The cat's name is Mr. Whiskers, but my mother calls him Mom. She talks to Mr. Whiskers about her childhood. She plays the oldies station so Mr. Whiskers can hear the songs he likes. She cooks tofu for Mr. Whiskers.

Once a week, I take my mother's grocery list and shop for her. My wife says this is the least I can do. My mother doesn't like to drive anymore and hates riding the bus.

"I thought this tofu was for you." I take three boxes of tofu from the bag and place them on the kitchen table. "Cats aren't supposed to like tofu, are they?"

My mother doesn't answer. She continues humming, her back to me as she stands at the stove. She's tied her gray hair in a bun to keep hairs from falling into Mr. Whiskers' food. She's coated the tofu fingers in Shake and Bake and fries them in vegetable oil.

"Fried food can't be good for Mr. Whiskers," I say.

"Mom is an old lady. She can eat whatever she wants as long as it makes her happy."

Mr. Whiskers runs a figure eight around my mother's legs, purring and rubbing his head against her. When the tofu turns light brown, my mother removes it from the oil and pats it with paper towels. "You have to wait for it to cool, Mom," she tells Mr. Whiskers. "It's too hot right now."

Mr. Whiskers chirrups. He flops over on his side and purrs. My mother leans over and strokes the cat's head. Mr. Whiskers, always a corpulent cat, seems to have lost some weight. His flabbiness no longer drags on the floor and he's now capable of hopping when he marks her as his territory, his head almost reaching her knee.

"I don't think you should feed him that."

"Her," she corrects me. "Mom has diabetes. The doctor put her on a special diet."

"Grandma had diabetes. The doctor put Grandma on a special diet." My mother continues to rub Mr. Whiskers' head. "That cat isn't Grandma – that cat's a tomcat."

"I know, Mom," she says to the cat. "He hasn't changed." She cuts the tofu into thin slivers and places them on a china saucer. She puts the saucer on the floor.

Once Mr. Whiskers is engaged, face down in a saucer of tofu, my mother turns her attention to me. "I wish you were kinder. To talk that way in front of your grandmother is disrespectful. Honestly, I thought I raised you better than that."

"I guarantee you that cat needs protein. Grandma's going to show up at the foot of your bed, mouse in mouth."

"Tofu has protein," my mother says. She picks up a package from the table and offers it to me. "See for yourself since you're skeptical of everything I say."

"Okay, I give up."

My mother smiles at me. "You mean to be a good boy." She pats my arm the way she used to when I got in trouble in high school. "I'll see you tomorrow. We have to be at the doctor's office before 9:00."

I agree to pick her up at 8:30. I don't bother trying to convince her that Mr. Whiskers is seeing a vet, not a doctor.

  *

My wife doesn't think it's problematic that my mother believes my grandmother has been reincarnated in her cat.

"She's not hurting herself or anyone else," Suzanne tells me during dinner.

My wife works with pre-school children at a daycare center. She's used to suspending disbelief. She's the queen in a court of princesses, knights, and unicorns one week, a fairy godmother the next. When responding to the imaginary, she defers to a wealth of psychology books and to parental instincts. If the kids don't hurt anyone and if the parents aren't concerned, she sees no reason to lose sleep about it. On the other hand, I direct the high school's choir. This, I think, explains the fundamental difference in the way each of us sees the world. Her world fosters imagination and creativity. In my world, an over-active imagination is a call for help, an immediate referral to the counselor's office. By the time students reach my classroom, the goal is to ground them in reality and prepare them for the real world.

"She's hurting the cat by feeding it a steady diet of tofu."

"Mr. Whiskers was always a little mangy. Tofu makes her coat shiny."

"His coat."

"Ask the vet tomorrow, if you're worried about it."

I like to venture into my wife's world, especially during my time off each summer. One day a month, I go to her daycare center for Theme Day. Last month, I was the captain of a pirate ship. This week, I'm a dragon. Suzanne even made a costume for me. She's been planning for weeks, making costumes for the kids, reading them stories about dragons, and thinking up names for each knight and princess. Theme days are usually a good time. The kids get a kick out of it, and so do I.

