Life Expectancy

delivery."
        After giving her the slice of streusel that I'd just cut, I went upstairs to fetch the bag that we had prepacked for her. I climbed the steps with caution and descended with something like paranoia. If there is ever a good time to fall and break a leg, this wasn't it.
        During three years of marriage, I had become markedly less of a lummox than before we'd taken our vows. I seemed to have absorbed some of her grace as if by osmosis.
        Nevertheless, I took no chances as I carried the suitcase into the garage and quickly loaded it in the back of our Ford Explorer.
        We also had a 1986 Pontiac Trans Am. Candy-apple red with black interior. Lorrie looked fabulous in it.
        After raising the automatic garage door a few inches to provide ventilation, I started the Explorer and left the engine running. I wanted the interior to be warm by the time that Lorrie got aboard.
        Following a lesser storm four days previously, I'd put snow chains on the tires. I had decided to leave them on.
        Now I felt prescient, competent, and in charge. I figured this was going to be a milk run, thanks to my foresight.
        Under Lorrie's mellowing influence, I'd become an indefatigable optimist. Before the night was out, I'd pay a price for my optimism.
        In the mud room between garage and kitchen, I kicked off my shoes and hurriedly put on ski boots. I snared my Gore-Tex/Thermolite parka from a wall hook and shrugged into it.
        I took a similar parka into the kitchen for Lorrie and found her standing near the refrigerator, groaning.
        "The pain's worse when I'm moving than when I'm standing still or sitting down," she said.
        "Then all the moving you're going to do is out to the Explorer. At the hospital, we'll get you in a wheelchair."
        After I'd assisted her into the front passenger's seat and got the safety harness around her, I returned to the mud room. I switched off the house lights. Pulled shut the door, locked it.
        I had not forgotten the 9mm pistol. I just didn't think that I would need it.
        My second of five terrible days was still a week in the future.
        Considering Grandpa Josef's track record, it didn't occur to me that he might have gotten the second date wrong-or that he might have predicted only five of six terrible days.
        When I got behind the wheel of the Explorer, Lorrie said, "I love you more than all the streusel and kugelhopf'm the world."
        I said right back at her: "I love you more than creme brulee and tarte aux limettes."
        "Do you love me more than mungo-bean custard?" she asked.
        "Twice as much."
        "I'm a lucky woman." As the segmented garage door rumbled upward, Lorrie winced with a contraction. "I think it's a boy."
        She had undergone an ultrasound scan to be sure the baby was healthy, but we hadn't wanted to know the gender. I'm all for modern technology, but not if it robs life of one of its sweetest surprises.
        I pulled into the driveway and discovered that the storm had worked up a little wind. Though only a breeze, it harried the dense snow through the headlights, masking the night with billowing veils.
        Our house stood along Hawksbill Road, two lanes of blacktop that link Snow Village itself with the resort of the same name. The resort, where Dad and I work, is a mile and a half to the north, and the outskirts of town lie five miles to the south.
        At the moment, the highway was deserted in both directions. Only road crews, reckless fools, and the pregnant would be out in weather this bad.
        Not many houses have been built along Hawksbill Road. For most of its length, the rocky and angular terrain flanking the highway is not conducive to construction.
        In the pocket of more hospitable territory where we live, five houses stand on large properties: three on our side of the highway, two on the east side of the blacktop.
        We know and are friendly with the neighbors in four of those houses. In the fifth, directly across Hawksbill Road from us, lived Nedra Lamm, who had been a local character for decades.
        In Nedra's front lawn stood half a dozen eight-foot-tall totems that she carved from deadwood and accessorized with deer antlers. These grotesque figures faced the highway, threatening a rain of hoodoo violence on unwelcome visitors.
        Nedra Lamm was a recluse with a sense of humor.