A Tiger's Tale

by Melinda

for Aria (crazysockmonkeys)

ch. 1

Lois Miller was your typical, everyday housewife. Everything about her life screamed ordinary (i.e. boring)..she met her future husband, Bill, as they were both freshmen in college. She worked two or three jobs after she graduated, none in her chosen profession, to support Bill throughout his law school days. She was married at 25, had her only child, Calvin, at 30, and had decided to stay home to raise her boy. What a prolific decision that would turn out to be.

Yes, Lois very much lived the American dream. Bill had done very well at his profession. Once Calvin turned 16, Bill had decided to run for judge. Everything looked perfect for their little future, for their little family.

That was until the day Bill went in for his yearly physical.

A bicycle enthusiast, a health-nut, even running ten miles daily in the coldest days of winter, Bill was fully prepared for his usual clean bill of health. When the doctor ordered x-rays, that should have sent alarms to Bill's mind, but it hadn't.

Cancer, they'd told him. Third stage lung cancer. And Bill had never smoked a day in his life, save for the occasional joint in college during his frat boy days. But those days had been far and few between, and a very, very long time ago.

This diagnosis would challenge the family as it had never been challenged before. And to anyone who'd ever knew, taught, raised, babysat or been a childhood playmate of Calvin Miller, they knew that would be saying quite a bit.

0000

Calvin never had been a typical child. His only friend for the first eight years of his life had been Hobbes, his stuffed tiger. Everywhere Calvin went, Hobbes was surely in tow. Lois hadn't thought much of it, only that Calvin had inheritied his father's wild imagination. (The wild stories Bill told Calvin, from how light bulbs operated on magic to some outlandish theory of how the sun only sat for the evening in Flagstaff, Arizona should have given Lois some clue as to how Calvin would come to have such a flare for the dramatic!)

Calvin was intelligent, intelligent enough to try every scheme imaginable to try to get out of going to school, getting out of chores, and to avoid Rosalyn, his babysitter. School never was his thing. The best he'd ever done was become a D student. He resisted authority, challenged what was taught him (except for what his dad would try to "teach" him), didn't fit in well with other students. So it was understandable that Lois should cut Calvin a bit of slack, though he would try her last nerve in the process.

So he had a stuffed tiger for a friend? What harm could that do? He'd outgrow it, the doctors would say, and for years it seemed as if he had.

So what in the world was Lois doing, dragging out Hobbes and preparing him for a trip to the hospital? Yes, Bill was in the hospital, but tonight, it wouldn't be her husband she would be visiting there.

She'd be visiting her only son, who'd been admitted to the adolescent impatient mental health ward.

Lois looked at Hobbes, touched the soft, worn out fur of the face, then finished packing Calvin's bags, and slowly and with much dread, she started out to the hospital, a place she was growing to detest by the day.

tbc