Lawyer for the Cat by Lee Robinson

Charleston peninsula, despite instructions from the GPS lady (I finally had to disable the thing; she was driving me crazy). “The reason you get lost,” my ex, Joe, once said, “is that you always want to be somewhere else.” He was right: I was always imagining what it would be like to live somewhere else. Out West, I’d fantasize, or Alaska. “Or maybe you don’t really want to live someplace else,” he said, “you want to be someone else.” And he was right again. “Remember, even if you manage to get a change of venue, you’re still going to be the same old self!”
    Edisto is the kind of place, only an hour from Charleston, where I can imagine being someone else. The state highway winds through the country: woodland and marsh, farms, a few houses. Sometimes the road seems about to disappear into the marsh and I’m sure I’m really lost this time, but then I recognize the intersection. Beatrice, on the seat beside me, is lying down but alert, her head erect. When I make the left onto Highway 174 she lets out a long satisfied “meow,” as if to say: Yes, I really am going home!
    It’s been years since I’ve driven out here—the last time wasn’t long after my divorce from Joe, when Frank McGill took me to a New Year’s Day oyster roast. I’d accepted the invitation only because Frank, a fellow public defender, insisted he was just trying to cheer me up. I wasn’t ready to start dating again, and wondered if I’d ever be. But at just about this point in the drive—the bridge over the Edisto River—Frank confided that he’d had a crush on me since law school. Poor thing, his wooing skills were about on par with his courtroom skills, his argument pathetically sincere but hopeless. I did my best to state my case without crushing him: It has nothing to do with you, Frank, I’m just not ready.
    By the time we arrived at the party I was desperate to disappear into the crowd. I found a place at one of the tables with people I didn’t know. We stood around in the cold, stamping our feet and poking around in the pile of picked-over oysters and waiting for the next load to be shoveled onto the table. When they came I busied myself prying a big one open, finding the slit between the halves of the sharp shell, twisting the knife until the thing revealed its glistening meat. Shucking oysters is dangerous business even with gloves, and since I was a determined vegetarian, I was violating my principles. I remember the pain as the knife slipped, jabbing my wrist just above the glove.
    There was a lot of blood, and the hostess insisted I come inside the house to clean the wound, and then—I should have known he might be there—Joe was next to me, his arm touching my elbow. “Probably won’t need stitches,” he said, “but you ought to get some antibiotic on it.” There was a woman with him, one of those dainty creatures who manage to look petite even in multiple layers of heavy clothing. “Sally, you remember Susan Harmon?” I nodded dumbly, closed the bathroom door, and cried while I let the hot water run over the cut. I convinced Frank to take me home early. “I have a terrible headache,” I said.
    I did have a headache, but it wasn’t from the pain of the wound. I’d been undone by seeing Joe with another woman. It was totally foreseeable, of course. He was young, good-looking, affable, an associate in his family’s venerable Charleston firm. He was still living in our apartment, but would soon, with his parents’ help, buy a place of his own a couple of blocks away from their house on Church Street. As far as they were concerned he’d made only one mistake in his life, and that was to marry me, that strange ungainly girl from upstate, who was definitely not, as they would say, “our kind of people.” She was smart, yes, but why on earth did she want