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“Hmm, this?” Niko leans his head on top of hers and points to the sculpture in the corner. “This is Judy Garland.”
Her mom comes to visit in October.
It’s tense, at first. When she talks, it’s clipped, audibly struggling to stay even, but that makes August appreciate her more. She can hear the old razor-sharp Suzette defenses trying to cut through, but she’s fighting them. August can appreciate that. She’s learned a lot in the past year about how much of that is in her too.
Her mom has never really traveled, and she’s definitely never been to New York, so August takes her to see the sights—the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty. She takes her to Billy’s so she can see where August works, and she immediately takes a shine to Lucie. She orders French toast and pays the ticket. Lucie brings August a Su Special without her even asking.
“I’ve missed you,” her mom says, dragging a piece of toast through a pool of syrup. “So much. Just, like, the pictures of ugly dogs you used to text me. The way you talk too fast when you have an idea. I’m really sorry if I made you feel like I didn’t love all of you. You’re my baby.”
It’s more sentiment than she’s handed August since she was a kid. And August loves her, endlessly, unconditionally, even if she likes to play at being August’s friend more than her mom, even if she’s difficult and stubborn and unable to let anything go. August is all three of those too. Her mom gave her that, just like she gave her everything else.
“I missed you too,” August says. “The past few months… well. It was a lot. There were a lot of times I thought about calling you, but I—I just wasn’t ready.”
“It’s okay,” she says. “Anything you want to talk about?”
That’s new too: the asking. August imagines her going to work at the library and digging through the shelves, pulling out books on how to be a more emotionally supportive parent, taking notes. She bites down on a small smile.
“I was seeing someone for a few months,” August tells her. “It, uh. It’s over now. But it wasn’t because we wanted it to be. She… she had to leave the city.”
Her mom chews thoughtfully and swallows before she asks, “Did you love her?”
Maybe her mom will think it’s a waste of time and energy, to love somebody as hard as August does. But then she remembers the file burning a hole in her bag, the things she’s going to have to tell her later. Maybe she’ll get it after all.
“Yeah,” August says. Her mouth tastes like hot sauce and syrup. “Yeah, I did. I do.”
That afternoon, they walk through Prospect Park, under the autumn sun dappled through the changing leaves.
“You remember that file you sent me earlier this year? The one about Augie’s friend who moved to New York?”
Her mom stiffens slightly. Her lips twitch in the corners, but she’s physically holding herself back, trying not to look too eager or anxious. August loves her for it. It almost makes her change her mind about what she’s about to do.
“I remember,” she says, voice carefully neutral.
“Well, I looked into it,” August says. “And I, um… I found her.”
“You found her?” she says, abandoning pretense to stop in the middle of the path. “How? I couldn’t find anything beyond, like, two utility bills.”
“She was still going by her birth name sometimes when she knew Augie,” August explains, “but by the time she got here, she’d started using a different name full-time.”
“Wow,” she says. “So, have you talked to her yet?”
August almost wants to laugh. Has she talked to Jane? “Yeah, I have.”
“What’d she say?”
They’ve drawn up to an isolated bench perched near the water’s edge, quiet and separate from the runners and the geese and the sounds of the street.
August gestures toward it. “Wanna sit?”
There on the bench, she pulls out her own file, a new one.
In the weeks since Jane left, August hasn’t looked for her, but she has looked for Augie. Everything she’s found is in the manila folder she hands to her mom. A postcard in Augie’s handwriting, from California to New York. A phone number, which she finally managed to match to an old classified ad that led to a storage facility with blessedly stringent record keeping. The name of the man who shared Augie’s number and apartment in Oakland, now happily married to another man but struck momentarily speechless when August told him over the phone that she was Augie’s niece.
A copy of a fake driver’s license with Augie’s photo, a few years older than the last time her mom saw him, a different name. He’d gotten in some trouble on his way to California, and he’d stopped using his legal name. It was all behind him by 1976 when he wrote to Jane, but it meant they never could find him after ’73.
The last item is a newspaper clipping about a car accident. A twenty-nine-year-old bachelor with an Oakland address wrecked his convertible in August of ’77. He was driving the Panoramic Highway.
He died, but not the way Jane thought. He died happy. He died chasing a dream, loved and sober and sun-drenched in California. The man he left behind still has a box in his attic filled with photos—Augie smiling in front of the Painted Ladies, Augie hugging a redwood, Augie getting kissed under the mistletoe. There are copies of those in the folder too, along with a carbon copy of a letter Augie wrote to his kid sister in 1975, proof that he never stopped trying to reach her.
