When I moved from my mom’s house to my dad’s to be closer to college in my late teens, my dad made one rule very clear: absolutely no animals in his house. My mom, on the other hand, told me that if I left my cat with her, she would take her straight back to the Humane Society. Don’t judge her too harshly; this cat was 666 kinds of crazy. She adored me and was the sweetest thing in the world to me, but to everyone else, she was the devil’s favorite villain. I named her Nova because she would go supernova without warning and explode with energy.
I begged my mom to let me keep Nova at her place, and she agreed… for a few weeks. Then a full-blown Super Nova event happened. Things broke, my mom gained a few new grey hairs, and suddenly, my cat was homeless.
So, I picked her up and smuggled her into my room at Dad’s house.
My dad worked long hours, and as long as Nova didn’t encounter another human, she was a perfectly normal, lazy cat who slept 90% of the time. She lived quietly in my room, and my dad was just happy I was home more often.
One day, my dad called and said he was making dinner at 6 PM and we needed to talk. I didn’t think much of it until I got home and saw my bedroom door wide open. The cat food and litter box had been moved to the kitchen and bathroom, and Nova was sprawled on the couch like she owned the place.
I’ve had tense moments with my parents before, but that dinner felt like I was about to be put on trial, for my life or at least my cat’s. I waited the entire meal for him to bring her up, but he never did. We talked about school and work, and I sat there bracing for the Cat Bomb to drop.
After dinner, he told me to do the dishes and that there would be no more disappearing for an entire day. I needed to be home and no more leaving five minutes after I got there, no exceptions.
Months later, when I decided to move in with my boyfriend, I started packing. My dad looked at me and said the cat was staying. Keep in mind, in all those months, we had never discussed Nova. She would sit between us on the couch or curl up in his lap, and neither of us said a word about it. And she was a perfect princess in his house, no supernovas, no wicked witch behavior. She finally turned into a sweet, loving cat that just wanted to be the best lap cat in the world.
I tried to argue that she’s my cat, as such, she’s coming with me, but Dad pointed out I was moving from a decent-sized house to a studio apartment, and as he put it, it wouldn’t be fair to take her from her castle to a rundown shack. Which, to be fair, a shack would have been an upgrade to the hovel I was moving to.
Nova was three when she moved in with my dad and lived there until she was seventeen. It wasn’t until after she passed that I learned what actually happened the day he called me home for dinner.
In my rush to get to class, I hadn’t closed my bedroom door all the way, and Nova escaped. My dad got up for coffee after I’d already left, and Nova rubbed against his leg for attention. He bent down, petted her, and headed to work. Until halfway there, he remembered we didn’t have a cat. He did a U-turn and drove back home to make sure he hadn’t dreamed the whole thing.
When he walked in, Nova was stretched out in a sunbeam in the family room like she’d lived there her whole life. He went into my room, found all the evidence, and got more and more upset, which is when he called me.
His plan was to yell at me, ground me (I was nineteen, so I’m not sure he thought that through), and generally unleash all the parental fury that comes with a kid breaking the rules. He didn’t go to work that day. While he was figuring out how to punish me, he sat on the couch, and Nova hopped into his lap, spun around three times, and fell asleep doing air biscuits while purring.
Thankfully, the magic spell she cast on him never wore off. Twenty-five years later, my dad has five cats, plus several others over the years that he rescued, those who were too sick to save but were able to spend their last months or years in comfort. I tell him Nova turned him into a cat whisperer, as every cat he’s had since I moved out has literally shown up on his doorstep asking to be rescued.
