There was a long, astonished silence from Duluth.
"Since when?"
"Since January. He's a DJ. Sort of. He works in a record store." She paused. "He sang the song, Stan. The moon song. The one from the Buick."
"The—" More silence. Then Stan, who had been fourteen in the summer of 1976, and had been yelling about the Twins on the original recording, started to laugh, and couldn't stop for some time. "The kazoo guy? You're dating the kazoo guy?"
"His cousin played the kazoo."
"Frankie." He caught his breath. "Look. I'm happy for you. I mean it. But this doesn't change the numbers. Lakeview has a bed opening up the end of March. I need to tell them by the first. Think about it. That's all I'm asking. Just think about it."
She lay under the table after he hung up, looking at the gum some long-ago Szymanski had stuck under there in roughly 1964, listening to the dial tone go on and on and then turn into that awful howling noise the phone makes when you've left it off the hook too long.
St. Casimir's was four miles from her apartment. Duluth was a hundred and fifty. And she knew, in the cold practical part of her that fixed things for a living, that Stan was not wrong. He just wasn't right, either.
She didn't tell Augie about Duluth that week. And Augie, for reasons he couldn't entirely explain to himself, didn't tell her about Chicago.
VII.
The jukebox at Bev's Lanes in Columbia Heights was a 1978 Rock-Ola that had been skipping on the same Bob Seger single for a week, and on the last Thursday in February Frankie was on her knees in front of it with the front panel off and a can of contact cleaner when a man in a bowling shirt that said DWIGHT over the pocket leaned on the machine above her and said, "Hey. Hey, are you Frankie?"
She looked up. He was big and pink and cheerful, with a mustache like a push broom and a beer in each hand, one of which he seemed to have forgotten about.
"Depends who's asking."
"Dwight Nyquist. Augie's cousin." He beamed down at her. "Drums. Also kazoo. You're the Lake Street Moon girl! He talks about you all the time. Well. He doesn't talk talk. Augie doesn't talk. But he says your name like it's in italics."
She sat back on her heels. In spite of herself, she was smiling. "You played the kazoo solo."