He grows sweet corn and snap beans for market and is second in charge of the township school-bus fleet. He confided to me, “I used to ask Irma, ‘What’s David going to do, in case you pass on, with all the cats?’ She’d say, so serene-like, ‘Oh, Davey will find a way. He always has. He’s kept me here in style for twenty years.’ ”

She had become a widow in her sixties. My contributions to her upkeep, added to my father’s pension and their savings, had been barely adequate and, now that she was dead, seemed quite niggardly. Dwight’s remarks were also irritating in that, though Irma had been her name, she had never much liked it and had resented people’s calling her by it. When I once asked her what she did want to be called, she looked offended. “You,” she said, “may call me ‘Mother.’ ”

“She had a way of exaggerating,” I said.

“Well, now, one thing she didn’t exaggerate any was the size of that herd of cats. I can’t imagine what-all money she put into cat food. This last year or two, she’d call me up after shopping, and I’d go carry the cases for her into the kitchen.”

“Thank you,” I said. Dwight was the son I should have been.

“A week or so, she’d have another trunkful to lug in.” Was he airing a bottled-up grievance, or trying to bring her back to life for me?

As apologetically as I could, I said, “They were company for her, of a sort.”

“They were stark wild,” Dwight said. “If I’d show up in the evening, they’d scatter off the porch like they’d never seen a man with a beard before.” His beard had alarmed me, too, when he first began to grow it—in this part of the country beards were left to Amishmen and to ancestors in stiff-leaved photograph albums. This beard had a surprising amount of red in it, among bristles of gray and brown. It gave its wearer a mischievous-looking authority, and seemed to amplify his voice.

“She began to feed them, you know,” I wearily explained, “to keep them from eating the birds.”

He chuckled. “That was the theory, I know from her own lips. But I used to tell her, ‘Irma, I still wouldn’t say your place here is any paradise for our fine-feathered friends.’ She didn’t appreciate my saying that. Then she’d motion me to be quiet and say, ‘Listen! There’s the mockingbird, thanking me.’ ” He laughed at that, or at the accuracy of his imitation.

“But—” I shifted my weight, my mother having been made real enough for me for the moment.