Marit Nyquist lived in a rambler on a cul-de-sac in Roseville with aluminum siding the color of butterscotch and a plastic deer in the front yard wearing a scarf. She opened the door before they'd finished parking, a small, round, white-haired woman in a sweatshirt that said UFF DA, and she looked at Frankie for two seconds and then pulled her into a hug that smelled of cardamom.
"He's never brought a girl home," she said into Frankie's parka. "Not once. I was starting to think he was going to marry a record."
"Mom."
"There's coffee. There's krumkake. There's a hot dish in the oven in case you're staying for supper, which you are." Marit released her and held her at arm's length. "You're the one with the grandmother. He told me. I cried."
"Mom, we're just here for the basement."
"Nobody's ever just here for the basement," said Marit darkly, and went to get the krumkake.
The basement was paneled in knotty pine and carpeted in an orange shag that had seen things. There was a pool table with a slight list to the left, a dartboard, a wet bar with no liquor, and a wall of shelves full of the debris of an entire family: Christmas decorations, Tupperware, a box of National Geographic going back to the Eisenhower years, and, in the far corner under a fitted sheet printed with faded cartoon cowboys, a long, low, unmistakable shape.
Frankie stopped on the bottom step.
"Is that—"
"Dwight's church never asked for it back," Augie said. "I don't think they wanted it."
She crossed the shag and lifted the sheet. The Farfisa sat on its spindly chrome legs like a sleeping insect—red and gray, a little dusty, a line of white and black keys gone yellow as old teeth. She pressed one. Nothing. It wasn't plugged in. She didn't care. She pressed another, and stood there touching the keys of the organ that had played the first note of the only song her grandmother could still sing.
Augie was on a step stool, reaching to the top shelf. He brought down a cardboard box, heavy, its corners soft with age. On the side, in his mother's handwriting, it said TAXES 1979, and underneath, in a younger, angrier version of the hand Frankie knew from the signs: DO NOT OPEN. EVER. THIS MEANS YOU, DWIGHT.
He set it on the pool table. He looked at it the way you'd look at a dog that had bitten you once.
"You do it," he said.
She cut the old packing tape with her pocketknife. Inside, stacked tight, two hundred and twelve seven-inch records in plain white paper sleeves, each with a pale blue label in the center: THE VESTIBULES. LAKE STREET MOON (A. Nyquist). B-SIDE: LAKE STREET MOON (INSTRUMENTAL). GUS NYQUIST INSURANCE PRESENTS.