And twenty-six-year-old Augie Nyquist, crouched on the linoleum floor of a nursing home in a tie, closed his eyes, and very quietly, a little off-key, he began to sing along with her.
Frankie had to look out the window for a while after that. The sky was so blue it hurt. A kid in a snowsuit was dragging a sled across the parking lot. She watched him the whole length of the lot.
When the song ended, Babcia let go of the earpad and looked at Augie and said, perfectly clearly, in a voice that had not managed a whole sentence in six months:
"You were flat."
Then she closed her eyes and fell asleep.
In the hallway afterward, Augie leaned against the wall by the fire extinguisher, put his hands over his face, and stayed like that for a long time. Frankie stood next to him with her shoulder against his and didn't say anything at all, because there are times when the kindest thing a person can do is be quiet next to you, and she was, in addition to everything else, a woman who knew when to stop talking.
"She's right," he said at last, through his hands. "I was flat."
"You were a little flat."
"I've been flat for ten years," Augie Nyquist said.
VI.
February came in mean and gray, and two phone calls arrived in the same week, like a pair of bad pennies.
The first was for Augie. It came to the Exchange on a Wednesday afternoon while he was alphabetizing the Bs, and Gordy handed him the receiver with an odd look and said, "Long distance. Chicago. Says his name's Artie."
Artie Farrante was the program director at WVRB, 93.1, "The River," a commercial station in Chicago that had decided in the summer of 1985 to stop playing Foreigner and start playing the Smiths, and was, to the surprise of everyone including its owners, making money doing it. Back in October, in a fit of three-in-the-morning courage, Augie had mailed them an air-check—a cassette of his best hour of Frostbite, with a letter he'd rewritten eleven times. He'd never heard back. He'd assumed it was in a landfill in Gary, Indiana.
"Kid," said Artie Farrante, whose voice sounded like gravel being poured into a cement mixer, "you got a voice like a guy who's disappointed in me. I love it. Overnights. Midnight to six, five nights. It pays. Not a lot, but it pays, and there's a dental plan, which in radio is like finding a unicorn. You'd start the first of April."
Augie sat down on a box of Bobby Vinton records. "I—yes. I mean—yes. Thank you."