Gerta Gonstern was thirsty.

“You need to decompress,” Isabella J. Malthus advised Gerta, who’d arrived at the bar lounge looking harried. Gerta’s social calendar was booked solid. A meeting of the Hot Old Toddies, then on to lunch with the ladies at the Cotillion Bar & Grill. Gerta spent the afternoon as a senior candystriper at the Crazed Obsidian Health Care Center and Organic Vegetable Garden where she handfed baby goats. After a quick hour leading bikram yoga, she’d met longtime buddy Isabella J. Malthus at the Carter House Bar Lounge in Eureka. The place had gone downhill since their last meeting there. Jonesy the manager had been rehired after a two-year hiatus working for a booze company, fathering a child and trying to raise it from a distance when his partner moved back to Susanville. There was no work in Susanville. To make a living income, Jonesy would have to work at the prison there. Jonesy did not see himself ever working at the prison in Susanville. Isabella J. Malthus felt it tragic that a man should father a child and not devote needed resources to see that it, the child, was properly raised.

Isabella J. Malthus tsk’d a quick tsk and picked up a full Emerald Triangle IPA. “You need to slow down. Take heed. Follow my example. I am decompressing.”

Isabella J. Malthus sniffed and closed her eyes. Her phone glurbled but she ignored it. She was in the moment.

When Isabella J. Malthus sniffed, Gerta snuffed. Gerta enjoyed her full days. The key to getting old, she told her seven great-grandchildren, is to wake up in the morning with something to do.

Hence the hot morning toddies, goat-feeding and yoga.

Gerta’s face, though, was scrunched. Her head throbbed and facial muscles were strained from smiling all day. She felt blurry and, well, her brain wasn’t functioning at 100 percent. Isabella J. Malthus could see this. They’d known each other since childhood. They’d met at the orthodontist, getting braces on the same day. They exchanged phone number that afternoon and that night was their first phone call, lisping about the pain and lamenting the fact that they’d have to go to school the next day and face a cruel judgmental gaggle of teen girls.

Isabella J. Malthus had never married. She was a one-woman population control effort.

Gerta had found a decent enough guy, back when she was studying economics in college. By the time she had a teaching license, she’d married him, Morgan Geary Gonstern the Third, who turned out to be heir to what was, well, a butt-load of money. They had two children, one for each gender. After the kids were grown, Gerta taught yoga and volunteered in an after-school program. She took a stint as director of goat breeding at Crazed Obsidian Health Care Center and Organic Vegetable Garden. She didn’t need the money. She liked goats. Their children married and grandchildren arrived.Morgan Geary Gonstern the Third passed away from gastrointestinitus. Kinda sad he never got to meet the great grandchildren. Life was full.

Gerta didn’t really know how Isabella J. Malthus had managed her solitary lifestyle, how she’d paid her bills, why she hadn’t nabbed a mate. Isabella J. Malthus was lovely, if a bit narrow and fierce, the living image of moral restraint. Well-dressed with few bad habits. Like the drinking.

“You need to decompress. Let’s get a bottle of champagne!”

Gerta agreed to the champagne. She thought she’d drink a small glass and then call it quits for the night. Hot yoga wore her out, dehydrated her. She needed a tall glass of water.

Instead she hydrated with champagne. She had not eaten much that day and, well, Berta wasn’t a big drinker. The conversation loosened up. And really, after a couple glasses of champagne, Berta felt decompressed enough to ask questions.

How do you pay your bills, Isabella J. Malthus? Have you never loved a man?

Isabella J. Malthus laughed at her old friend Gerta’s questions. “Let me tell you a story, Gerta,” she said, “now that you’ve relaxed a little.”

Gerta leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes and decompressed, decompressed one last time before she lurched forward in her chair, clutching her rib cage.

It took so long for the ambulance to arrive. Isabella J. Malthus stroked her friend’s head. “There you go, there you go. You almost forgot that it’s not about anything, didn’t you? The story’s just a story, whether you’re busy or still, married or single or childless or a matriarch.”

Gerta’s memorial service was a full house, with the Gonstern children, their partners, grandchildren and their partners and seven great-grandchildren racing around like banshees. There were yoga partners, members of Gerta’s writing group and the staff of the Crazed Obsidian Health Care Center and Organic Vegetable Garden. Jonesy showed up from the Carter House, along with others from the wait staff who’d enjoyed knowing Gerta Gonstern. Isabella J. Malthus, for the smallest moment, felt jealous of all this affection, this highly developed sense of familial loss. Almost envious was Isabella J. Malthus. After, she poured herself a neat two ounces of Irish whiskey. Nah, she thought.

Given all the choices in the world, I’d still be me.