Everyone cheers, loud and happy and a little misty, the sound filling the place up to the brim, rushing over the Formica tabletops and the sticky kitchen floor and the photo to the side of the men’s room door of the first day Billy’s fed the neighborhood.
Just as Billy takes a swig, the front door opens.
The room’s too busy throwing back champagne to notice, but when August glances across the dining room, there’s a young woman standing in the door.
She looks lost, a little shocked, unsteady on her feet. Her hair’s inky black and short, swept back from her face, and her cheeks are flushed from the November chill outside.
White T-shirt, ripped jeans, sharp cheekbones, an armful of tattoos. A single dimple at one side of her mouth.
August thinks she throws a chair out of the way. It’s possible a bottle of hot sauce hits the linoleum and shatters. The specifics blur out. All she knows is, she clears the room in seconds.
* * *
Jane.
Impossibly, here. Now. Her red Chucks planted on the black-and-white floor.
“Hi,” Jane says, and her voice sounds the same.
Her voice sounds the same, and she looks the same, and when August reaches out and grasps desperately for her shoulders, they feel exactly the same as they always have under her hands.
Solid. Real. Alive.
“How—?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “One second I was—I was with you on the tracks, and you were kissing me, and then I, I opened my eyes and I was just standing on the platform, and it was cold, and I knew. I could tell when it was. I didn’t know where else to look for you, so I came here. I had to make sure you were—you were okay.”
“That I was okay?”
“I can’t believe you did that, August, you could have died—”
“I—I thought you went back—”
“You got me out—”
“Wait.” August can barely hear what Jane is saying. Her brain is still catching up. “It’s only been a second for you?”
“Yeah,” Jane says, “yeah, how long has it been for you?”
Her fingers squeeze in Jane’s shirt. “Three months.”
“Oh,” she says. She looks at August like she did that night on the tracks, like it’s breaking her heart. “Oh, you thought I was—”
“Yeah.”
“I’m—” she says, but she doesn’t get to finish the sentence, because August has thrown her arms around her waist and crashed into her chest. Her arms close around August’s neck, tight and fierce, and August breathes in the smell of her, sweet and warm and faintly, under it all, something a little strange and singed.
All those months. All the trips up and down the line. All the songs on the radio. All of it, all the work, all the trying and scraping and tearing at the seams of what she can see, all for this. All for her arms wrapped around Jane in a diner on a Saturday afternoon.
Her girl. She came back.
17
Photo from the archives of New York Magazine, from a photo series on Brooklyn diners, dated August 2, 1976
[Photo depicts a plate of pancakes with a side of bacon in the hands of a waitress, illuminated by the blue and pink glow of the neon lights that wrap the underside of the bar at Pancake Billy’s House of Pancakes. Though the waitress’s face is out of frame, several tattoos are visible on her left arm: an anchor, Chinese characters, a red bird.]
August takes her home.
The sky splits open the second they step out of Billy’s, but Jane just turns to her under the onslaught of rain and smiles. Jane in the rain. That’s something new.
“Which way we goin’, angel?” she asks, raindrops sliding into her mouth.
August blinks water out of her eyes. “I don’t guess you wanna take the subway?”
“Fuck you,” she says, and she laughs.
August grabs her hand, and they throw themselves into the back of a cab.
As soon as the door slams shut, she’s in Jane’s lap, swinging a leg over to straddle her hips, and she can’t stop, not when she thought she was never going to see Jane again. Jane’s fingers dig into her waist, and hers twist into Jane’s hair, and they kiss hard enough that the days they missed all fold together like a map, like the pages of a notebook shut, like it was no time at all.
Jane’s mouth falls open, and August chases after it. She skims that soft bottom lip with her teeth and finds her tongue, and Jane makes a low, hurt sound