“You’re going to do what?” Pax asked. He lifted his head from its resting place on Lucy’s mother’s foot. She was sorting through bills on the kitchen table, completely oblivious to the ghost cat’s affections.
“I’m going to see the Catfather,” Michael Stein said. “Lots of cats do it. That’s what he’s there for—to hear our grievances and help us out.”
“You won’t find it’s as easy as that. Catfathers are movers and shakers when they’re alive, but…You do understand that you can’t go to a living catfather, don’t you?”
Michael Stein hadn’t thought of that. “You sure?”
“Trust me, I’ve been dead a lot longer than you. You’re not part of their constituency anymore. It’s a catfather ghost for you. And those…” Pax lifted one of his white paws, licked it, and ran the paw over one of his black ears. He couldn’t actually touch it, but old habits were hard to break. “They’re really rather useless.”
Michael Stein doubted that. He had an idea about what he was going to ask the Catfather for. He almost said it, but he didn’t want Pax to laugh at it. Instead, he just said, “Still, I’m going to try.”
Pax shrugged. “Suit yourself, but what you should do is accept the way things are. Act like the rest of us do.”
“You mean sit around on your human’s feet?”
“You always have to have the last word, don’t you?”
Michael Stein didn’t think that was fair. He also couldn’t help but have the last word. “Lounging around invisibly doesn’t do anybody any good.”
“You’d be surprised,” Pax said, with an air of import that annoyed Michael Stein.
Before Michael Stein could try again to have the last word, Lucy’s father trod down the stairs, having just come from Lucy’s room.
“She any better?” Lucy’s mother asked.
“Not really. She cried herself to sleep. She’s going to have puffy eyes in the morning.” Sighing, he added, “She really loved that cat.”
Lucy’s mother looked up from her bills and stared wistfully out the open window. She said, “All the girls loved Michael Stein.”
“Good grief!” Lucy’s father said. “If I’d known it would be this bad I wouldn’t have agreed to keep him in the first place.”
“With Michael Stein, it’s better to have known love and lost it than to never have loved at all,” Lucy’s mother said. “I was miserable when my old cat, Pax, died, but that was only because I loved him. I still do. Sometimes I think of him and it almost feels like he’s in the room with me. You know that feeling?”
Lucy’s father said, “Nope. I can’t say that I do.” He grabbed the trash bag from the bin and stomped outside with it.
Pax purred and looked pleased with himself. “See? Didn’t I tell you? Why don’t you just curl up beside Lucy and do what you can to comfort her?”
“That might be fine for other cats,” Michael Stein said, “but I say there can be more to death than that.”
The Catfather’s headquarters was in the same backyard that it had been in when the Catfather had still been alive. Michael Stein had never called on him before, but he’d known where he lived. Every cat knew that. He was surprised at how many cats were already there when he arrived. Seemed like half the town had crammed into the yard, between the lawn furniture and the shed and all around the raised garden beds. All of them had problems they were hoping the Catfather could solve for them.
When he gave his name at the back gate, the Catfather’s secretary looked up from his notepad, one eyebrow cocked. “What kind of name is Michael Stein? For a cat, I mean.”
“Oh,” Michael Stein said awkwardly, “I don’t know. I was only a kitten when my humans chose it.”
The secretary raised his other eyebrow.
Truth is, Michael Stein knew exactly where his name came from. Humans thought it was a pretty strange name for a cat too. Lucy’s mother had to tell the story of how she came up with it on more than one occasion.
Michael Stein was a guy Lucy’s mom had a crush on in high school. He was half-Filipino and half-Jewish. “A crazy mix,” Lucy’s mom had said, “but the result was dreamy.” She claimed that all the girls at school had a thing for him. Because of all the attention he got, Lucy’s mother only admired him from afar. In her junior year science class she got paired with him for a series of projects. They worked well together, but she didn’t let on for a minute about how she felt. And that was that. Unrequited love. Life moves on.
Or so she’d thought until the night of her twentieth high school reunion. Michael Stein was there, looking as dreamy as ever. He ran a successful software design firm with offices in Boston and Munich. He was married with three kids, a dog, two cats. He liked foreign films, ran 10k marathons, and had hand built a wood-fired pizza oven in his backyard. He drove a Prius. He was everything Lucy’s mother had dreamed he’d become.