"You were singing."
"I do that."
"I noticed. The whole store noticed. Those kids by the imports noticed, and they're from Edina, so they've never noticed anything in their lives." He folded his arms on the counter. "I'm going to have to ask you to stop. Not the singing. The singing's fine. I'm asking you to stop listening to whatever that is, because I can hear it from here, and it's terrible music, and it's lowering the resale value of every record in this building."
There was a pause. Behind him the Replacements crashed into a chorus. One of the Edina kids looked up, scented blood, and drifted closer.
Frankie, of Gopher State Amusements, looked at him for a long moment. She looked at the button on his lapel, and the pencil behind his ear, and the ABANDON HOPE sign under the radiator, and she seemed to put something together.
"Terrible," she repeated.
"I'm not saying it to be cruel. I'm saying it as a public service. That organ is out of tune. That drum machine is set to bossa nova, which I'm pretty sure was an accident. And whoever that kid singing is, somebody should have taken him aside and had a gentle conversation with him about his range."
"You can tell all that from the leak?"
"I have a gift."
"You have something," she agreed pleasantly. She took off the other earpad, so the headphones hung around her neck, and the tinny sound got louder, and Augie fought an urge to reach across the counter and switch the thing off himself. "Well, since you're the expert. I came in here looking for a record. A forty-five. Nobody's ever had it, but my friend Rhonda said if anyone in town would, it'd be the snotty guy at the Exchange." She smiled. "I'm guessing that's you."
"I prefer 'discerning.'"
"I bet you do. It's called 'Lake Street Moon.'" She said it carefully, the way you'd say the name of someone you loved. "By a group called the Vestibules. Nineteen seventy-six, I think. Local band. It was on KTWN for maybe two weeks that summer, and then it was gone like it never happened. I've been to every store in the Twin Cities. I've been to a swap meet in Anoka. I've been to a church rummage sale in Fridley where a man tried to sell me a bowling ball with somebody's teeth marks in it. Nobody has it."
Augie's face did something he could not control.
He felt it happen—the blood leaving, the jaw going loose. He was aware, distantly, that the Edina kid was watching him. He was aware that Gordy was in the back room pricing a box of Herb Alpert and could emerge at any moment. He was aware, most of all, of the thin little organ still piping out of the orange foam around her neck, and the boy's voice coming in again, and the words he had written at sixteen at his mother's kitchen table with a box of Cheerios for a desk.
"Never heard of it," he said.
"No?"