Life Expectancy

thinking twenty."
        "Let's make the decision five at a time."
        "Deal," I said. "One almost out of the oven, four left to bake."
        "Two girls and three boys," she wondered, "or three girls and two boys?
        "Is that really our decision?"
        "I believe we shape our own reality by positive thinking. I'm sure we could positive-think ourselves any combination we wanted, although for ideal balance we should have two girls, two boys, and one hermaphrodite."
        "That might be taking balance too far."
        "Oh, Jimmy, no kids will ever have been loved more than these are going to be loved."
        "But they won't be spoiled," I said.
        "Damn right they won't, the little brats. Their Great-Grandma Rowena can read them fairy tales. That'll keep them on the straight and narrow."
        She talked and talked, and soon I saw that she had wisely talked us through the dread and the danger of the climb, to the top of the slope and Hawksbill Road.
        We arrived on Hawksbill Road twenty feet in front of the parked Hummer.
        We churned across a recently compacted high curb of snow, onto the southbound lane, which had been scraped almost to the bare blacktop.
        Immediately to the south of us, a highway department crew in two vehicles was carving a passage to town through the storm. A road grader on immense knobby tires, fitted with an angled plow, led the way, trailed by a truck spreading salt and cinders in its wake.
        I followed the truck at a safe distance. A police escort could have gotten us to town no quicker in this mean weather.
        The night sky hid behind the shedding snow, and the wind was revealed only by the white shrouds that it wound about itself and whirled, and flapped, and billowed.
        Also unseen but not for long, the baby made known its impatience to be free from nine months of confinement. Lorrie's contractions had become regular. By her wristwatch, she timed them, and by her groans and louder cries, I knew the intervals and willed the road crew to move faster.
        Suffering people frequently curse their pain. For some reason we seem to believe that acute agony can be managed by injections of obscenities. Lorrie allowed not one such word to cross her lips that night.
        I can testify that in ordinary times she is capable of treating a cut or a contusion with a verbal blue streak more astringent than iodine.
        Birth night was not an ordinary time.
        She said that she didn't curse the pain because the baby, as it made its entrance, might think it wasn't wanted in the world.
        That our child might be born with advanced language skills had not crossed my mind. I accepted her concern as legitimate-and loved her for it.
        When groans and grunts and wordless cries did not satisfy her urge to express the effect of her pangs, she resorted for the baby's sake to words that described some of the world's beauty and bounty.
        "Strawberries, sunflowers, seashells," she said, hissing out the sibilants with such vehemence that someone who spoke no English would have been convinced that she had wished pestilence, disease, and damnation on a hated enemy.
        By the time that we reached town and then Snow County Hospital, Lorrie's water had not yet broken, but it seemed instead to be coming out of her through every pore. This labor, as surely as chopping wood or digging a trench, wrung rivers of sweat from her. She unzipped her parka, then stripped it off. She was soaked.
        I parked at the emergency entrance, rushed inside, and returned in a minute with an orderly and a wheelchair.
        The orderly, a freckled young man named Cory, thought Lorrie had descended into delirium when, trading Explorer for wheelchair, she snarled in rapid succession, "Geraniums, Coca-Cola, kittens, snow geese, Christmas cakes and cookies," with such fervency that she scared him.
        On the way inside I explained to him about welcoming the baby to the world by trading curses for words of beauty and bounty, but I think I only succeeded in making him a little afraid of me, too.
        I couldn't accompany Lorrie directly to the maternity ward in part because I had to present our insurance card to the clerk at the admissions desk at the back of the ER waiting lounge. I kissed her, and she squeezed my hand hard enough to crack my knuckles and said,
        "Maybe not twenty."
        A nurse joined the