The Heron's Witness

Lara stood at the bar of the Blue Heron with her second gin and tonic getting warm in her hand, and she was doing the thing she hated doing, which was comparing herself to every woman under thirty in the room.

It had started an hour ago with a comment that probably meant nothing. Her coworker Rekha, who was twenty-six and built like a yoga instructor, had looked at Lara's outfit and said, "Oh, I love that you don't even try anymore." She had meant it as a compliment. Lara was pretty sure she had meant it as a compliment. But it had lodged in her brain like a splinter and now here she was, thirty-four years old, standing in a room full of younger women in tight dresses, tugging at the hem of her blue blouse and thinking frumpy, frumpy, frumpy.

The gin and tonic wasn't helping. Or it was helping, but not in the direction she needed.

She caught her reflection in the mirror behind the bar. Her hair needed washing. Her shoes were the comfortable ones. There was a small stain on the blouse from the sliders Gerald had brought her earlier.

"Relax," Gerald said, appearing at her elbow. He was thirty-seven, gray coming in at his temples in a way that made Lara want to throw something at the unfairness of the universe, and he kissed her cheek before she could say anything mean about herself out loud. "You look great. Stop doing the thing!"

"What thing?"

"The mirror thing. The hem thing." He took a sip of her drink without asking, which she let him do because they'd been married eight years and he had earned drink-sipping rights. "Gino would be hurt if he knew you were sad at his party."

"I'm not sad. I'm just..." She waved a hand at the room.

Gerald followed her hand and then looked back at her with that face he made, the one that said he understood exactly and wasn't going to make a speech about it. "Go sit down. I have to go do the toast thing before he gets weepy again."

Gino had already gotten weepy twice. He was fifty-eight and retiring after fifteen years of managing the club, and the party had that specific temperature of a room full of people who liked each other but knew an era was ending. Gerald climbed the little stage with his drumsticks still in his back pocket and leaned into the microphone.

"Gino, you old bastard," Gerald said, and the room hollered. "Fifteen years you put up with my drum solos. Fifteen years. Nobody else would have."

"Nobody else SHOULD have!" Gino yelled back from his table, wiping his eyes with a napkin, and everybody laughed.

Lara found a stool at the end of the bar and watched her husband do his bit. He was funny, Gerald. He didn't get to be funny enough, she thought. Most nights he was behind the kit at some gig, concentrating, and here he was loose and bright under the stage lights with his arm slung around Gino's shoulders, and she felt that warm married feeling, the good one, mixed in with the sad one.

That was when the door banged open and Shay came in like weather.

"Oh my GOD, I am so sorry," she was saying before she was fully through the door, dragging a duffel bag that still had her flight instructor patches on it. "The flight got cancelled. The whole evening was shot. I've been in a rental car for two hours and I need a drink the size of my head."

"Shay!" Lara was off the stool before she decided to be. Seven years of friendship made her legs do that.

Shay was thirty-five, a year older than Lara, and she looked like what she was, a woman who spent her days in small cockpits shouting encouragement at terrified student pilots. Flight jacket, boots, hair in a practical knot. She dropped the duffel in the middle of the floor like it owed her money and hugged Lara hard enough to creak a rib.

"Oh, it's good to see you," Shay said into her shoulder. "It's been what, three months? Four?"

"Three. Since Vera's birthday."

"Three months. Criminal." Shay held her at arm's length and looked her over. "You look amazing."

"I look like a tired museum docent."

"You look amazing and you know I don't lie about airplanes or outfits." Shay turned to flag down the bartender. "Whatever she's having, and make it double. I've earned it. I had a student today who tried to land with the wheels up."

"No!"

"Yes. Full flaps, coming in pretty as anything, and I look over and the gear light is on. ON. That means UP, Bo, we have discussed this."

"Bo again? I thought Bo was the one who..."

"He's the one who radioed the tower to ask what the little numbers on the runway meant. Same Bo. He passed his check ride anyway. I don't know how. I think the examiner felt sorry for me." Shay took her drink and knocked back half of it in one go. "God. Okay. Tell me everything. How's Gerald? How's work? You look like you're having a thought."

"I'm always having a thought."

"No, a bad one. I know that face. That's the face from the thing with the gallery board."

"It's nothing. Rekha at work said something dumb and I've been marinating in it."

Shay looked at her the way she looked at weather reports, like she was going to get to the truth of it eventually but there was no rush. "Rekha the one with the..."

"The one who's twenty-six and does Pilates at five in the morning, yes."

"Ah." Shay patted Lara's arm. "Well, she can have five in the morning. Some of us have sense."

On stage, Gerald finished his toast and the room drank. Gino gave a little speech that got weepy again around the halfway mark. Then Gerald leaned back into the microphone and announced, "Okay, folks, last call's happening in the green room. Gino's buying. If the heron can stand it, so can we."

There was a cheer and a general migration toward the back of the club. The green room was the Green Room, capital G, the club's little back lounge with the vintage posters and the famous taxidermied heron mounted over the fireplace, its glass eye staring out at decades of musicians. Gino loved that bird more than most humans, people said.

Lara and Shay followed the crowd, talking the whole way.

"So Bo passes his check ride," Shay was saying, "and my OTHER student, Brooke, this sweet terrified woman, forty-one years old, decided to learn to fly because of a midlife crisis, she soloed last week."

"Shut up, that's wonderful."

"First solo. She cried. I cried. The tower guys got on the radio and said congrats, which they're not supposed to do, so then the whole pattern was crying. It was a mess. Best day I've had in a year." Shay looked around the green room, at the posters and the heron. "God, I forget how much I like this place. Remember the night we snuck back here and Gerald let us mess with the drum kit?"

"I remember you breaking a cymbal."

"I remember Gerald covering for me. That man is a saint." Shay dropped into the old leather couch and patted the cushion next to her. "Sit. Tell me about the Rekha thing for real, because I can hear it brewing in you and I've got all night and nowhere to fly."

The green room was filling up. Somebody put coins in the jukebox. The heron watched with its glass eye from over the fireplace, the way it had watched a thousand last calls, and Lara sat down next to her best friend and thought that maybe the night was not shot after all.

Lara stayed on the couch longer than she meant to. The party moved around her, and she sat there with her second gin and tonic going warm, and Shay talked, and it was good, it was easy, the way it had always been between them since the night they met seven years ago.

At some point Lara got up to look at the heron. She had walked past that bird a hundred times and never really touched it. She reached up and put her fingers on the wing, right where the feathers met the mount, and it was cool and stiff and perfectly still. Glass eye. Waxed feathers. A bird that had stopped mid-stride fifty years ago and never finished the step.

"It's kind of beautiful, isn't it," Shay said, right at her shoulder. "In a creepy way."

"It's like it's waiting for something."

"Everything in this room is waiting for something." Shay looked at her then, not the bird. "That dress is doing a lot of work tonight, by the way. The blue one. It suits you."

"It's a blouse, and it has slider grease on it."

"Then it suits you even more." Shay grinned. "Gerald's a pig with the sliders."

Gerald came over with the whiskey bottle Gino had put in his hands and three glasses. "Gino says nobody leaves until the good stuff's gone," he said, pouring. "His words. He cried again during