The Dress at the Car Wash

Forty-two hit me harder than I expected.

Not the birthday itself. Birthdays are fine. Cake, candles, the whole bit. It was the months after, when Dennis moved out with his record collection and his stupid espresso machine, and I stood in our apartment, which was suddenly my apartment, and realized I couldn't remember the last time a stranger had looked at me.

Not looked through me. At me.

There's a specific kind of invisibility that happens to women somewhere in their forties. Nobody warns you about it. You're at the pharmacy counter, counting out pills, being competent, being useful, and the world just sort of slides its gaze off you like you're a shelf. A fixture. Part of the wallpaper with a license to dispense lisinopril.

Dennis left in March. He didn't leave me for anyone younger, which everyone kept telling me like it was a comfort. He left me for himself, he said. For his journey. He's forty-five and he's on a journey, and I'm forty-two and I'm counting out lisinopril, and some days that math feels like the whole story of my life.

So anyway. Saturday. There was a record store closing sale at the edge of the strip mall on Colfax, and I went, because apparently when your life empties out you start buying vinyl. Grief logic. I don't question it anymore.

The store was called Spin Again, and it was dying honestly, everything marked down forty percent and the owner crying a little near the register. I dug through the jazz bin for an hour. Found a Coltrane I already owned. Bought it anyway.

And that's when the bird showed up.

* * *

I want to be careful here, because what happened next sounds like I made it up, and I swear on my pharmacist's license that I didn't.

A green parrot came flapping out of the cafe next door. The Sparrow, it's called. Car wash in front, cafe in back, which is a business model I have questions about. The bird sailed through the open door of the record store like it owned the place, did one lap over the reggae section, and landed on my shoulder.

Not near my shoulder. On it. Claws and everything.

"Um," I said.

The bird said nothing. It just settled in, warm and heavier than you'd think, and started preening my hair like we'd arranged this in advance.

"Hey, uh, miss?" The store owner came around the counter, hands up. "Don't move. That thing bites."

"Great," I said. "Wonderful."

"You're doing great, actually. Birds like you. You must be a bird person."

"I'm a pill person. I count pills for a living."

The bird dug in a little tighter. Its claws were doing a thing to my new blouse that I decided not to think about. I stood there, forty-two years old, one Coltrane record under my arm, a parrot on my shoulder like some kind of discount pirate, and a small crowd gathering to film me, presumably, for the internet.

"Does anybody here know this bird?" I asked.

Silence. Great crowd. Very helpful.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. Bird. We're gonna walk out of here together like this is normal, and you're not going to poop on me. Are we clear? Blink twice."

The bird did not blink twice. It did, however, shift its weight, which I chose to interpret as agreement.

So I walked out of Spin Again with my record and my new shoulder accessory, and crossed the little strip of parking lot toward the cafe, past the car wash tunnel where a minivan was getting beaten with soft blue towels. The whole way, the parrot chattered in my ear. Actual words, some of them. One of them was "oh no," repeated with real conviction, which did a lot for my confidence.

"It's fine," I told it. "Everything's fine. I'm sure your owner is a normal person and not a weirdo."

The cafe door was propped open with a chair. I went in.

* * *

And there he was.

I knew him before I knew him. You know what I mean? The shape of him came first, the shoulders, the way he stood with his weight on one hip, and then my brain caught up and did the math and went, oh no. Oh no, no, no.

Preston. Preston Hale, from grad school. Nineteen years since I'd seen him and there he was behind a cafe counter, wiping his hands on a rag, looking at me like I was the answer to a question he'd been asking.

"Hey," he said. "That's Zelda. She got out again. Sorry about your shoulder."

"She's fine. She's very..." I looked at the parrot. "Vocal."

"Yeah, she's a rescue. Previous owner taught her to say 'oh no' and nothing else useful." He leaned on the counter, grinning. "You want a coffee? On the house. You just performed a bird extraction, that's a five-dollar value at least."

And this is what matters. Here's the whole stupid thing.

He didn't know who I was.

I could see it. The grin was friendly but it was stranger-friendly. Flirty-friendly. The kind of grin a man gives a woman he doesn't have history with, and some ancient dumb starving part of me sat up and went, oh, he's giving you that look, he's actually looking at you.

"Sure," I heard myself say. "Coffee. Thanks."

"Coming right up." He turned to the machine, talking over his shoulder. "You're not from around here, huh? I'd remember. Woman walks into my cafe with a parrot on her shoulder, that's a memorable Tuesday."

It was Saturday. I didn't correct him.

"I'm just visiting the record store," I said. "Before it dies."

