Every six months our health inspector arrives at our outlet grocery store with a clipboard wedged under his armpit, a stained governmental baseball cap covering his balding head, and a mouth on him as garrulous as a pubescent girl’s. Because he is our health inspector whose good opinion is vital to our store, I always act like he’s my best friend who I just love to catch up with twice a year.

In reality, I dread his arrival.

Last March when he saw me sitting in the office while working on my manuscript, he nodded at my laptop then said, “Is that there one of them trashy romance novels?”

I reassured him that it was not and he said, “Well, my wife always said she’d like to write a romance novel, but she just ain’t got ’round to it yet.”

“Is that right?” I said while trying to smile.

He smiled in return. “Sure ’nough. She wants to write one just like Nora Roberts.”

For the next half hour I was given a lecture on the publishing world -- which was about as informative as a groundhog holding a symposium about the moon -- but it was worth it. When the lecture was over, the health inspector took a look-see around the store and gave us a ninety-nine out of a possible hundred points.

Needless to say, when the health inspector poked his baseball-capped head into the office this week and bellowed, “How-dy!” it was all I could do not to run.

We made small talk for a few minutes, then he asked, “How many kids y’all got?”

“Actually,” I said, “we’re expecting our first.”

“Welllll! I thought you were expecting the last time I was here!”

I wanted to ask how he had thought this but feared the answer.

“My cousin just gave birth,” he said, then shook his head and clicked his tongue. “She had a real hard time. She was in labor for hours and hours, and the baby got stuck in her…” He grinned sheepishly and lowered his voice. “Well, in her ca-nal. They had to cut her open, but by this time she’d been laboring so long and so hard that she had a fever and the baby had a fever. When the baby come out, they had to stick an IV in her, but they have to be real careful that they didn’t blow out a vein.”

At this point all I wanted was to plug my ears or tell the health inspector to keep his horror stories to himself, but then we also needed a good health score on the inspection sheet, and I did not want to say anything that might thwart that. So, I simply let the man keep on talking. And keep on talking he did.

“The baby wouldn’t even nurse right after that,” he continued. “She lost a whole bunch of ounces, but the doctors said that’s pretty normal for being in the hospital.”

Seeing an opportunity to change the subject and not realizing I was opening up a whole new can of worms, I snapped, “I’m not giving birth in a hospital, but a natural childbirth center. My husband and I just visited the facility this week.”

“Wellllll,” the health inspector said.

I didn’t even let him gather steam. “Yes, we watched this video called, ‘The Business of Being Born,’ and it talked all about the increase of C-sections over the years and how we can avoid them.”

“Oh, I’ve already got my opinion on that.” (Somehow I didn’t doubt he did.) Lowering his clipboard to the desk, the health inspector moved his hands in the hour-glass gesture. “You see . . . when you look at a cow and she don’t got hips wide enough to give birth, then you just don’t breed her. It’s the same with women: The ones with narrow hips aren’t meant to have children, so they hafta give birth through C-sections. Then they pass that narrow-hipped gene onto their girls and they give birth through C-sections, too.”

He looked up and smiled. That’s when he saw my frown.

“Of course,” he said, pointing at my boyish hips like I was just a cow going up for auction, “gals your size give birth all the time, and they don’t got a stitch of trouble.”

“Is that right?” I said while trying to smile.

He smiled in return. “Sure ’nough.” Grabbing his clipboard, the health inspector then touched a finger to the brim of his governmental cap and clomped down the office steps into the store. Five minutes later, he handed me the pink and yellow papers to sign. At the top was the usual ninety-nine out of a possible hundred points.

Suddenly that number seemed pretty stingy to me.