As any one who lives near me can tell you, we don't have central air conditioning. The reason people know this is because every time the temperature starts creeping into the upper part of the thermometer, they can hear my kids from across the street, wailing -- in pained and painful tones -- asking why they were born into the type of family that would live in a house without air conditioning.

We live in a house where it would be really, really hard and really, really expensive, to add central air conditioning. Our home is heated with radiators and made out of solid brick. The only solution is window air conditioners, which means that at some point, I have to climb the stairs in the garage, drag out the collection of rusty old window units, stagger across the driveway, and cram them into the bedroom windows. It takes hours because none of our air conditioners has those accordion thingees on the side, and I have to cut pieces of plywood to fit around them. (I know. A sensible person would have kept the pieces from last year. A sensible person, though, would have purchased a house that could be fitted out with central air conditioning.)

But this year, we've had a surprisingly mild summer. Days have been just warm enough to make you want to go outside, and nights have brought the kind of cool air that makes sleeping even more of a pleasure than it usually is.

As the weeks ticked by, with no sign of hot weather, I started to get excited. This would be the first year in the past 15, I thought, that I'd be able to skip the death march to the garage.

Until last weekend. A heat wave swept up from the south, and suddenly our house was so sweltering that when I got up from the leather couch in the living room, it made the sound you get when you try to pull tape from the duct tape roll. When I turned around, there was a creepy, sweaty silhouette on the couch.

I looked at the forecast, though, and found that if we could get through two, maybe three days of misery, the temperature would drop back to normal. We could tough it out, and I still might make my goal.

I lasted one night. Our master bedroom is on the third floor, away from the kids and up under the eves. With the sun baking all day on slate tiles, our room feels like a sauna well before the rest of the house. After 10 minutes of sticking to the sheets, I rustled up an air conditioner and jammed it into the window.

I felt a little guilty about keeping cool while the kids sweltered just one story below, but I got over it. Even though I don't do it very well, I am the breadwinner of the family and need my rest.

And I figured we'd never get caught. My kids learned long ago to stay away from Dad's bedroom. No kid in his right mind wants to come upstairs and catch Dad getting changed. (I walked in on my dad getting out of the shower when I was 13 and felt slightly nauseated for six months.) Any time my kids need anything, they stand at the bottom of the steps, shouting at the top of their lungs, until we come to the top of the steps.

Sunday night, complaining of the heat, my wife and I said we were going up to bed early, and we climbed the stairs to our frozen retreat. An hour later, we were in our room watching TV from bed when we heard a knock on the door. It was our 13-year-old daughter. Clearly, we hadn't heard her repeated shouts with the door closed.

"What?" I yelled. "What do you want?" I tried to sound fatherly but hostile. It was tricky.

"I want to ask you a question!" she called from the other side of the door. She opened the door a crack and stuck her sweaty face inside.

"It's so hot tonight, can we ..." her voice trailed off, as she felt the cold blast of air on her face. Her eyes widened, and her jaw dropped in shock.

"YOU!" she shouted, "HAVE AIR CONDITIONING!?" It was a question, an exclamation and an accusation all at once.

I stared into my daughter's hurt face and said the only thing I could under the circumstances: "Listen Honey. I'll let you sleep on the floor in our room tonight if you promise not to tell anyone!"