Lawyer for the Cat

 

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About the Author

Copyright Page

 

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In memory of Virginia Tavel

 

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Jaime Levine, Anne Brewer, and Jennifer Letwack, my editors, for their insight and enthusiasm.

I am indebted to my agent, Mary Evans, for her vision, wise counsel, and encouragement.

My friend Laura Waggoner Moore read an early draft and provided invaluable advice on pet trusts.

My sister, Salley McInerney, spent a week with me on Edisto as I envisioned this story and introduced me to Gretchen Smith, who graciously led us on a tour of Prospect Hill Plantation.

Thanks also to the Edisto Island Historic Preservation Society, for their good work; and to Cantey Wright and the late Nick Lindsay, whose books on Edisto reflect their deep affection for the place and the people.

My husband, Jerry Winakur, took time away from his own writing to help me with mine. His love keeps me going.

 

Let's Start with the Dog

In my twenty-five years as a lawyer I've tried hundreds of cases, represented the full spectrum of humanity: petty thieves from the projects, highborn heroin addicts, the sane and the insane, the abusers and the abused. Every case is a story, and the more preparation I do for a trial, the more complicated that story seems. If I'm not careful I get lost in the labyrinth of facts and law. So the night before a trial I draw a line down the middle of a legal pad. At the top of one column I write “Good,” and at the top of the other, “Bad.” This is what it's going to boil down to. In last week's divorce case, for example, the list started like this:

Good

Articulate client, will make good witness

Excellent homemaker, mother

Put husband through dental school

Client's husband admits he left because “she got fat”

Bad

Client responsible for large credit card debt

Addicted to Home Shopping Network

Had affair early in marriage with husband's best friend

Drinks too much

And so on. This is what's going to matter. This—after a couple of days of testimony, tears, truths and half-truths and downright lies, lawyers arguing over the rules of evidence, objections overruled and sustained, the judge yawning, the perspiration, the exhaustion—is the story that will matter.

If I were to perform such an analysis on myself, on the Case of My Life, it would look something like this:

Good

Honest

Built successful law practice from scratch

Healthy, not bad-looking

Attentive to aging mother

Generally optimistic

Independent

Bad

Workaholic

Blunt, bordering on obnoxious

Impervious to fashion

Resentful of aging mother

Hot-tempered

A failure at romance

That's what it boils down to: The Good and the Bad of Sarah Bright Baynard, Attorney at Law, AKA Sally, just turned fifty.

*   *   *

“I hate the sound of it,” I say.

“What are you talking about?” asks my best friend, Ellen. We're at Giminiano's, the new restaurant on King Street that's tucked behind a shoe store, down a narrow brick walkway. It's advertised as “lively and intimate,” which means—as we now understand—tiny, noisy, and crowded.

“Fifty. It sounds so heavy, like some giant sack of years I'll be lugging around for the rest of my life.”

“That doesn't sound like you,” she says.

“Maybe now that I'm fifty I'm not the same
me
anymore.”

“Wow,” Ellen says. “You definitely need a glass of wine, or two or three. Red or white?”

“Shouldn't we wait for the others?” Every year Ellen assembles the same group of girlfriends to celebrate my birthday. We were all roommates in law school, but she's the only one I've stayed close to. Ellen thinks she's doing me a favor by getting us together, as if this annual reunion will magically transport me back to my twenties, but it depresses me. This year I postponed it a couple of times with lame excuses, until I couldn't put it off any longer.

“Answer the question. Red or white?” Her voice has that prosecutorial determination she uses in the courtroom.

“Red, I guess.”

She scans the wine list, motions for the waiter. “We'd like a bottle of Chianti. The Banfi, please.” Ellen is one of those people who knows her wines. She's also a great tennis player and gardener, not to mention lawyer, wife, and mother. I'd hate her except for the fact that she's one of the very few people who knows me well and loves me anyway.

By the time the wine comes Valerie and Wendy have arrived. Valerie looks great, her thick red hair swept up and pinned loosely in one of those arrangements that looks artsy and casual but undoubtedly takes a lot of time. “Helen sends her regrets,” she says. “Last-minute babysitting for the grandchildren.”

“God,” says Wendy, “Can you believe we're old enough to have grandchildren?” There's a moment of discomfort, a pang of silence in which I wonder if they're all thinking the same thing:
Yes, we're all old enough, but one of us won't ever have grandchildren.

