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“Tons,” Myla cuts in. “Born in an apron.”
Winfield squints at August, looking doubtful.
“You’d have to apply. It’ll be up to Lucie.”
He jerks his chin toward the bar, where a severe-looking young white woman with unnaturally red hair and heavy eyeliner is glaring at the cash register. If she’s the one August has to scam, it looks like she’s more likely to get an acrylic nail to the jugular.
“Lucie loves me,” Myla says.
“She really doesn’t.”
“She loves me as much as she loves anyone else.”
“Not the bar you want to clear.”
“Tell her I can vouch for August.”
“Actually, I—” August attempts, but Myla stomps on her foot. She’s wearing combat boots—it’s hard to miss.
The thing is, August gets the sense that this isn’t exactly a normal diner. There’s something shiny and bright about it that curls, warm and inviting, around the sagging booths and waiters spinning table to table. A busboy brushes past with a tub of dishes and a mug topples from the pile. Winfield reaches blindly behind himself and catches it midair.
It’s something adjacent to magic.
August doesn’t do magic.
“Come on, Win,” Myla says as Winfield smoothly deposits the mug back in the tub. “We’ve been your Thursday nighters for how long? Three years? I wouldn’t bring you someone who couldn’t cut it.”
He rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling. “I’ll get an app.”
“I’ve never waited a table in my life,” August says, when they’re walking back to the apartment.
“You’ll be fine,” Myla says. “Niko, tell her she’ll be fine.”
“I’m not a psychic reading ATM.”
“Oh, but you were last week when I wanted Thai, but you were sensing that basil had bad energy for us.…”
August listens to the sound of their voices playing off each other and three sets of footsteps on the sidewalk. The city is darkening, a flat brownish orange almost like a New Orleans night, and familiar enough to make her think that maybe… maybe she’s got a chance.
At the top of the stairs, Myla unlocks the door, and they kick off their shoes into one pile.
Niko gestures toward the kitchen sink and says, “Welcome home.”
And August notices for the first time, beside the faucet: lilies, fresh, stuck in a jar.
Home.
Well. It’s their home, not hers. Those are their childhood photos on the fridge, their smells of paint and soot and lavender threaded through the patchy rugs, their pancake dinner routine, all of it settled years before August even got to New York. But it’s nice to look at. A comforting still life to be enjoyed from across the room.
August has lived in a dozen rooms without ever knowing how to make a space into a home, how to expand to fill it like Niko or Myla or even Wes with his drawings in the windows. She doesn’t know, really, what it would take at this point. It’s been twenty-three years of passing through, touching brick after brick, never once feeling a permanent tug.
It feels stupid to say it, but maybe. Maybe it could be this. Maybe a new major. Maybe a new job. Maybe a place that could want her to belong in it.
Maybe a person, she guesses. She can’t imagine who.
August smells like pancakes.
It just doesn’t come off, no matter how many showers or quarters wasted at the twenty-four-hour laundromat. She’s only been working at Billy’s for a week, and greasy hashbrowns have bonded with her on a molecular level.
