I closed my eyes to count to ten. At three I got hit in the face with a blast of water.

“Dammit, enough!” I said, putting my hands on my hips. “Turn the hose off!”

Rob dropped the hose. It landed at an angle and continued to squirt me just below the left knee until he reached the spigot and turned it off.

“More! More!” Timmy called. He ran in to pick up the spray head and shake it, to make it start again. I snagged him.

“Come on Timmy,” I said. “Uncle Rob and I are going to give you a bubble bath. Rob, put on your bathing suit.”

Timmy didn’t actually look particularly dirty, but I shared Rob’s squeamishness to the extent of wanting to make sure. And besides, I knew the only way to calm Rob down was to convince him that Timmy was no longer noxious. I hauled Timmy into Michael’s and my bathroom and gave him a quick scrubbing in the walk-in shower while Rob, at my orders, prepared the bubble bath and fetched Timmy’s bath toys.

“There,” I said, plopping Timmy in the tub. “Splash to your heart’s content.”

“You’re so good with kids,” Rob said. “I couldn’t get him to cooperate.”

“I didn’t get him to cooperate,” I said. “I just picked him up. Where was he running around without his diaper?”

“All over the kitchen,” Rob said, wrinkling his nose.

“Keep him entertained while I clean the kitchen, then.”

Apart from the diaper dumped in one corner, the kitchen seemed about as clean as it had been when I’d left it. Either Rob had cleaned up the marks left by Timmy’s diaper-swinging rampage or he’d exaggerated the whole incident out of proportion. My money was on exaggeration.

I dumped Rob’s and Timmy’s discarded clothes in the washer. Then I shed my own clothes, trying to ignore the fact that I had a sizeable audience—the snakes that had so disconcerted Michael last night. While in theory I knew they were only responding to light and motion, and not watching me with any kind of menace, it was still rather creepy.

“We need to get you guys back to the zoo,” I said to the snakes, and reached for my cell phone—at least, I reached for where my cell phone would be if I hadn’t just dumped my jeans, cell phone and all, into the washer. I fished out the phone, started the machine, and called Dad.

As the phone rang, I rummaged through the piles of clean clothes on the folding table. I could tell how busy Michael and I were by how full the table was. Right now, it contained over half of our wardrobe.

I got Dad’s voice mail.

“Dad,” I said. “When you get this, I need you to get the snakes out of our basement ASAP. I want everything to go smoothly when Mother comes over tonight, and you know how she feels about snakes. And don’t just stash them somewhere else over here—if she starts measuring one room, there’s no telling where she’ll go.”