(13) Dog Cavanaugh: Like Good Luck and Love
In his last days, my father asked sometimes about the cat — where was it now, who would feed it, that kind of thing. At first, we didn’t understand. The cat had died years before, just after I’d finished college. When I reminded him, he dropped my hand, then slapped it away from the side of the bed and rolled over.
A few days later, as I wiped a splodge of cherry Jello from his cheek, he grabbed at my wrist and said, “We gave the right name in the end. He knew we were waiting for him.”
It was a little black-and-white tuxedo-style kitten trying to escape cold and windy December weather. We’d been imprisoned in the house all day, all three of us. My brother Milo left a voice mail for our mother that there was a dangerous cat on our porch. It kept attacking us when we went outside and tried to talk to it. My brothers and I were on Christmas break. By mid-afternoon, all three of us were afraid to go outside.
Our parents came home from work on the train. We heard them out on the porch talking. When we opened the door, my father stood to the side in his khaki trench coat, maroon scarf draped across his neck, tie loosened, the cat nuzzling his neck. Our mother was stroking its black and white fur, sort of cooing at it with a very stupid look on her face.
“It’s basically a kitten,” our mother said.
“Are you sure you should be touching that thing?” I asked.
“It’s hungry.”
“It’s scary.”
They laughed at us. “It’s been abandoned,” my father said. “Look at its paw.” He showed me a pad, oozing some sort of cat substance.
“How did it know to show up here?” my mother asked. Then she laughed strangely.
“We’ll feed it tuna fish,” my father said, “until we can get to the store.”
“Wait! What? We’re keeping it?” I don’t think we said anything, we just stood there and looked like we wanted to say that.
My father said, “We kept all three of you.”
That was more than thirty years ago. On his last day, my father told all of us in the room, “Cats can come from the future. Just like children.”
We tried to laugh.
“Like good luck and love,” he said.
Maybe an hour later he was gone. We had originally named the cat Snuffy until that first spring when my father changed its name to Tommy Tomorrow. Tommy lived to be seventeen, ate only canned tuna, and drank out of the third-floor toilet exclusively in order to satisfy his thirst.
Dog Cavanaugh is a mixed-race Afro-Irish Quaker American author. Most recently, he has published fiction with New World Writing, Bull magazine, and Philadelphia Stories. You can track him down at https://dogcavanaugh.com