and looks up at August, extending the knife. “Your turn.”
August glances between her, the knife, and the blank space below the plus sign for a full ten seconds before she gets it. Jane wants August’s name next to hers in the permanent mark she’s leaving on the Q.
Reaching into her back pocket, August clears the feelings out of her throat and says, “I have my own.”
She flicks the blade of her knife out and gets to work, scratching a clumsy AUGUST. When it’s done, she sits back, holding the knife loosely in her palm, admiring their work. JANE + AUGUST. She likes the way they look together.
When she turns to look at Jane, she’s staring down at August’s hand.
“What’s that?” Jane asks.
August follows her gaze. “My knife?”
“Your—where did you get that?”
“It was a gift?” August says. “My mom gave it to me; it belonged to her brother.”
“August.”
“Yeah?”
“No. August,” Jane says. August frowns at her, and she goes on: “That was his name. The guy who owned that knife. Augie.”
August stares. “How did you—”
“How old is he?” Jane cuts in. Her eyes are wide. “Your mom’s brother—how old is he?”
“He was born in ’48, but he’s—he’s been missing since—”
“1973,” Jane finishes flatly.
August never told Jane any of the specifics. It was nice to have one thing in her life that wasn’t touched by it. But Jane knows. She knows his name, the year, and she—
“Fuck,” August swears.
Biyu Su. She remembers where she saw that name.
She fumbles the fastening on her bag three times, before she finally pulls out the file.
“Open it,” August says.
Jane’s fingers are tentative on the edge of the manila folder, and when it falls open, there’s a newspaper photograph paperclipped to the first page, yellowing black and white. Jane, missing a couple of tattoos, in the background of a restaurant that had just opened in the Quarter. In the cutline, she’s listed as Biyu Su.
“My mom sent me this,” August says. “She said she’d found someone who might have known her brother and traced them to New York.”
It takes a second, but it comes: the fluorescent above their heads surges brighter and blinks out.
“Her brother—” Jane starts and stops, hand shaking when she touches the edge of the clipping. “Landry. That was … that was her brother. I knew—I knew there was something familiar about you.”
August’s voice is mostly breath when she asks, “How did you know him?”
“We lived together,” Jane says. Her voice sounds muffled through decades. “The roommate—the one I couldn’t remember. It was him.”
August knows from the look on her face what the answer is going to be, but she has to ask.
“What happened to him?”
Jane’s hand curls into a fist.
“August, he’s dead.”
* * *
Jane tells August about the UpStairs Lounge.
It was a bar on the second floor of a building at the corner of Chartres and Iberville, a jukebox and a tiny stage, bars on the windows like all the spots in the city used to have. One of the best places for blue-collar boys on the low. Augie was short-haired and square-jawed, shoulders filling out a white T-shirt, a towel over his shoulder behind the bar.
It was the summer of ’73, Jane tells her, but August already knows. She could never forget it. She’s spent years trying to picture that summer. Her mom was sure he’d left the city, but August used to wonder if he was hidden away a few neighborhoods over, if ivy climbed the wrought iron on his balcony, or power lines heavy with Mardi Gras beads dipped into the oak trees outside his window.
Her mom had theories—he got a girl pregnant and ran away, made enemies with the guys who bribed the NOPD to guard their craps games and skipped town, got lost, got married, got out of town and disappeared beyond the cypress trees.
Instead, instead, Jane tells August he was loved. She remembers him at the stove of their tiny kitchen, teaching her how to make pancakes. She tells August how he used to frown at the bathroom mirror and run a wet comb through his hair trying to tame it. He was happy, she says, even though he never talked about his family, even though she heard him through the walls sometimes, on the phone using a voice so gentle that he must have been talking to the round-faced, green-eyed little girl whose picture he kept in his wallet. He was happy because he had Jane, he had friends, he had the job at the UpStairs and