The Previously Unmentioned Father

She told the children the cat went to Florida to visit his father,

but she had found him in the neighbor’s yard, one leg sticking out from under the shade-loving hostas. The not-so-shade-loving cat shouldn’t have been there. So when she scooped his body up, limp like a bunched orange beach towel, she wondered what she would say. What was a better place? How to introduce heaven to kids who had been to Mass once when their grandmother died, and then the oldest asked, pointing at the priest, “Is that God?”

Three days later when the kids noticed the cat still hadn’t shown, she brought up Florida. And they seemed to buy it all: the previously unmentioned father, the sun, and the sandy beach.