Lawyer for the Cat (8 page)

“No problem,” Gail says to Randall. “You all just take your time. Beatrice and I, we'll be fine.”

I follow Randall up the staircase. “Look around,” Randall says when we reach the living room. “You think this was a woman in her right mind? A fortune in stocks and bonds and she lived like this? Jesus.” He shoves a pile of books off one of the sofas, lets them fall to the floor. “I'll get straight to the point. You don't need to take notes—it's not complicated.” The sofa gives a little under his weight. “My mother was always a little nutty. Lived in her own world, with all these books, played like she was a real historian, writing articles mostly nobody published unless she supported the magazine. Wasn't much of a wife, couldn't hide her relief when my daddy died, though God knows he was good to her, gave her everything she wanted.”

“Mr. Mackay,” I say, “My role in this case is to—”

“I know what your role is. You really let old Judge Clarkson pass the buck to you, didn't you?”

“He's retiring soon, and apparently he's not in good health.”

“He didn't want to deal with the cat,” Randall Mackay says. “And frankly I can't understand why a successful law-yer like you would want to waste your time.… Anyway, as I was saying, my mother was always crazy, but in the last five years or so, that brain of hers went haywire. Burney Haynes—he was her law-yer—should have known that. I guess she must have paid him a bundle, so he didn't want to cross her.”

“Are you alleging that your mother lacked the capacity to understand what she was doing?”

“Damn right I am.”

“But apparently you believed she was capable of living out here all by herself?”

“We hired some people to stay with her. She fired them all. I should have had her declared incompetent, put her in a home.”

“But you didn't.”

“No, I just couldn't do it to her. She loved this place.” His voice softens. “I guess you know something about how hard it is, when they get demented.”

“What?”

“Your mother.”

My whole body tenses. “How do you know about my mother?”

“Your ex—we hunt together sometimes.”

“You know Joe?”

“Friend of a friend,” he says. Again the grin, the arched eyebrows. “No need to get all huffy. I'm just pointing out that we have something in common. When it's your own mother, you don't think straight. But never mind all that, I have to protect myself now.”

“Then you should hire a lawyer.”

“I'd like to avoid that.” he says.

“But I can't advise you, Mr. Mackay.”

“I'm going to cut to the chase. If I contest this trust, we're going to use up a whole bunch of time and a whole bundle of money in unnecessary litigation. And at the end of all that, there'll be some kind of settlement, so why not just get right down to it? I'm willing to work a deal.”

“My job is to choose the best caregiver for the cat. I'm not really concerned with—”

“But if I succeed in setting the trust aside,” he says, arching his right eyebrow, “all this nonsense about the cat goes out the window.”

“Again, Mr. Mackay, I can't advise you.”

“But you can hear me out. The deal I propose is this: Let Gail keep the cat. She's a good kid, and her boyfriend's okay, too. Pay her that ridiculous salary, since that's what my mother wanted, but they don't need to live here in this house. Hell, they don't even want to. And in exchange I won't raise any objection to the trust. Everybody's happy.”

“So
you
want to live here?”

“I'll get the property after the cat dies anyway.”

“I don't think I have the authority to make a deal like that, even if I thought it was advisable,” I explain. “My role as trust enforcer is to—”

“Oh, for God's sake, Judge Clarkson doesn't give a damn who gets the cat or where the cat lives. If he did, he'd be handling this himself. He just wants to wash his hands of the whole thing, because he knows how crazy my mother is … was.”

“I need to get back to Charleston, but I'll think about what you said.”

“I trust you will … no pun intended.”

“Just one question: What if I continue with my investigation, and I determine that one of the others—the librarian, or the nephew in New York—would be willing to move here, and would make the best caregiver for Beatrice?”

“Then the deal is off. Look.” He's turning red, and though it's cold in the room, his forehead is damp with perspiration. “My mother thought Gail would take good care of the cat, otherwise she wouldn't be on the list. And Gail's willing to take the cat. Why make it more complicated? Or is it that you just want to rack up a bunch of hours on my mother's dime?”

“If you're going to challenge the trust, you'll need to hire a lawyer.”

“I'll do whatever I have to do. This house isn't just a piece of real estate to me,” he says. “My great-great-great-great-great grandfather built it. That's six generations. It's in my blood. Look, I like cats, but I'm not going to let some damn
animal
keep me from getting what's mine. Now,” he says, standing up, “I don't want to take up any more of your time. You think it over, what I've said.”