Ellen, bless her heart, recovers quickly, lifts her glass toward me: “To Sally, who gets better every year!” I lift mine, take a swallow big enough, I hope, to bring me back to myself, whoever that is.

“Yeah,” says Wendy, “I heard things are getting better for you in the love department!” She leans across the table and lowers her voice. It's only then that I notice the little pucker-lines around her mouth; otherwise she could pass for thirty-five. “He's a vet, right?”

“Just a good friend at this point,” I say.

“She's being coy, if it's possible for Sally to be coy!” Ellen says. She pours the rest of the bottle into my glass, orders another. “Maybe, since he's a vet,” she says, “he could help you with the cat case.”

“Katz?”
Valerie says, her eyes widening. “Don't tell me the Katzes are divorcing!”

“‘Cat,' as in feline,” I say. “But it's not official yet.”

“She did such a good job on the dog case, the probate judge wants her to represent a cat,” explains Ellen, as if I'm not there. And then, because the chatter around us makes it hard to hear, she continues in her loud, lawyer-in-the-courtroom voice: “You know about her thing with the dog, right?” Of course it is at this very moment that the waiter reappears, and although he can't miss hearing “her thing with the dog” he pretends, as he takes our orders, that he hasn't. We smother our laughter until he leaves, then explode. Everyone in the room turns around to look.

“Okay,” says Valerie, after we've recovered our respectability, “I want the whole story.”

“Sorry,” I say. “Client confidentiality.”

“Bullshit,” says Ellen. “Your client was a dog. A dog doesn't have any secrets.”

“So, tell all,” insists Valerie.

When I'm finished she says, “So, let me get this straight: Joe Baynard, judge of the Charleston Family Court, who happens to be your ex-husband, appoints you to represent a schnauzer in a divorce case, not because the dog really needs a lawyer but because he—Joe—is still in love with you?”

“Well, to be fair to him,” I said, “it was the case from hell, and poor Sherman—”

“Sherman?”

“The dog. Sherman was right in the middle of it. Like a kid in the middle of a custody case.”

“So,” says Wendy, “Joe couldn't find someone else? He has to choose his ex-wife to represent the dog?”

“He's appointed me in lots of custody cases—to represent the kids,” I say. “I think he was hoping I'd help him settle it.”

“Maybe,” says Ellen, “but he's also obsessed with you.”

“Joe's remarried, isn't he?” asks Valerie.

“I heard they were separated,” says Wendy.

“They separated for a while, but they're back together now,” I say.

“I always liked Joe,” says Wendy. “I never did really understand why you … Never mind, this is your birthday dinner!”

“So, what happened … with”—Valerie interrupts herself while the waiter serves our appetizers—“with the case, I mean?”

“The couple reconciled and Sherman's back home with them.”

“She's leaving out the best part,” says Ellen. “The dog's vet wants to marry her.”

Valerie's eyebrows rise. “You're getting
married
?
”

“Not anytime soon,” I say.

“I don't know what you're waiting for,” says Ellen. “He's perfect for you.”

And there's a voice in my head—a voice that sounds strangely like my own. This voice, this me, is agreeing with Ellen. This me is still Sally Baynard, lawyer extraordinaire, but she's also a woman with a love life, one who doesn't live with her demented mother. She trusts her own instincts, isn't afraid of making another mistake.

This me might have another glass of wine, might even move in with the vet.

*   *   *

By the time I get back to the condo, after dinner and dessert and coffee, I'm my old self again, feeling the full load of being Sarah Bright Baynard for half a century. The short drive across town was oddly comforting—Charleston with its antebellum buildings glowing under streetlamps, cobblestone streets with their bumpy history, the city where I'm still, by contrast, young—but when I enter the renovated lobby of my building (faux marble floor, trendy red leather furniture) I'm struck by its gleaming newness. The members of the home owners' board are all in their seventies and eighties. Maybe this expensive facelift is a defense against their own deterioration. This year there are fresh Christmas decorations—real pine garlands with white bows over the doors, a gigantic spruce tree in one corner, glittering with tiny white lights—to replace the fake wreaths and faded red ribbons of years past.

I share the elevator with a woman who lives on my floor, whose name I don't remember, and her poodle, whose name I
do
remember. “Hello, Curly,” I say, and the dog wags her tail.