"I want to begin," he said, "by saying I hated it."
"Okay."
"Every song. With specific and detailed reasons, which I've written down."
"I'm listening."
"And then I want to say that 'Gloria' was on in the store this afternoon because Gordy left the radio on, and I caught myself doing a thing with my shoulder."
"What kind of thing?"
"A rhythmic thing. A small rhythmic thing. Gordy saw. He's never going to let it go."
She was lying on her kitchen floor with the phone cord stretched all the way from the wall by the refrigerator, under the table, which was where the cord reached and where, since high school, she had done all her serious phone calls. She covered her face with her free hand. She couldn't stop smiling. It was becoming a problem.
"Augie," she said. "Did you dance in your record store?"
"I will deny it under oath."
They talked until his quarters ran out, and then he called back collect from the payphone at the Embers on Nicollet, and they talked until the waitress there asked if he was going to order something or just stand in the doorway letting the cold in. So he ordered pie. And then Frankie said, "What kind?" and he said, "Banana cream," and she said, "That's disgusting, I'll be there in fifteen minutes," and was.
---
They went to see Babcia on a Sunday at the end of January, in the bright, brittle cold that comes after a snowstorm, when the whole city glitters and hurts to look at. Augie wore a tie. Frankie didn't say anything about it, but she looked at it, and he looked at her looking at it, and turned red, and said, "My mother raised me to wear a tie to a nursing home," and she said, "I didn't say anything," and he said, "You said it with your eyebrows."
Dolores met them at the nurses' station, looked Augie up and down, and said, "So you're Gertrude."
"Excuse me?"