Life Expectancy

to be lovely and charming. She disappointed us, however, by arriving without a single snake.
        In the three years following our wedding, I became a pastry chef.
        Lorrie changed careers from ballroom-dance instructor to website designer, so she could work baker's hours.
        We bought a house. Nothing fancy. Two stories, two bedrooms, two baths. A place to start a life together.
        We caught colds. Got well. Made plans. Made love. Had raccoon trouble. Played lots of pinochle with Mom and Dad.
        And we got pregnant.
        At noon Monday, January 12, after three hours of sleep, Lorrie woke with pain in the lower abdomen and groin. She lay for a while, timing the contractions. They were irregular and widely separated.
        Because this was exactly one week prior to her most likely delivery date, she assumed that she was experiencing false labor.
        She'd had a similar episode three days previously. We had gone to the hospital-and come home with the baby still in the oven.
        The spasms were sufficiently painful to prevent her from falling back into sleep. Careful not to wake me, she slipped out of bed, took a bath, dressed, and went to the kitchen.
        In spite of the periodic abdominal pain, she was hungry. At the kitchen table, reading a mystery that I had recommended, she ate a slice of chocolate cherry cake, then two slices of caraway kugelhopf.
        For a few hours, the contractions did not become more painful or less irregular.
        Beyond the windows, the white wings of the sky were molting. Snow descended silently and feathered the trees, the yard.
        Lorrie gave little thought to the snow at first. In an ordinary January, snow fell as many days as not.
        I woke shortly after four in the afternoon, showered, shaved, and went into the kitchen as the day slowly faded into an early winter twilight.
        Still at the table, immersed in the final chapter of the mystery novel, Lorrie returned my kiss when I bent to her, taking her eyes from the page for only a moment.
        Then: "Hey, pastry god, would you get me a slice of streusel?"
        During her pregnancy, she had developed numerous food cravings, but at the top of the list were streusel coffee cake and various kinds of kugelhopf.
        "This baby's going to be born speaking German," I predicted.
        Before getting the cake, I glanced through the window in the back door and saw that about six inches of fresh powder covered the porch steps.
        "Looks like the weatherman was wrong again," I said. "This is more than flurries."
        Enchanted by the book, Lorrie had failed to notice that the lazy snowfall had turned into an intense if windless storm.
        "Beautiful," she said of the ermine view. Then half a minute later, she stiffened in her chair. "Uh-oh."
        As I began to slice the streusel, I thought her uh-oh referred to a tense development in the story that she was reading.
        With a hiss, she sucked breath through her teeth, groaned, and let the book fall from her hands onto the table.
        I turned from the cake to the sight of her suddenly as pale as the snow-mantled world beyond the window.
        "What's wrong?"
        "I thought it was false labor again."
        I went to the table. "When did it start?"
        "About noon."
        "Five hours ago? And you didn't wake me?"
        "The pain was just in the lower abdomen and the groin, like before," she said. "But now…"
        "Across the entire abdomen?"
        "Yeah."
        "All the way around your back?"
        "Oh, yeah."
        That specific topography of pain signified genuine labor.
        I clutched, but only for a moment. Fear gave way to excitement as I considered my impending fatherhood.
        Fear would have abided with me if I'd known that our house was being watched and that a sensitive surveillance device, planted in our kitchen, had just transmitted our conversation to a listener no more than two hundred yards away. ^26.
        For or a woman carrying her first baby, the initial stage of labor lasts twelve hours on average. We had plenty of time. The hospital lay only six miles away.
        "I'll pack the SUV," I said. "You finish the novel."
        "Gimme the streusel."
        "Should you eat during first-stage labor?"
        "What're you talking about? I'm starved. I intend to eat all the way through the