Sometimes, I think I could try those types of things with my high schoolers—maybe dress up as a composer or get the band teacher to enact critical scenes from musical history with me—but the urge usually doesn't last long. I can imagine the laughter, the type that follows dead silence in a room and quickly emanates to a riotous outburst. The orchestra director told me he experienced it one time when he failed to realize what every kid under eighteen in the room knew: he had conducted an entire concert with his fly down. "Do you think one of them had the decency to tell me?" he asked. "They were smiling, and I thought maybe they finally loved Vivaldi. I thought I'd had an educational breakthrough with them." Their ability to fake sincerity is what brings me to my senses and inspires me to show clips from movies or read passages from biographies when I want to set historical contexts.

"But why my grandmother?" I ask Suzanne. "Why isn't my father inhabiting Mr. Whiskers' body? At least the cat's gender would be correct."     

"Your mom always loved animals, and she loved your grandmother." Suzanne smiles and pats my hand. Her touch is calm and reassuring. She's a favorite among the kids. They fight over who gets to sit on her lap and who gets to hold her hand at the playground. Our refrigerator is covered with pre-school art projects given to Suzanne by pupils who love her.

"Everything will be fine," Suzanne says. "The kids can't wait to meet Puff the Dragon." She squeezes my hand.

"They must know it's the same guy in a different outfit."

"Maybe," she says. "But I don't think they really care."

  *

Before we go to bed, Suzanne asks me to try on the dragon costume. The base of the outfit is a plain red sweatsuit and red socks. The sweatshirt has a hood, which she pulls over my head and fastens under my neck. Suzanne has made wings and a tail from construction paper, which she fastens to the back of the sweatsuit. She's made claws by covering a pair of my gloves with tinfoil. Last week, as an art activity, the kids made clay dragons, and she based the costume on their designs.

"I've got face paint, too," Suzanne says. "But it's messy, so we won't put that on tonight." She stands back and admires her work. "You look cute."

"Grrrrr," I say. I swipe a tinfoil hand through the air. "Grrrrrr."

"Less bass in your voice. We don't want to give them nightmares."

"Isn't the point that the kids fend off the threat of a dragon? Don't they have swords? Shouldn't I be scary? Won't that foster a sense of genuine accomplishment?"

Suzanne stares at me in a way that suggests I take my role as the dragon too seriously. "They're little kids. The swords are made of foam. You're not actually going to breathe fire on them."

She begins carefully removing the dragon costume, folding the pieces and putting them back in plastic grocery bags. When my transformation back to a man in a red jogging suit is complete, she says, "Really, Sean. Fantasy is the goal, not realism."

  *

When I arrive at my mother's house, she's sitting at the dining room table and Mr. Whiskers is reclined in her arms, his four legs straight in the air and his eyes closed. My mother cradles his head in one hand and rubs his belly with the other. The cat isn't moving.

"Is the cat dead?"

"No," she says, without looking at me. She rubs the tips of her fingers back and forth across a spot on the cat's stomach. "Feel this." She nods for me to come over by her.

I touch Mr. Whiskers' belly, and the cat squawks, raises his head briefly, and then goes back to his prone position. "He feels a little skinnier," I tell my mother, "but that's good. The cat was too heavy."

"No," my mother says, "there." She moves my hand to a spot directly beneath Mr. Whiskers' rib cage. "Do you feel a bump there?"

I press my fingers into the cat's flesh. Nothing feels strange. As my fingers move, the fat redistributes itself. "I don't feel anything."

"I think it's a lump."

My first impulse is to suggest it's a lump of fat, but my mother's eyes are heavy and she looks old, like she did when my father died. "If you're worried, you can ask the vet."

This seems to make her feel better. She collects her purse and heads for the door, Mr. Whiskers still firmly held in her arms.

"Don't you have a cat carrier?"

She looks at me as if I've committed heresy, the same look of surprise mingled with disappointment she wore when I told her Suzanne and I weren't getting married in a church.

"I'm not putting Mom in a cage. What's the matter with you?"

"How are we going to take the cat to the vet without a carrier?"

"I'll hold Mom." Her lower lip sets. "If you have a problem with that, I'll call a taxi."

  *

In the car, my mother cradles Mr. Whiskers on her lap. The cat sits straight up, looking idly out the window, the same reaction my grandmother had to car rides. Nothing much impressed her.

