The Last Thing He Told Me

All that matters is the face.

It isn’t a photograph matching the woman I know as Bailey’s mother—that, more important, Bailey knows to be her mother. Olivia. Olivia of the red hair and girlish freckles. Olivia who looks a little like me.

But the woman staring back at us—this woman Katherine “Kate” Smith—looks like Bailey. Exactly like Bailey. She has the same dark hair. She has the same full cheeks. And, most notably, she has the same fierce eyes—judgmental more than sweet.

This woman staring back at us—she could be Bailey.

Bailey shuts off the screen suddenly, as if it is too much to look at. The photograph, Kate’s face matching her own. She looks over at me, wondering what I am going to do next.

“Do you know her?” she says.

“No,” I say. “Do you?”

“No, I don’t know,” she says. “No!”

“Hello?” Elenor says. “Are you still there?”

I keep my hand over the speaker, but Bailey can hear her through the phone. She can hear her loud-pitched questions. It’s making her even more tense than she is. Her shoulders are seizing. Her hands are reaching for her hair, pulling it tight behind her ears.

I’m not proud of this. But I hang up on Elenor.

Then I turn back to Bailey.

“We need to go there right now,” Bailey says. “I need to go to this bar… to this Never Dry…”

She is already standing up. She is already grabbing her things.

“Bailey,” I say. “I know you’re upset, I know you are. I’m upset too.”

We aren’t saying it yet, not out loud, who we think Katherine Smith may be—who Bailey fears and hopes she is.

“Let’s just talk this through for a second,” I say. “I think our best chance to get to the bottom of all this is to keep going through the class roster. We are at most forty-six men away from getting an answer to who your father used to be.”

“Maybe we are. Maybe we’re not.”

“Bailey…” I say.

She shakes her head. She doesn’t sit back down.

“Let me say this another way,” she says. “I’m going to the bar right now. You can come with me or you can let me go alone.”

She stands there and waits. She doesn’t storm out. She waits to see what I will do. As if there is a choice.

“I go with you, of course,” I say.

Then I stand up. And we walk together toward the door.

The Never Dry

In the cab ride on the way to The Never Dry, Bailey keeps pulling on her bottom lip—almost like a nervous habit she suddenly developed, her eyes darting from side to side, frantic and terrified.

I hear the questions she’s not asking me out loud and I don’t want to push her. I also can’t just sit there and watch her suffer, so I search obsessively on my phone for Katherine “Kate” Smith, for Charlie Smith—for anything I can possibly tell her, any new information I can offer up, in an attempt to soothe her.

But I find way too much. Smith is too common of a last name, even with my subsearches (UT-Austin, Austin native, debate champion). There are hundreds of hits, and images—none for the Katherine who greeted us at the library.

Which is when I have an idea. I plug Andrea Reyes into my search, along with Charlie Smith, and I finally hit on something that may help us.

A Facebook profile for the correct Charlie Smith pops up. He is a 2002 graduate from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in art history, followed by two semesters at the Graduate School of Architecture, and an internship at a landscape architecture firm in downtown Austin.