“I will, but I want to reiterate—”

“You law-yers like fancy words, don't you? You usually get, what, fifty dollars a word? So maybe for the fancy ones, you get a hundred, right?”

Just before he drives off he says, “Don't let anything happen to that cat, you hear?” His truck, a big shiny black one, roars away.

*   *   *

Beatrice doesn't want to part with Gail, or maybe she doesn't want to leave her warm spot by the fire. She complains mightily about getting back in her carrier. “Poor thing,” says Gail, “she just got back home and now you're going to … And she hates the car. You sure you don't want to leave her with me?”

“I wish I could.”

“Can't say as I understand all this legal stuff,” she says.

“I have to interview two other people. But it shouldn't take long.”

“I don't even know why she—Lila—even named them. That librarian lady—”

“Katherine Harleston?”

“Yeah, her. She's nice enough, but her husband's kind of, you know, a snobby-type Charleston person. I can't see him moving out here. And the nephew, he lives in New York. Only been down once to see her, since I started working out here, anyway.”

“How long is that?”

“About five years. He's, you know…”

“No, tell me.”

“I guess you'll see for yourself. Anyway, I just can't see him wanting to live down here.”

“By the way, how did Randall know I'd be here today?”

“I guess my boyfriend—my fiancé, I mean—might have told him. They're friends.”

“Where does Randall live?”

“Over on the front beach,” she says. “Lila bought the house for him a while back, before the property values went through the roof.”

“So he doesn't really need a place to live.”

“He's just got a sentimental connection to this house, I guess.”

“But if he and his mother didn't get along, I don't understand—”

“Randall's always been kind of a mystery,” she says with a shrug.

I look at my watch. “Thanks for all the information, Gail—and the house tour. I'll be in touch.”

“No 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:

—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?)

—I don't trust Randall.

—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.”

“I 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 baby, and a well-kept house.

“I don't want any encumbrances,” I said.

“Would a
rug
be too much of an encumbrance?” she asked, looking around my apartment living room. “Or maybe a coffee table?”

“I want to be really careful about my choices from now on,” I explained. “I don't want to blithely accumulate things. That's what happens to people—they start accumulating things and before they know it they're up to their ears in stuff they don't need.”

“Does ‘stuff' include relationships?” Ellen's good at cross-examination.

“We were talking about furniture.”

“I know, but don't you see what you're doing to yourself?”

“I'm trying to start over. A clean slate. Whatever I buy from now on will be the result of a deliberate and conscious choice—not just a bunch of stuff I've accumulated.”

She laughed. “Wow, you're in worse shape than I thought! You're twenty-six years old, honey, still young, that's true, but
way
past the clean-slate stage. You can't just wipe out your past and start over as if it never happened.”

She was right, of course. I needed a coffee table, preferably one I wouldn't mind putting my feet on—like the one in storage with the dents and scratches—for those nights I'd come home from court, beat. And I needed my old sofa back, with its paisley print that would graciously accommodate the drips from a coffee cup or the excess mustard from a hastily made sandwich. I needed my books and my cheap sagging bookcases and my stacks of old
New Yorker
s. The Rothko prints depressed me. I missed the Kandinsky reproduction with the red comet, though it was slightly faded, and even the lousy paintings I'd done in college when I imagined myself an artist.

Gradually all this stuff found its way back into my apartment and shared the space with my new purchases. It was clear to any observer that Sally-the-Decorator had a split personality, equal parts ascetic and eclectic. And now I seem to have accumulated, deliberately or not, a great deal more than mismatched furniture: I've got a boyfriend who wants to be a husband, an ex-husband I can't quite get out of my heart, and an aging mother with all her accoutrements. Plus a cat.

This evening when I get home, my mother is in the act of sorting out some stuff of her own. “She's been packing a suitcase,” says Delores. “Says she's going to ‘the plantation.' You think she means that place—Middleton?—where I took her a while back?”

“Could be, or maybe she heard me say something about going out to Edisto.”

“How was it? Nice house?”

“It's seen better days.”

“Like with a hundred slaves?”

“You know that's not what I mean.”

“I got some cousins on Edisto, live over there behind the AME church. Seems like the jungle to me, snakes and all that. And what's an old lady gonna do if she needs to get to the hospital? Takes an hour on those curvy roads, and you can't go too fast or you'll end up in the swamp. Anyway, she must have been plenty lonely.”