Life Expectancy

Christmas banner that featured an extravagantly ornamented message-we love you, santa claus- which Lorrie had designed on her computer. Their assignment: Color it with care and with love so that on Christmas Eve, the good Claus would be more disposed to leave them a truckload of gifts.
        We are fiendishly clever at devising tasks to keep a trio of hyperactive munchkins occupied.
        Annie was almost five that Christmas, Lucy three months short of four, and Andy two and a half. Frequently, I'm proud to say, they could play together in an atmosphere of civility with a chaos-meter reading of no more than four on a scale of one to ten.
        That evening they were especially calm. Annie and Lucy had made a competition of the coloring and were bent to it intensely, tongues pinched between their teeth. Having lost interest in the banner, Andy was crayoning his toenails.
        "Let's move this project to your room, girls," I said, helping them gather their materials. "I've got to straighten up the living room.
        Grandpa, Grandma, and Gran-gran will be here in a little while. In fact, you have to change clothes and look pretty for them."
        "Boys don't look pretty," Annie patiently informed me. "Boys look handsome."
        "I look pretty," Andy protested, thrusting out one of his feet and spreading his rainbow-hued toes for our appreciation.
        "Daddy looks pretty, too," said Lucy.
        "Thank you, Lucy Jean. Your opinions on beauty matter a lot to me, seeing as how you're going to be Miss Colorado one day."
        "I'm going to be better than that," Annie announced as we moved toward the stairs. "When I grow up, I'm gonna be a bullshit artist."
        They do surprise me. Perpetually.
        Halted by this proclamation, I said, "Annie, wherever did you hear that?"
        "Yesterday, the mailman told Gran-gran she looked foxy, and she told him, "You're a real bullshit artist, George." Then he laughed and Gran-gran pinched his cheek."
        You don't want to tell them that a word is taboo. If I made that mistake, all three of them would work bullshit artist into every third sentence out of their mouths, which would make this a memorable Christmas for all the wrong reasons.
        Letting it pass with the hope that they would forget about it, I resettled them with crayons in the girls' room.
        I had no concern about them being upstairs while Lorrie and I were on the lower floor because for one thing the house was locked tight; for another thing, the alarm system had been set in monitor mode. If any door or window opened, the alarm would not sound, but a digitized voice on the system chip would announce, through speakers throughout | the house, the exact location of the breach.
        Downstairs again, I went to the foyer and watched the street through one of the tall, narrow French windows that flanked the front door.
        The police station lay less than ten minutes from our house. I intended to open the door before Porter Carson could ring the bell and alert the kids that we had a visitor.
        Within two minutes, a Mercury Mountaineer pulled to the curb at the end of our front walk.
        The man who got out of it wore a dark suit, white shirt, dark tie, andl open topcoat. Tall and trim, he moved with purpose and shoulders-back confidence.
        As he climbed the steps, the porch lights revealed that he was in his mid-forties, handsome, with dark hair combed straight back from his brow.
        When he spotted me at the window, he held up one finger, as if to say Wait a sec, and withdrew a vertical-fold ID wallet from his coat. He held his FBI credentials to the glass so that I could read them and compare his face to the photo before I opened the door.
        Obviously, Huey Foster had told Carson that we were security conscious, and if the agent knew Beezo's history, he must understand why paranoia was common sense.
        Conditioned by Hollywood, I expected Porter Carson to speak with the clipped diction and cool detachment of a movie fed. Instead, he had a voice that I at once warmed to: friendly, all the sharp edges rounded off the words by a Georgia accent.
        When I opened the door to him, the digitized voice of the alarm system announced, "Front door open."
        "We have the same feature on our home alarm," he said as we shook hands. "My son, Jamie, he's fourteen and a computer whiz. Dangerous combination. He couldn't