Page 95 of Angel of Thursdays

A delivery truck reversed below the window, the beep at two-second intervals. Cassiel murmured an “Excuse me,” and moved toward the wall with the photographs, finding the pictures dated in the 80s.

Under 1985, there was a cluster of three photos from the same event. A banquet or gala, possibly Chinese New Year. The center photo showed a microphone stand and a tiny stage. Someone or most likely many someones had stood there and sung, and the audience had kept eating. If the story May wanted was true, then perhaps a voice had crossed the room and reverberated against everything within it and a part of it had remained, kept within the memory of a woman now reading a newspaper in a folding chair.

His hand went to his ring finger, and then to the strap of his bag. He turned back to where May and the woman were talking.

“Her English name,” he said. “What was it.”

May actually looked at him. Mrs. Au Yeung turned as well.

“The record says Wong Suet Ying,” Cassiel said, speaking to May because May would translate. “But she came to Oakland having married a Shum. Even if she didn’t change her last name⁠—”

He stopped.

May turned back to Mrs. Au Yeung. His Mandarin was slower now. He looked down at his phone, picked it back up, looking through what Ben had sent him. “Elizabeth,” he said, like he wasn’t sure. Then, more sure, “Elizabeth.”

“Ah!” the woman exclaimed. She gestured at the phone and said something. Then in English: “Show me again.”

May swiped again. The woman peered with her magnifying glass with more scrutiny.

“Betty,” she declared, and stood up, walking over to Cassiel, to the photographs. She found the same photo of the banquet. Her finger landed on a woman at a table near the stage—dark hair straight and long, different from the ’72 photo, older, sitting beside a man wearing a pair of thick glasses.

“Betty and Mark.” Mrs. Au Yeung craned her neck up and nodded at Cassiel, tapping the photograph. “She sing, he always listen.”

May came over to look.

“Betty and Mark, Mark and Betty. Shum?” He took photos of the photos, then remembered to ask if it was okay to do so. The woman laughed.

They returned to the table and the conversation carried on. Cassiel stood, having offered precisely what he could, and started counting. The minutes (ten), the times Mrs. Au Yeung laughed (three), the times May remembered there was someone else there and looked at him (two).

Most of it, Cassiel had to assume, was fluff. May translated one sentence out of every four. The woman drank her tea at her own pace and talked at her own pace while the phone recorded. May listened, betrayed only by the shaking of his knee.

Betty Wong sang from time to time. She had taught piano on Saturdays out of a church that was no longer a church. Cassiel caught the word ‘vape.’ Mrs. Au Yeung’s own daughter had taken lessons for three years until it was clear that her daughter had no patience or talent. Then something else.

“Strict with the fingers,” May said, though it sounded more like he was talking to himself. He went quiet after that, his head swiveling back to the photographs on the wall.

One man had brought a portable recorder to the banquet from the pictures. The woman was sure of that. She was less sure that he had recorded Betty.

Cassiel considered the technology. Cassette. Mono, almost certainly—a handheld unit with a built-in condenser mic that picked up everything within arm’s reach. With forty years of oxide degradation on the tape, the high frequencies would be the first to go. What may still survive on a cassette that old would likely be hisses and melody and the clinking of cutlery. A voice if they were lucky.

The man the recorder belonged to had died fifteen, twenty years ago. Mrs. Au Yeung knew his daughter lived in Sacramento, or used to. She didn’t have the number but had a friend in her dance class who might.

They had two names and possibly a city. Not today.

May hadn’t brought his notebooks. He tapped the information into his phone instead. Cassiel would ask for a copy of the voice memo recording and transfer the relevant details to the Midori later, he decided. Properly.

On the way out, May shook Mrs. Au Yeung’s hand with both of his. She patted his forearm and said something that made him laugh and Cassiel looked at his mouth, his teeth. Cassiel nodded at the woman from the doorway and turned, already halfway down the steps before May left the room.

They walked back toward the station through Chinatown the way they had come. The produce stands were still out, narrowing the sidewalk, and Cassiel watched a woman sorting lychees into plastic bags as May walked ahead, and Cassiel maintained their distance.

May was quiet for half a block. Then⁠—

“She taught piano,” he said.

“Hm?”

“Betty. My mom taught piano too, for like—twenty years. I’d come home from school and there’d just be some kid in the living room banging out scales while I was trying to watch SpongeBob.”

That had been the most information May had ever given to Cassiel about his mother.