Dean Koontz - Life Expectancy

Had you glanced in through a window, you might have thought not that we were at dinner but that we were conducting a séance, with food provided to keep us entertained until at last the ghosts showed up.

Although my parents had prepared my favorite dishes, I tried not to think of it as the condemned man’s last meal.

Five properly presented courses cannot be eaten on the same schedule as a McDonald’s Happy Meal, especially not with carefully chosen wines. We were prepared for a long evening together.

Dad is the head pastry chef for the world-famous Snow Village Resort, a position he inherited from his father, Josef. Because all breads and pastries must be fresh each day, he goes to work at one o’clock in the morning at least five and often six days a week. By eight, with the baking for the entire day complete, he comes home for breakfast with Mom, then sleeps until three in the afternoon.

That September, I also worked those hours because I had been an apprentice baker for two years at the same resort. The Tock family believes in nepotism.

Dad says it’s not really nepotism if your talent is real. Give me a good oven, and I am a wicked competitor.

Funny, but I am never clumsy in a kitchen. When baking, I am Gene Kelly, I am Fred Astaire, I am grace personified.

Dad would be going from our late dinner to work, but I would not. In preparation for the first of the five days in Grandpa Josef’s prediction, I had taken a week’s vacation.

Our starter course was sou bourek , an Armenian dish. Numerous paper-thin layers of pasta are separated by equally thin layers of butter and cheese, finished with a golden crust.

I still lived with my folks in those days, so Dad said, “You should stay home from midnight to midnight. Hide out. Nap, read, watch a little TV.”

“Then what’ll happen,” Grandma Rowena imagined, “is that he’ll fall down the stairs and break his neck.”

“Don’t use the stairs,” Mom advised. “Stay in your room, honey. I can bring your meals to you.”

“So then the house will burn down,” Rowena said.

“Now, Weena, the house won’t burn down,” Dad assured her. “The electrical wiring is sound, the furnace is brand new, both fireplace chimneys were recently cleaned, there’s a grounded lightning rod on the roof, and Jimmy doesn’t play with matches.”

Rowena was seventy-seven in 1994, twenty-four years a widow and past her grief, a happy woman but opinionated. She’d been asked to play the devil’s advocate, and she was adamant in her role.

“If not a fire, then a gas explosion,” she declared.

“Gee, I don’t want to be responsible for destroying the house,” I said.

“Weena,” Dad reasoned, “there hasn’t been a house-destroying gas explosion in the entire history of Snow Village.”

“So an airliner will crash into the place.”

“Oh, and that happens weekly around here,” my father said.

“There’s a first time for everything,” Rowena asserted.

“If there’s a first time for an airliner to crash into our house, then there’s a first time for vampires to move in next door, but I’m not going to start wearing a garlic necklace.”

“If not an airliner, one of those Federal Express planes full of packages,” Rowena said.

Dad gaped at her, shook his head. “Federal Express.”

Mom interpreted: “What Mother means is that surely if fate has something planned for our Jimmy, he can’t hide from it. Fate is fate. It’ll find him.”

“Maybe a United Parcel Service plane,” said Rowena.

Over steaming bowls of pureed cauliflower soup enlivened with white beans and tarragon, we agreed that the wisest course for me would be to proceed as I would on any ordinary day off work—though always with caution.

“On the other hand,” Grandma Rowena said, “caution could get him killed.”

“Now, Weena, how could caution get a person killed?” my father wondered.

Grandma finished a spoonful of soup and smacked her lips as she had never done until she had turned seventy-five, two years previously. She smacked them with relish, repeatedly.

Halfway between her seventh and eighth decades, she had decided that longevity had earned her the right to indulge in certain small pleasures she had never previously allowed herself. These were pretty much limited to smacking her lips, blowing her nose as noisily as she wished (though never at the table), and leaving her spoon and/or fork turned useful side up on the plate at the end of each course, instead of useful side down as her mother, a true Victorian and a stickler for etiquette, had instructed her always to do in order properly to indicate that she had finished.

She smacked her lips again and explained why caution could be dangerous: “Say Jimmy’s going to cross the street, but he worries that a bus might hit him—”

“Or a garbage truck,” Mom suggested. “Those great lumbering things on these hilly streets—why, if the brakes let go, what’s to stop them? They’d go right through a house.”

“Bus, garbage truck, might even be a speeding hearse,” Grandma allowed.

“What reason would a hearse have to speed?” Dad asked.

“Speeding or not, if it was a hearse,” said Grandma, “wouldn’t that be ironic—run down by a hearse? God knows, life is often ironic in a way it’s never shown on television.”

“The viewing public could never handle it,” Mom said. “Their capacity for genuine irony is exhausted halfway through an episode of Murder, She Wrote .”

“What passes for irony on TV these days,” my dad noted, “is just poor plotting.”

I said, “I’m less spooked by garbage trucks than by those huge concrete mixers they drive to construction sites. I’m always sure the part that revolves is suddenly going to work loose of the truck, roll down the street, and flatten me.”

“All right,” Grandma Rowena said, “so it’s a concrete mixer Jimmy’s afraid of meeting up with.”

“Not afraid exactly,” I said. “Just leery.”

“So he stands on the sidewalk, looks left, then looks right, then looks left again, being cautious, taking his time—and because he delays there on the curb too long, he’s hit by a falling safe.”

In the interest of a healthy debate, my father was willing to entertain some rather exotic speculations, but this stretched his patience too far. “A falling safe? Where would it fall from ?”

“From a tall building, of course,” Grandma said.

“There aren’t any tall buildings in Snow Village,” Dad gently protested.

“Rudy, dear,” Mom said, “I think you’re forgetting the Alpine Hotel.”

“That’s only four stories.”

“A safe dropped four stories would obliterate Jimmy,” Grandma insisted. To me, in a concerned tone, she said, “I’m sorry. Is this upsetting you, sweetheart?”

“Not at all, Grandma.”

“It’s the simple truth, I’m afraid.”

“I know, Grandma.”

“It would obliterate you.”

“Totally,” I agreed.

“But it’s such a final word— obliterate .”

“It sure does focus the mind.”

“I should’ve thought before I spoke. I should’ve said crushed .”

In lambent red candlelight, Weena had a Mona Lisa smile.

I reached across the table and patted her hand.

Being a pastry chef, required to mix many ingredients in precise measure, my father has a greater respect for mathematics and reason than do my mother and grandmother, who are more artistic in their temperaments and less slavishly devoted to logic than he is. “Why,” he asked, “would anyone raise a safe to the top of the Alpine Hotel?”

“Well, of course, to keep their valuables in,” said Grandma.