Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online

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.
    “Whose valuables?”
    “The hotel’s valuables.”
    Although Dad never triumphs in exchanges of this nature, he always remains hopeful that if only he persists, reason will prevail.
    “Why,” he asked, “wouldn’t they put a big heavy safe on the ground floor? Why go to all the trouble of craning it to the roof?”
    My mother said, “Because no doubt their valuables were on the top floor.”
    In moments like these, I have never been quite sure if Mom shares more than a little of Weena’s cockeyed perspective on the world or if she’s playing with my father.
    Her face is guileless. Her eyes are never evasive, and always limpid. She is by nature a straightforward woman. Her emotions are too clear for misinterpretation, and her intentions are never ambiguous.
    Yet as Dad says, for a person so admirably open and direct by nature, she can turn inscrutable when it tickles her to, just as easily as throwing a light switch.
    That’s one of the things he loves about her.
    Our conversation continued through an endive salad with pears, walnuts, and crumbled blue cheese, followed by filet mignon on a bed of potato-and-onion pancakes, with asparagus on the side.
    Before Dad got up to roll the dessert cart in from the kitchen, we had agreed that, for the momentous day ahead, I