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Back in New Orleans, her friends would talk about a butch they used to know named Stormé, who’d moved to New York and patrolled outside lesbian bars with a bat, who threw a punch at cops outside the Stonewall Inn and instigated a riot back in ’69. That sounded like the kind of person she wanted to know and the kind of fight she wanted to be in. So she went to New York.
She remembers finding friends in a different Chinatown, in Greenwich Village, in Prospect Heights, in Flatbush. She remembers curling up on twin mattresses with girls who were working nights to save up for the big operation, pushing their curls behind their ears and cooking them congee for breakfast. She remembers fights in the streets, raids on bars, the police dragging her out in cuffs for wearing men’s jeans, spitting blood on the floor of a packed cell. It was early—too early for anyone to have any idea what was happening—but she remembers friends getting sick, taking a guy from the floor above to the hospital in the back of a cab and being told she wasn’t allowed to see him, and later, watching his boyfriend get told the same thing. Sterile whites, skinny ankles, hunched in waiting room chairs with bruises from cops still mottling her skin.
(August goes home and does her own research later: nobody was calling it AIDS until ’81, but it was there, creeping silently through New York.)
But she also remembers bright lights on her face at clubs full of feathers and thrift store evening gowns and glittering turbans perched atop ginger wigs, bare shoulders smudged with lipstick, bottom shelf gin. She lists off the names of guys with heavy eyeliner who threw punches at CBGB and recites the summer ’75 concert calendar, which she’d pinned to her bedroom wall. She remembers getting in a fight with her upstairs neighbor, before he got sick, and settling it over a pack of cigarettes and a game of bridge, laughing until they cried. She remembers steaming dumplings in a kitchen the size of a closet and inviting a small crowd of girls from Chinatown to eat around her coffee table and talk about things they were just beginning to suspect about themselves. She remembers Billy’s, jabbing an elbow into Jerry’s ribs at the grill, hot sauce and syrup dribbling down her wrists as she bit into her sandwich and declared it the best idea she ever had, the exact look on Jerry’s face when he tasted it and agreed.
She remembers the phone, always the phone looking back at her, always the same nine digits repeating in her head. Her parents. She knew she should call. She wanted to. She never did.
August can see it pull at her—around her eyes, her mouth. Sometimes she laughs, remembering making herself sick on too much fried chicken from the shop down the block and her mom mumbling “yeet hay” at her disapprovingly even as she patted her forehead and brought her chrysanthemum tea. Sometimes she stares at the ceiling when she talks about her sisters and the way they used to whisper to one another in their room at night, giggling into the darkness. She’s found and lost everything, all in the span of a few hours.
It all makes sense, though. It fills in most of the gaps in August’s research—the lack of official documents using her name, the confusing timelines, the impossibility of pinning down exactly where Jane was for most of the ’70s. And it makes sense of Jane too. She ran away because she didn’t think she could make her family happy, and she never went back because she thought she did them a favor. She kept running, because she never quite learned what home was supposed to feel like. That, especially, August can understand.
It’s hard, to picture Jane’s life forty-five years ago and understand how close it feels for her—a matter of months, she said once. It’s always soaked in sepia for August, grainy and worn at the edges. But Jane tells it in full color, and August sees it in her eyes, in the shake of her hands. She wants to go back. To her, it’s only a short summer away.
But how New York ended for Jane is still missing. She took the Q to and from her apartment often, but she can’t remember how she ended up stuck there.
“That’s okay,” August says. She leans her shoulder into Jane’s. Jane leans back, and August pushes away the knowledge that she kissed her a few hours ago, lets it be buried under everything else. Jane watches another station slide away with a soft expression on her face, freedom unreachable on the other side of a sliding door. “That’s what I’m here for.”
When August clocks in at Billy’s on Thursday afternoon, Lucie is on the phone, staring blankly at a Mets clipping on the wall.
“We can only sell three,” she says in a monotone, sounding absolutely bored. “$100 each, $250 for the set. It’s a historic New York landmark. No, not on the registry.” A pause. “I see.” A much longer pause. “Yes, thank you. I invite you to eat a dick. Goodbye.”
She slams down the phone hard enough that the coffee in the pot behind the counter trembles.
“Who was that?” August asks.
“Billy wants to raise money to buy the building by selling things we can spare,” Lucie explains tersely. “Put some of the barstools on Craigslist. People are cheap. And idiots. Cheap idiots.”
She storms off into the kitchen, and August can hear her swearing up a storm in Czech. She thinks of the jar of onion and honey and the way Lucie concealed a smile under the streetlights, and she turns to Winfield, who’s puttering around the counter.
“There’s more to it than she lets on,” August says, “isn’t there?”
Winfield sighs, throwing a towel over his shoulder.
“You know, I’m from Brooklyn,” he says after a pause. “Seems like nobody who lives here is from here, but I am—grew up in East Flatbush, big-ass Jamaican family. But Lucie—she emigrated when she was seventeen, was on her own longer. Came here hungry one night and couldn’t pay the bill, and Billy came out the back and offered her a job instead.”
He hops up onto the bar, narrowly avoiding putting his ass in a pecan pie.
“I’d just started working here the year before. I was only a kid. She was only a kid. She was so skinny, mean as shit, dishwater blond, learning English on the job, and she started telling people what to do, and then one day she showed up with red hair and black nails like she had some kinda Wonder Woman level up. This place made her who she is. It’s the first home she ever had. Shit, I had a home, and even I feel that sometimes.”
“There’s gotta be a way we can save Billy’s,” August says.
Winfield shrugs. “That’s Brooklyn, man. Places get bought up and shut down all the time.”
She glances over her shoulder through the kitchen window, to where Jerry is busy with an omelette. She asked him a week ago if he remembers the person who came up with the Su Special. He doesn’t.
August passes her shift thinking about Jane and ghosts, things that disappear from the city but can’t ever really be erased. That afternoon, August finds her on the Q, sitting cross-legged across three seats.
“Mmm,” Jane hums when August sits down next to her. “You smell good.”
August pulls a face. “I smell like the inside of a deep fryer.”
“Yeah, like I said.” She buries her nose in August’s shoulder, inhaling the greasy ghost of Billy’s. August’s face flashes warm. “You smell good.”
“You’re weird.”
“Maybe,” Jane says, drawing back. “Maybe I just miss Billy’s. It smells exactly the same. It’s nice to know some things’ll never change.”
