“Sometimes.”

Mary Alice groaned.

“How’s your log cabin coming along?” I asked Tammy.

“Haven’t done much on it the last couple of days.” Tammy tapped at a gauge, picked up a telephone, and read some numbers into it. She turned back to me. “Been too busy.”

“Lots of emergencies?”

She nodded. “People wait until after Christmas to die. Happens that way every year. Never fails.”

“That makes sense,” Sister said. “You don’t want to miss Christmas. I bought these purple boots in Warsaw, Poland, this Christmas.”

Tammy lifted the blanket and looked at the boots. “I forgot about those. We need to get them off. We don’t want anything constricting your extremities.”

“My extremities aren’t constricted. Don’t you dare touch my boots.” Sister tried to sit up, but the straps allowed only a sideways movement of her head.

“She’s fond of the boots,” I explained.

Tammy shrugged and brushed her bangs out of her eyes. They immediately fell back in. I’ll bet her mother was dying to get to her with the scissors. Or some bobby pins. I glanced at Sister. The Dharma look was a good one if you were going to be bitten by a snake and hit a mailbox. You couldn’t tell if it was messed up or not.

“How did y’all get tangled up with that snake anyway?” Tammy asked, giving up on the boots. “The guy who called us said it was a huge one.”

“Somebody put it in our car.” I shivered and looked out at the now familiar limestone-rock walls of the road, at the leaning pines. They looked, I realized, like the universal sign for PICNIC AREA, a sign that has always bothered me because the tree looks like it may fall at any minute on the unwary picnickers. The trees along this road loomed the same way.

Tammy tapped the gauges again. Either they were defective or she didn’t believe what she was seeing. “Why would they do that?”

“Crazy,” Sister muttered.

I touched the right side of my rib cage. Definitely painful. I tried to take a deep breath. Definitely painful. I would need to be checked out at the hospital, too.

I suddenly felt very sleepy. I rested my head against Sister’s gurney. And when I closed my eyes, I saw the rattler striking Sister’s hand. A hand that had been encased in a leather driving glove.

My eyes popped open.

“Tell the children I love them, Mouse.” Sister whispered faintly.

“Tell them yourself.”

I turned to Tammy. “Is she really bitten?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am. Not as bad as she would have been without those gloves, but the fangs went through a little bit.”

“So she’s just a little bit bit.”

Tammy looked thoughtful. “Well, a little bit bit is something you have to see about when the snake’s that big. She may need some antivenom. If she was small she definitely would.”