As we drive to the vet's, my mother tells me the story of LuLu the pot-bellied pig. Lulu's owner had a heart attack and, in the midst of the attack, the owner vividly remembers the pig coming through the dog door on the house. The pig stood by the owner's head crying, then devised a plan. The pig ran out to the highway and laid down in front of cars. Eventually, someone stopped and followed LuLu back to her owner. The motorist called an ambulance, the owner was saved, and LuLu was rewarded with a jelly donut.

"Mom would do that for me, wouldn't you, Mom?" my mother asks the cat.

"You don't have a pet door," I remind my mother.

She ignores me. "Yes, you would," she says to Mr. Whiskers. She scratches his ears. "I know you would."

My mother continues to coo at the cat, and Mr. Whiskers' loud purring fills the car. I turn on the radio and focus on the road. Even the kids at the daycare center eventually move on. Pirates are replaced by knights, which are replaced by cowboys and firemen and quarterbacks. My mother, on the other hand, shows no signs of relenting. Initially, I thought it was a phase brought on by grief or even loneliness, but now I'm not so sure.

I turn down the radio. "Mom, is everything okay?"

She smiles at me. "Of course," she says. "If anything is wrong, the doctors will be able to fix it. Mom has years left to live. She's not ready to give up on life. Not yet."

"I mean with you. Not with the cat."

"Of course, honey." She pats my knee. "You're a good boy, helping your mother out like this. You're a good, good boy."

  *

The receptionist at the vet's office gives my mother two options. She can use a cardboard cat carrier to hold Mr. Whiskers in the waiting room or she can wait outside the office. "I'm sorry," the receptionist says, "but it's our policy."

My mother chooses to wait outside.

"I told you we needed a cat carrier," I say as we stand outside the vet's window. The office is small. A man with a German Shepherd and a mother and child with a guinea pig also wait to see the vet. The Shepherd strains at its leash, nose wrinkling, trying to get closer to the guinea pig. The dog looks more curious than hungry, but the small boy clutches the cage to his chest, shielding the pig.

"It's a nice day," my mother says. "I don't mind waiting outside."

When the receptionist motions through the window that it's our turn to see the vet, I follow my mother and Mr. Whiskers into the office. I start to follow my mother into the exam room, but she stops me. "Ladies only," she says. "Mom would be so embarrassed if you watched the doctor give her a physical."

  *

While I'm waiting for my mother, a college-aged boy comes into the office. In the aquarium, he has a small iguana.

"Please help me," the boy says. "My roommate let him loose on the carpet. When I tried to pick Ziggy up, his tail got stuck. The tip came right off." The boy holds the aquarium up so the receptionist can examine the wound.

"I think it'll grow back," the receptionist says, but the boy isn't convinced.

"Please," he says, "I know I don't have an appointment, but could the doctor look at him?" The boy seems close to tears. He's similar in age to my students, but his heart is open, as if it could rip in half right here in the vet's office.

"Okay," the receptionist says. "I'm sure I can squeeze you in if you don't mind waiting. The doctor can probably give you something to clean the wound."

The boy sits in a chair next to mine. He holds the aquarium on his lap. He talks to his iguana. "I'm sorry, Ziggy. If you make it through this, I promise nothing like this will ever happen again."

The lizard sits on his rock. His skin is the color of fresh limes, except for a red spot at the end of his tail. His legs are muscular and plump. His claws are long and curved. His pale green dorsal crests and banded tail remind me of dinosaurs, even though this iguana is still small.

The boy continues to talk to the iguana. The iguana bobs his head. He licks the air.

"I think he knows everything will be okay," the boy says to me. "The doctor is going to help us. Ziggy can sense that."

I nod. In contrast to his owner, the iguana seems calm. His eyes are oval shaped. He relaxes on his rock, perhaps not even noticing his missing tail, not caring that he's got a medical appointment.

"I'm pretty sure Ziggy will forgive me." Like many of my students, the boy tries to form a declarative sentence, but when he speaks, it sounds more like a question.

I nod again. "I'm sure Ziggy will be fine. I'm sure he's still happy to be your pet."

The boy relaxes. "Sometimes I like Ziggy more than I like my roommate," he says.

