Free Lawyer for the Cat by Lee Robinson Page B

“Thanks for all the information, Gail—and the house tour. I’ll be in touch.”
    â€œNo problem,” she says. “You take care of my precious Beatrice, okay?”
    *   *   *
    By the time I get back to my condo, I’ve come to a few conclusions:
    â€”I don’t drive well with a complaining cat in the car. (How did I go ten miles out of my way before I realized I’d made a wrong turn?)
    â€”I don’t trust Randall.
    â€”Beatrice trusts Gail.
    It’s clear that Mrs. Mackay believed Gail would be an adequate caretaker for the cat. Despite my reservations about Randall, what would be so wrong with his proposal: Beatrice goes to live with Gail, who’ll get $50,000 a year to take care of her. Randall gets the plantation free and clear and agrees not to challenge the trust. And—although I hate to admit I’m even taking this into consideration—I can rid myself of this cat.

 
    Encumbrances
    After I divorced Joe, I tried to reinvent myself. I’d failed at being a well-adjusted wife to a nicer-than-average husband; failed to appreciate what everyone else thought was my amazing good luck at being taken in by one of Charleston’s most respected law firms—his family’s; and failed at even that most basic biological function, baby-making. I gave up trying to explain to anyone but my best friend Ellen why I couldn’t stay at the firm or why I’d left Joe, and no one but Ellen and Joe knew about the miscarriage. Most of my colleagues—though of course no one said this to my face—assumed there must be something really wrong with me, some fundamental defect of personality, an if not fatal at least very unfortunate character flaw.
    I couldn’t disagree with them. I never blamed Joe. “He’s a wonderful guy,” I’d say if pressed for an explanation, “we just weren’t a good fit.” And I never said anything negative about his family firm. After all, his father and his uncles had tried to accommodate me—I, the first female in the firm’s 130-year history. “They couldn’t have been nicer,” I’d say, “but I missed my public interest work.”
    I now realize that my desire to reinvent myself arose out of distorted logic: If I was defective, I thought, I might as well be defective in an interesting way. If I had a character flaw, or more than one, I might as well be a character. I cut my hair very short, limited my wardrobe to black and neutral colors, eschewed makeup, even lipstick. I furnished my new apartment in minimalist style, with a white sofa, a black chair, a glass-topped dining table, and a bed. All my old furniture, the frayed but comfortable stuff, I put in storage. (I guess there was some frayed, comfortable part of me that needed to hang on to it.) I bought some cheap Rothko reproductions—his “black and gray” phase—and hung them on the walls. On the nights I didn’t eat at home I sat by myself in a corner booth at Greens and Grains, an earnest vegan restaurant that soon went out of business. I bought expensive running shoes, started jogging and lost ten pounds, though I hadn’t been overweight to begin with.
    This was my misguided attempt at self-purification, the purging of everything Sally. “You’re being too hard on yourself,” said Ellen. “And—I hate to say this, but who the hell else is going to—that haircut is not at all flattering. Your ears are not your best feature.”
    â€œI don’t have time for hair,” I said. True, I’d been spending long hours trying to stay on top of my new caseload at the public defender’s office, the mostly hopeless cases of the mostly guilty. But Ellen worked as hard as I did as an assistant solicitor, prosecuting child abusers and rapists, and somehow she managed to find time for regular appointments at the salon, not to mention a husband, a