“Well, come on in and tell me what I’m not going to believe,” I said. “There’s a lot in this world that’s hard to believe.”

They followed me to, where else, the kitchen.

“Anybody want cookies?”

“Sure!” they said. “Thanks!”

I poured two glasses of milk without asking and put a half dozen Oreos on the table.

“You have permission to dunk, sirs,” I said and gave them a little salute.

“So,” Tyler said, “last night I was taking a shower.”

“We’re taking showers now?” I said. “No more baths?”

“Sharon says baths are for babies,” Hunter said.

“Oh? She does?”

“Yeah, she says that they’re not sanitary because you sit in your own filth,” Tyler said.

“Well, you could rinse off at the end, but what do I know?” I said.

“Exactly!” Tyler said and Hunter bobbed his head in agreement. “So, I’m in the dumb shower and she sticks her hand in the bathroom and turns off the light! She says something like, ‘You’ve been in there long enough! You’re wasting all the hot water!’ I was like, are you kidding me?”

“Seems excessive to me,” I said. “Did you tell your daddy?”

“Of course! You know what he said? He said, ‘If Sharon says you’ve been in there too long, you probably were.’”

“Well, parents are supposed to support each other when it comes to the kids,” I said.

Momma came into the room.

“What’s new, boys?”

They repeated the story for her. I must say, she was filled with disgust.

She said, “What did I tell you? She’s taking over.” She poured herself a glass of tea and sat down at the table with us. “But turning off the lights when someone’s in the shower doesn’t seem like a nice thing to do. What if you fell? You could really get hurt!”

My ears perked up. Nice thing to do? Suddenly, Momma was concerned with niceness?

“Look,” I said, “you see how Hunter has dissolved his whole cookie in his milk?”

The boys giggled.

“Well,” I continued, “that’s kind of an odd way to eat a cookie. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yeah,” Tyler said. “It’s disgusting.”

“Okay,” I said, bringing this argument to a close, “you’ve got your deal with cookies and she’s got a thing about showers. I’ll admit, it’s an odd battle to pick. But who knows? Maybe she never had enough hot water when she was a kid or something like that.”

“Yeah, maybe it’s something like that,” Tyler said.

“She did it to me, too,” Hunter said.

“Well, so now you know one more thing about her,” Momma said. “Just don’t stay in the shower so long.”

“If it happens again, ask her to set the kitchen timer for you to what she thinks is a fair amount of time,” I said.