"From the phone. Ninety-four." Dolores laughed her snowplow laugh. "He's taller than he sounds, Frankie."
Room 214 was hot and clanking as always. MTV played silently in its bracket: a woman in big hair dancing in an alley, a man in a suit with his collar turned up. Wanda Szymanski sat in her vinyl chair by the window with the afghan on her knees, and when Frankie came in her eyes found her granddaughter and softened, and then moved to the tall, thin, nervous stranger in the doorway and stayed there, suspicious and very sharp.
"Babcia, this is Augie," Frankie said. "Augie, this is Wanda Szymanski. She taught Sunday school at St. Hedwig's for thirty years, she made the best pierogi in Northeast, and she once threw a rolling pin at a Lutheran."
"It was a misunderstanding," Augie said faintly.
"It was not."
He crossed the room. He hesitated, and then, as if he'd been rehearsing it in the van, he crouched down beside the vinyl chair so that his face was below hers, and took off his stocking cap and held it in both hands like a boy in church.
"Mrs. Szymanski," he said. "I'm the one who sang it. 'Lake Street Moon.' I was sixteen. I'm sorry about the high note."
Babcia looked at him for a long time. Her eyes moved over his face, his hair, the ridiculous tie, the hands crushing the hat.
Then she reached out and patted his cheek—twice, briskly, the way you pat a dog that's done something adequate.
Frankie put the Walkman in Augie's hands. He looked at it as if it were a live grenade.
"Go on," she said.
His fingers weren't steady. He put one earpad to Babcia's ear, the way Frankie showed him, and held the other against his own, and then, because the cord was short, he had to lean in until his temple almost touched hers. He pressed play.
Frankie stood back against the radiator and watched.
The organ came in, warbling worse than ever now. Augie's whole face clenched. The drum machine started its jaunty, wrong bossa nova. And sixteen-year-old Augie Nyquist began to sing about a moon over a Dairy Queen, and Wanda Szymanski's lips began to move, and then the thread of her voice came, cracked and certain—
—and I'll save every quarter, every dime, every penny too—