He laughed, startled—a real laugh, short and helpless.
"I mean it." She leaned forward on the milk crate. "You know what music is for? It's not for being right. It's for when the kitchen's too quiet. It's for when you're scared in a DMV parking lot. It's for an old lady who can't say her own granddaughter's name anymore, but she can sing every word of the worst record ever pressed in the state of Minnesota." She held his eyes. "Somebody laughed at you. Fine. Somebody else laughed so hard they forgot to be scared. That counts too, Augie. That's the half you left out."
The record ended. The needle hissed in the runout groove, around and around. Dead air—the one sin of radio.
He didn't move to fix it. He was looking at her.
"Augie," she said gently. "You're off the air."
"I know," he said, and reached for the next record without taking his eyes off her face.
V.
The first mixtape arrived on a Tuesday, left with Rhonda at the Gopher State office in a padded envelope that smelled faintly of the Exchange—dust, cardboard, and Gordy's cigars. It was a TDK SA-90, which Frankie gathered from the way he'd written the brand name in capitals was the serious kind. The J-card was folded into a tiny booklet and hand-lettered in the same blocky marker as the signs.
REMEDIAL LISTENING FOR F. SZYMANSKI, it said. A Course in Twelve Lessons. Side A: Things That Sound Like a Cat But Aren't. Side B: Things You Will Pretend Not to Like and Then Like.
Inside the booklet, every song had a footnote. Next to a Hüsker Dü track: Listen to the guitar. That's what being furious and in love at the same time sounds like. Do not play this for your grandmother. Next to a Replacements song: These guys are from here. They're a mess. That's the point. Next to a Raincoats track: I know. Just trust me. And at the very end of side B, after a gap of silence so long she thought the tape was over: Bonus track. The only good thing Big Jim Brekke ever played. I won't tell you what it is. You'll know.
It was Patsy Cline. "Walkin' After Midnight." She sat in the Econoline in the parking lot of a laundromat in Richfield, with the heater blowing lukewarm air on her feet, and played it three times.
She made him one back. It took her four nights at the kitchen table with her brother's old boombox, two tape decks, and a bottle of Wite-Out for the J-card. She labeled it in pink felt-tip: TERRIBLE MUSIC FOR A. NYQUIST, VOL. 1. A Defense.
Side A opened with Starship, "We Built This City." The footnote said: Yes. I know. You're making a face right now. Play it in the van with the windows down on Hiawatha in July and then come talk to me. Then Air Supply. Then Laura Branigan, "Gloria." Then the Captain & Tennille, "Muskrat Love," with a footnote that ran onto a second piece of paper: My mother danced with my father to this at the Polish Falcons hall in 1977. He stepped on her foot and she broke a toe and she said it was the best night of her life. You don't have to like it. You just have to know that.
The last song on side B was Mr. Mister, "Broken Wings," which was on every station in America that winter whether you wanted it or not. The footnote said only: Admit it.
He called her the night he got it, from the payphone outside the Exchange at closing, the cord so short he had to stand with his face practically against the metal. She could hear Lyndale traffic hissing past on the wet road and the click of the quarters going down.