"Sad, right? Dave's been there twenty years. He says vinyl is dead and so is he." Preston set a mug down in front of me. "So what do you do? Let me guess. You work with animals. Vet tech? You've got the calm thing going. Zelda doesn't sit on just anybody."

"I count pills," I said, which was evasive, which was a skill I apparently still had.

"Pharmacist?"

"Close enough."

Zelda climbed from my shoulder to the counter and then to Preston's arm, and he handled her like she was made of tissue paper, and something about watching his hands did an unwelcome thing to my chest. Those hands. I remembered those hands. Nineteen years ago, in a drafty apartment near campus, when I was twenty-three and he was twenty-five and we were both nobody, before I took the job in the city and he stayed here and we agreed, like adults, that long distance was for people with more faith than us.

"You have a good face," he said, out of nowhere, and then immediately looked mortified. "Sorry. That was weird. I mean, you have a kind face. Resting-kind-face. It's a compliment, I swear, I just botched the delivery."

"Thank you," I said. "I think."

"I'm Preston. Owner of the bird, the cafe, and, uh." He gestured vaguely toward a door behind the counter, the one that led back to his studio. "The bird museum. Sort of. It's a taxidermy studio. It sounds creepier than it is."

"A taxidermist who runs a car wash cafe," I said.

"My ex-wife called it a cry for help. I call it diversified revenue."

And I laughed. Really laughed, for the first time in months, and Zelda screamed "oh no" in support, and Preston pointed at her and said, "see, even she's worried about my business model," and for about four seconds I forgot to be careful.

Then I remembered. Remembered the mirror that morning, the lines around my eyes I keep telling myself are character, the way I'd changed my blouse twice before leaving the house because the first one looked like I was trying. Remembered that the last man who looked at me like this had been looking at a version of me that had expired, and Dennis had still managed to find the exit.

Preston was looking at me like I was someone new. Someone young and calm and interesting, someone who was good with birds and didn't count pills for a living and definitely wasn't the girl he used to make bad coffee for at two in the morning while we pretended that was a date.

And I let him. God help me, I sat there and let him, because it had been so long since anyone looked at me at all.

"So," Preston said, wiping down the counter, casual as anything. "You busy later? Because I make a mean quiche and Zelda could use more time with her new best friend."

The bird said, "oh no!"

"Yeah," I said. "No, I mean, yes. Yes, I'm free. Not busy. Not busy at all."

He disappeared through the door and came back with a quiche that had clearly been made by a man who owned exactly one pan. It was fine. It was more than fine, actually, and I hated how much I enjoyed sitting at a counter eating quiche with a parrot staring at me like I owed her money.

"So what brings you to my little empire?" Preston asked, refilling my coffee. "Besides the bird. The bird's an ambassador."

"Closing sale at Spin Again," I said. "Forty percent off everything."

"You bought anything?"

"A Coltrane record. That I already own."

Preston laughed. "A woman with a system. Okay. I respect it."

The quiche ended too fast. I was aware of the clock, of the afternoon light coming through the big glass windows and the cars gliding through the wash with that dreamy muffled look, and of the fact that I had nowhere else to be, which was itself a small sad fact I chose not to examine.

"You want to see the studio?" he asked. "Fair warning, there are dead birds in there. They're very still, though."

"Yeah," I said. "Sure."

The door opened on a room that smelled like cedar and coffee grounds, and shelves lined every wall, and on those shelves sat maybe sixty birds. Owls. A stack of sparrows. One enormous heron frozen mid-step, forever about to commit to something.

"They're gorgeous," I said, and meant it.

"Thanks. Ex-wife hated them. Said they judged her." He walked ahead of me, talking over his shoulder. "I got into it in school. Dropped out of a bio program, apprenticed with a guy in Lakewood, and now here I am. Dead birds and quiche."

And then I saw it, and I stopped walking.

A mannequin stood against the far wall, near the window, and it was wearing a dress. Rose colored. Knee length, fitted at the waist, with little capped sleeves. It hung there between a shelf of finches and a jar of something amber and terrible, and it was the single most out of place object I had ever seen in my life.

"Is that..."

Preston followed my eyes. His whole body changed. I watched a man in real time decide whether to lie and then decide, visibly, that he was too tired for it.

"Yeah," he said. "That's mine."

I looked at him. He was forty-four now, and it showed in a good way, gray coming in at his temples, forearms tattooed with what I swear were little songbirds. He was rubbing his jaw, waiting for me to say something.

"You wear it?" I asked.

"Sometimes. When I'm working alone at night." He said it plain. "It's dumb. Dave at