“Mingxia,” Jane says, turning to August. “That was her name. Mingxia. I took her back to my place in Prospect Heights on … Underhill Avenue. It was a brownstone. I had the second floor. That was the first place I lived in New York.”
August writes down the street name and the playground across the street and the nearest intersection and spends an afternoon pulling ownership records on every brownstone on the block, calling landlords until she finds the son of one who remembers a Chinese American woman renting the second floor when he was a kid.
The kiss reveals: Jane moved to New York in February 1975.
And so, it becomes another thing they do. The food and the songs and the old articles and, now, the kisses.
There are certain crucial bits of information they still don’t have—like Jane’s childhood, or her infuriatingly elusive birth certificate, or the event that got Jane stuck in the first place—but there’s no way to predict what memory might cause a chain reaction leading to something important.
The kisses are strictly for evidence gathering. August knows this. August is absolutely, 100 percent clear on this. She’s kissing Jane, but Jane is kissing Jenny, Molly, April, Niama, Maria, Beth, Mary Frances, Mingxia. It’s not about her and Jane, at all.
“Kiss me slow,” Jane says, grinning on a Tuesday afternoon, her sleeves rolled up enticingly, and it’s still not about them.
They kiss under the dappled sunlight of the Brighton Beach Station, strawberry ice cream on their tongues, and Jane remembers summer 1974, a month crashing with an old friend named Simone who’d moved to Virginia Beach, whose cat absolutely refused to leave them alone in bed. They kiss with August’s earbuds split between them playing Patti Smith, and Jane remembers autumn 1975, a bass player named Alice who left lipstick stains on her neck in the bathroom of CBGB. They kiss at midnight in a dark tunnel, and Jane remembers New Year’s Eve 1977, and Mina, who tattooed the vermilion bird on her shoulder.
August learns all this, but she also learns that Jane likes to be kissed every kind of way: like a secret, like a fistfight, like candy, like a house fire. She learns Jane can make her sigh and forget her own name until it all blurs together, past and present, the two of them on Manhattan balconies and in damp New Orleans barrooms and the candy aisle of a convenience store in Los Angeles. Jane’s kissed a girl in every corner of the country, and pretty soon, August feels like she has too.
For research.
It’s not like kissing is all August does—the time she spends thinking about the kisses and chasing down leads from the kisses when she’s not actually having the kisses notwithstanding. It’s been three weeks since she worked a single shift. She does have to pay rent, eventually, and so to stave off absolute bankruptcy, she finally calls Billy’s and, with some coughing and begging, convinces Lucie to put her on the schedule.
“Sweet Jesus, she lives,” Winfield says, pretending to faint dramatically over the counter when August returns to the bar.
“You literally saw me last week.” August brushes past him to clock in.
“Was that you?” Winfield asks, gathering himself back up and beginning to change the coffee filter. “Or was that some girl who looked like you but has not been bedridden for weeks like you told Lucie you were?”
“I was feeling better that day,” August says. She turns to see Winfield’s skeptical look. “What? Did you want me to get Billy’s shut down for giving mono to all the customers in tables fifteen through twenty-two?”
“Mm-hmm. Okay. Well. Speaking of. You missed the big news last week.”
“Is Jerry’s old ass finally retiring?”
“No, but he might have to now.”
August whips her head around. “What? Why?”
Winfield turns wordlessly, humming a few notes of a funeral dirge as he heads toward the kitchen and Lucie fills his place behind the bar.
She looks … rough. One of her typically flawless acrylics is broken, and her hair is falling out of its scraped-back ponytail. She shoots August a fleeting glare before setting a small jar down on the counter.
“If you’re not sick, I don’t care,” she says. She jabs a finger toward the jar. “If you are, take this. Three spoonfuls. You’ll feel better.”
August eyes the jar. “Is that—?”
“Onion and honey. Old recipe. Just take it.”
Even from three feet down the bar, it smells lethal, but August is not in a position