bound leg, explaining to Lorrie that although I wasn't much to look at, although I might be dull and boring and talkative and unadventurous, I hoped she would be thrilled to marry me.
        And she said, "I'm in love with someone else."
        I could have wished her a good life. I could have squeaked out of the kitchen with my walker, lurched up the stairs, taken refuge in my bedroom, and smothered myself to death with a pillow.
        That would have meant never seeing her again in this life or in the next. I found that prospect intolerable.
        Besides, I hadn't yet eaten enough pastries to be willing to trade this world for one in which the existence of sugar is not guaranteed by theologians.
        Keeping my voice steady, determined to sound like a stoic loser who wouldn't think of smothering himself, I said, "Someone else?" "He's a baker," she said. "What are the odds-huh?" Snow Village was markedly smaller than New York City. If she loved another baker, surely I knew the guy. "I must know him," I said.
        "You do. He's very talented. He creates pieces of Heaven in his kitchen. He's the best."
        I could not tolerate losing the love of my life and my rightful place in the bakers' hierarchy of Snow County. "Well, I'm sure he's a nice guy, you know, but the fact is that around these parts, only my dad's a better baker than me, and I'm closing on him fast." "There he is," she said. "Who?"
        "The someone I'm in love with." "He's there now? Put him on the line." "Why?" "I want to find out if he even knows how to make a decent pdte sablee."
        "What's that?"
        "If he's such a hotshot, he'll know what it is. Listen, Lorrie, the world is full of guys who'll claim they have the stuff to be a baker to kings, but they're all talk. Make this guy put his muffins where his mouth is. Put him on the line."
        "He's already on the line," she said. "That weird other Jimmy-the one that kept putting himself down, telling me how plain and dull and unworthy he was-I hope he's gone forever."
        Oh.
        "My Jimmy," she continued, "isn't a braggart, but he knows his worth.
        And my Jimmy will never stop till he gets what he wants."
        "So," I said, no longer able to keep the tremor out of my voice, "will you marry your Jimmy?"
        "You saved my life, didn't you?"
        "But then you saved mine."
        "Why would we have gone to all that trouble and then not get married?" she asked.
        Two Saturdays before Christmas, we were wed.
        My father stood as my best man.
        Chilson Strawberry flew in from a bungee-jumping tour of New Zealand to be maid of honor. Looking at her, you would never have known that she once crashed face-first into a bridge abutment.
        Lorrie's dad, Bailey, took a break from storm chasing to give the bride away. He arrived looking windblown, looked windblown in his rented tux, and left looking windblown, marked by his profession.
        Alysa Hicks, Lorrie's mother, proved