She was twenty-seven now. She fixed things. You didn't fix things by kicking the machine across the room. You opened the panel and looked.
She drove to Lyndale Avenue.
The Exchange was closing. Gordy was turning the sign on the door. He took one look at her face through the frosted glass and let her in and said, "I'll be in the back. With the Mantovani," and disappeared with remarkable speed for a man of sixty.
Augie was behind the counter, counting the till. He looked up and saw her, and smiled—that quick, unguarded smile he never used on anyone else—and then he saw her face and the smile went out like someone had pulled its plug.
"I met Dwight," Frankie said.
He put down the stack of ones.
"At Bev's Lanes. He's very nice. He loves his kazoo." She stood in the middle of the store with her hands in her parka pockets. "He says you bought every copy in 1980. Two hundred and twelve. And burned them behind the Kmart."
Augie didn't say anything for a moment. The radiator ticked. On the turntable the last record of the day had ended, and the needle was hissing in the runout groove, around and around.
"I'm not here to yell at you," Frankie said. "I want to make that clear, because I'm pretty mad, and it might come out sounding like yelling. I just want to know if it's true. I want you to tell me. Not Dwight. You."
He came around the counter. He stopped a few feet from her, not too close, and she gave him credit for that.
"I bought them," he said. "Two hundred and twelve. That part's true."
"Okay."
"I didn't burn them."
She waited.
"I drove out there. I had the barrel. I had a can of lighter fluid from my mom's garage. I stood in that lot behind the Kmart for an hour in the dark, and I couldn't do it. I couldn't." He looked at the floor. "I told Dwight I did. I told everybody. Then I drove home and put them in my mother's basement in a box marked TAXES 1979, and I haven't opened it since."