Life Expectancy

orderly, and together they wheeled Lorrie toward the elevators.
        As they rolled her out of sight, I heard her say with singular intensity, "Crepes Suzette, dafouti, gateau a Vorange, souffle au chocolate."
        I supposed that if our baby might be born with a command of English, it might also know French and might already anticipate a career as a pastry chef.
        While the admissions clerk Xeroxed my insurance card and began to fill out two pounds of registration forms, I used her phone to call Huey Foster. He was my father's friend from childhood, the failed baker who had become a cop.
        From Huey, Dad had received the free pass to the circus on the back of which he had written the five terrible days in my life. We didn't hold that against Huey.
        He worked nights, and I caught him at the station house. When I told him about Konrad Beezo, fugitive murderer and would-be baby bandit, shackled to a tree in the woods about three to four hundred yards downhill and west of his parked Hummer, Huey said, "That's state trooper jurisdiction. I'll get 'em right on it. I'll go with 'em.
        After all these years, I want to personally put the cuffs on that crazy bastard."
        Next I called my folks to tell them only that we were at the hospital and that Lorrie was in labor.
        "I'm painting a potbelly pig," Mom said, "but that can wait. We'll be there quick as we can."
        "It's not necessary for you to come in this weather."
        "Sweetie, if it was raining scorpions and cow pies, we'd still come, though we wouldn't like it much. It'll take us a while because we first have to get Weena into her snowsuit. You know what an ordeal she'll make of that, but we'll be there."
        I was still a relatively young man when the admissions clerk finished filling out forms for me to sign, and from her desk I went up to the maternity ward.
        The expectant-fathers' lounge had been remodeled since the night that I gave my mother such a hard time being born. The flamboyance of cheerful clashing colors had been replaced by gray carpet, pale-gray walls, and black leatherette chairs, as though the hospital directors had reached a consensus that in the intervening twenty-four years, all the joy had gone out of parenthood.
        The admissions clerk had phoned ahead to advise that I was en route. A nurse showed me to a lavatory, where I washed up according to instructions and changed into hospital greens; then I was taken to my wife.
        Lorrie's water had not yet broken, but all the signs pointed to an impending birth. Therefore, and because no other pregnant women had been reckless enough to go into labor in a blizzard, she had been prepared quickly in her assigned room and conveyed to Delivery.
        When I entered, a heavyset red-haired nurse was taking Lorrie's blood pressure, and Dr. Mello Melodeon, our physician, was listening to her heart through a stethoscope.
        Mello is as solid as any football fullback, as personable as a popular tavern owner whose charm keeps the bar stools filled, and a mensch.
        Judging by his fine name, his skin the color of raisins, his relaxed manner, and his mellifluous voice, you might think he had once been a Jamaican Rastafarian who had traded dreadlocks and reggae for a career in medicine. Instead, he'd been born in Atlanta and came from a family of professional gospel singers.
        Finished with the stethoscope, he said, "Jimmy, how come when Rachel makes your chocolate apple lattice tart, it doesn't taste like yours?"
        Rachel was his wife.
        I said, "Where'd she get the recipe?"
        "The resort gives it out if you ask. We ate at the restaurant out there last week."
        "She should have asked me. That's the original resort recipe, but I've modified it. Mainly, I've added a tablespoon of vanilla and another of nutmeg."
        "The nutmeg I understand, but vanilla in a chocolate tart?"
        "That's the secret," I guaranteed him.
        "Yoo-hoo, I'm here," Lorrie reminded us.
        I took her hand. "And you're not snarling about crepes Suzette and dafouti."
        "Because of an even more beautiful word," she said. "Epidural. Isn't that a beautiful word?"
        "So let me get this straight-you just add vanilla to the filling?"
        Mello asked.
        "It's not in the filling. It's in the dough."
        "In the dough," he repeated, nodding sagely.
        Lorrie said,