  *

My mother and Mr. Whiskers come out of the exam room, and we head to the car.

"How's the cat?"

"The doctor ran a few tests," my mother says. "She'll call me with the results." I hold the cat while she adjusts herself in the passenger seat. Then, she opens her arms expectantly, the way young mothers do when they pick up their children from the daycare center.

On the drive home, I ask my mother if she mentioned the cat's diet and the lump she found to the vet. I ask her if the vet had an opinion.

My mother doesn't answer. She strokes the cat's head. She closes her eyes, exhausted. Finally, her voice consciously calm and practical, she says, "I'll tell you when I know something." 

  *

When I arrive at the daycare center, Suzanne has my costume waiting for me in the staff bathroom. As she helps me dress, she asks about my visit with the vet. I tell her that my mother wouldn't allow me to go in with them.

"Maybe you make her nervous," Suzanne says. She smears my face with paint she's made from cold cream and food coloring.

"Does it strike you as strange that my mother thinks the cat is a reincarnation of my grandmother? Mr. Whiskers was at least seven when Grandma died. It seems more like a possession."

"Stop talking," Suzanne says to me in the firm but loving voice she uses with her kids. "You're making it hard to get this on evenly."

She continues adjusting my costume. When she's satisfied everything is in place, she stands back and looks at me. She smiles. "Okay, Puff, I'm going to introduce you to the children."

  *

The children are on the playground with Suzanne's co-workers. I wait near the door until I hear Suzanne introduce me. Then, I venture out in my stocking feet onto the wood chips. The kids are sitting in a circle, but they jump up when they see me.

"I'm Ziggy the Dragon," I say. I wave at the kids.

"Where's Puff?" one of the smaller knights asks.

Suzanne frowns at me. I'm deviating from our script. "Puff wasn't feeling well, so he asked me to come in his place."

Suzanne's frown increases. Her curriculum doesn't cover sickness, unless it discusses preventive medicine, like hand washing.

The kids pause for a moment, staring at me. A growl starts to rise in my throat, but I know that will only cause trouble at home. Instead, I say, "I'm Ziggy. Let's play!"

The kids are still skeptical. But then Suzanne steps in. "Okay, knights and princesses," she says, "let's get to our places in the castle." She points to the natural jungle gym in the middle of the fenced in play area. "Ziggy's a fun dragon. Let's have FUN."

The kids instantly run to the jungle gym, giggling and swinging their foam swords. The princesses lift the hems of their skirts as they run, and Suzanne puts on a crown that says queen.

"Okay, Ziggy," she says to me, "approach the castle."

I bend over and begin to saunter on all fours toward the jungle gym. I'm only half way across the playground when the knights charge me. They run like a hoard of invading barbarians. Two knights jump on my back and four more swing at me with their foam swords. I shake them off and, on two legs, make a run for the castle. But they're on me again. Children hang from my arms, around my waist, and finally one precocious child takes me down at the knees.

When all is said and done, I'm covered by a dozen giggling knights and at least three princesses. At the bottom of the pile, I can barely breathe. I surrender myself to the sensation, allowing my body to relax. I stop fighting. Wood chips stick to the cold cream on my face, and I've lost a sock somewhere in the battle. My dorsal crests are creased and my tail hangs by a thread.

  *        

That evening, Suzanne brainstorms ideas for her next theme day. "Maybe something to do with wizards," she says. She makes a few notes in her day planner, then stops.

"Sean, I feel horrible about keeping a secret from you."

I think she's going to tell me she's disappointed with my performance. Maybe she was concerned when I emerged from the pile, gasping for breath with my tongue out licking the air. Perhaps this bordered on death, a topic she's not ready to cover.

Instead, she tells me my mother requested a ride to the Women's Health Clinic last week.

"My mother hasn't been seen by a doctor since I was born."

"She made me promise not to mention it to you."

"Why wouldn't she tell me?"

"She said she'd tell us when she knew something."

When the phone finally rings, disrupting the weight of our silence, I know I should have been the one who made the call.

"Do you want me to get it?" Suzanne asks, but I shake my head. I resist the urge to let the machine take it.

Cradling the receiver, I ask, "How's Mom? Can the doctor help us?"