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Grandma Muffin may look like a sweet old granny, with her little white curls and her angelic pink face, but underneath all that loveliness lurks a tough old baby.

“It folds!” Gran now yelled.

Both Tex and Marge stared at her.“It does what now?” asked Tex.

“The new phones! They fold right down the middle. And I want one.”

Tex rolled his eyes, and so did Marge. A collective eye roll. Not good.

“You don’t need a foldable smartphone, ma,” said Marge.

“Yeah, those things are fragile,” said Tex. “Plus they cost a fortune.”

“I need the bigger screen, so I can watch my shows on my phone.”

Gran is an avid consumer of soap operas. I think she watches all of them, if she has the chance. And the ones she can’t watch, on account of the fact that she works at Tex’s doctor’s office as a receptionist, she records on her DVR and watches later in the day.

“You can watch your shows on the TV like a normal person,” said Tex.

“I want to watch them live at the office. It’s different when you watch them live.”

“Someone should tell Gran that none of those shows are live,” I said.

Instead, Marge wagged her finger at her mother.“You shouldn’t watch shows when you’re working, ma.”

“Well, I want to, and I will,” Gran said stubbornly. “There’s never much to do at the office in the afternoon. Besides, Tex’s patients bore me, with all their yapping about their irritable bowel syndrome and their hemorrhoids. Who cares about some old idiot’s bowels! I don’t need thatcrap in my life. I want my shows and I want to watch them live.”

“She’s right,” said Dooley. “She always misses her favorite shows these days.”

“All working people miss their favorite shows,” I pointed out. “That’s what DVRs are for. Besides, she can watch them online. Most networks put shows online these days.”

Frankly the whole argument was starting to get a little tedious, not to mention repetitive, so I decided to leave them to it, and move into the living room, where a couch was waiting that had my name on it. Well, not literally, of course. But it is very comfy.

Dooley felt the same way, for he followed me out, the voices of three adults yelling at each other over a foldable smartphone following us into the living room. We hopped up onto the couch, turned around a couple of times to find ourselves the perfect spot, and finally lay down, neatly folding our tails around our faces, and promptly dozed off.

You’re probably wondering why I wasn’t over at Odelia’s, enjoying my perfectly good nap on my own perfectly good couch. Well, I will tell you why. Odelia and Chase are redecorating, and the house is a total mess right now. Not only that, but there’s a weirdly annoying smell of wallpaper glue and paint that pervades the entire house, and it fills me with such a sense of nausea I have trouble finding sleep. So for the time being Dooley and I have both decided to seek refuge at Tex and Marge’s. Fights are never pleasant, unless you love their entertainment value, like we do, but the stench of paint fumes is actually a lot worse, and even deleterious for one’s general health and wellbeing.

And I’d just dozed off and had started dreaming about the birds and bees—real birds and bees, mind you—when a loud booming voice practically had me tumbling down from my high perch. I was up and poised in a fight-or-flight position, ready for any contingency, when I saw that the booming voice didn’t actually belong to a human presence in the room, but to some loudmouth on the television, which Gran had just switched on and was watching intently, the volume cranked up to maximum capacity.

“Gran! Turn that down!” Tex bellowed from the kitchen.

But Gran decided to play deaf, and sat watching the TV with a mulish expression on her face. Obviously foldable smartphone negotiations hadn’t reached a breakthrough.

“Max?” said Dooley.

“Uh-huh?” I said, my heart rate slowly climbing down from its Himalayan heights.

“Isn’t that the guy?”

“What guy?” I said, wishing not for the first time that cats were able to put their fingers in their ears, the way humans can.

“The guy on the TV.”

I redirected my attention to the television for the first time. Apart from the noise, I hadn’t really paid any attention to the particular spectacle that was unfolding there.

The evening news was on, and newscaster Lauren Klepfisch, a lady we’d met in a recent adventure, was announcing that a person had gone missing, and asking the public to keep an eye out for him. I have to admit I didn’t recognize the youth in question. He was liberally pimpled and had a big zit on the tip of his nose. Not the picture of beauty.

“I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure…” I began.

“The lottery guy,” said Dooley. “The kid who won the lottery.”