Kimberley not only didn’t jump out of bed, she didn’t want to get out of bed at all. She clutched her stuffed bobcat and refused to open her eyes. She was like that about every other morning; given her druthers, she would have slept till noon. She didn’t have her druthers, not on a Tuesday. “You’ve got to get up, sweetie,” Nicole said with determined patience.

Eyes still resolutely closed, Kimberley shook her head. Her light brown hair, almost the same color as Nicole’s, streamed over her face like seaweed.

Nicole wheeled out the heavy guns: “Your brother is already up. You’re a big four-year-old. You can do what he does, can’t you?” If she’d used such shameless tactics in court, counsel for the other side would have screamed his head off, and the judge would have sustained him.

But she wasn’t in court, and there was no law that said she had to be completely fair with a small and relentlessly sleepy child. She did what she had to do, and did it with a minimum of remorse.

It worked. Kimberley opened her eyes. They were hazel, halfway between Frank’s brown and Nicole’s green. Still clutching her beloved Scratchy, Kimberley headed for the bathroom. Nicole nodded to herself and sighed. Her daughter wasn’t likely to say anything much for the next little while, but once she got moving, she moved pretty well.

Nicole got moving, too, toward the kitchen. Her brain was running ahead of her, kicked up into full daytime gear. She’d get the kids’ breakfasts ready, get dressed herself while they ate, listen to the news on the radio while she was doing that so she could find out what traffic was like (traffic in Indianapolis had not prepared her for L.A., not even slightly), and then…

And then, for the first time that day, her plans started to unravel. Normally silent Kimberley let out a shrill screech: “Ewwww!” Then came the inevitable, “Mommmmy!” Ritual satisfied, Kimberley deigned to explain what was actually wrong: “Justin tinkled all over the bathroom floor and I stepped in it. Eww! Eww! Eww!” More ewws might have followed that last one, but, if so, only dogs could hear them.