I’m Not Buying That Cat Sake Anymore

Saturday was Liza Bean Bitey’s birthday. My son spent much of Friday night abusing me for knowing such a thing – I should’ve never sent that card to her! – but how could I have not? She wrote it on the calendar!

So we set our differences aside, Liza Bean and I, and went out for sushi Saturday night. You know, you get a couple of glasses of sake in her, and that cat is hilarious!

Of course, there’s a fine line between enough sake and too much, but before the fist fight, we had a great time.

Wait – if you don’t have thumbs, is it still considered a “fist”?

We over-ordered, naturally. We both adore sushi, and it had been so long, with the scariness of the stock markets, the upcoming election in the U.S., etc., but how often does a kitty turn three?

Exactly.

What a great evening. By tacit agreement, no mention was made of the late-night calls from Kuala Lumpur or of the strange notebook (all in French, for some reason) I found hidden in the basement. If Liza is a spy or a smuggler of some sort, we both felt it prudent to pretend to forget, if only for the evening. Why ruin a good time?

Liza can’t hold her liquor, though. Oh, she thinks she can, but she started to slur her words half-way through the first bottle and in short order had her head in her paws, bemoaning the state of airline security.

“Take off your shoes,” she muttered. “Yeah, right.” She fixed her bright green eyes on me. “Do I look like I’m wearin’ shoes to you?”

She shook her head in disgust and the bell on her dress collar – the one with the pink faux-diamonds on it – jingled merrily.

It was at this time that the man at the next table determined that our conversation, such as it was, was his business.

“Hey,” he said to Liza Bean, leaning into the space between the tables. “If you don’t like it, why don’t you go back to where you came from?”

“What?” Liza said, focusing on him. “What did you just say?”

The man paused. Hadn’t the cat seemed to have an accent just moments ago? He decided to stand his ground.

“You heard me,” he said. “If you don’t like it, you should go back to where you came from.”

Liza sat up on her back legs, placing both paws on the table in front of her. The end of her tail twitched dangerously.

Uh-oh.

“Back to where I came from?” she purred. “You want me to go back to the farm, is that it? Maybe you” – and she jabbed a gracefully curved claw of her right paw toward the man – “want to go back to the farm, too?”

And with that, she leapt.

What ensued was a melee of yowling and shouting, the sound of breaking glass and overturned chairs as restaurant patrons scrambled out of the way of the belligerent man with a drunken, hissing cat clinging to his shoulders, clawing at his head.

I downed the last of the sake.

The police were called, of course; and I was forced to use the money I’d been saving for a flat-screen TV to bail her out. It was, after all, her birthday.

I can’t say that I blame her, but there’s another restaurant we can’t go to anymore.

Oh, well. Happy Birthday, Liza Bean Bitey.