"The B-side is the same song," Frankie said slowly, "without you singing it."
"Uncle Gus thought people would want to sing along. Like at a party."
"Augie, that's karaoke. You invented karaoke in Roseville in 1976."
"The Japanese invented karaoke."
"Not in Roseville."
He laughed—helplessly, the way he had in the booth—and something that had been clenched in her since Bev's Lanes let go.
There was an old Magnavox console stereo against the wall, a big walnut-veneer coffin of a thing with the speakers behind fabric grilles. Marit had come down the stairs with a plate of krumkake and stood holding it, not saying anything, which Frankie suspected was a heroic effort. Augie slid one record out of its sleeve, blew on it out of habit, set it on the platter, and lowered the needle.
And there it was. Not stretched. Not warbling. Not recorded through a Panasonic's pinhole microphone over Stan yelling about the Twins. The Farfisa came in bright and flat and full, the drum machine bossa-novaed with pristine wrongness, and the voice was sixteen and clear and so sincere that it hurt to hear, every crack and reach and wobble perfectly preserved in two hundred and twelve copies that had sat in the dark for six years waiting.
Frankie stood in the middle of the orange shag and listened to the whole thing, all the way through the kazoo solo, with her hand over her mouth.
When it was over, Marit Nyquist set down the krumkake on the pool table and said, in a voice choked with emotion, "That kazoo is the worst thing I have ever heard in my life," and went back upstairs to cry in private.
---
He drove her home in his Pinto—the same Pinto, with a ghost of red spray paint still faintly visible on the passenger door if you knew where to look. The box sat on her lap. Snow came down in the headlights, slow and fat.
"You should go," Frankie said.
He kept his eyes on the road.
"To Chicago. You should go. I mean it. You've been hiding in a basement for ten years playing records for six people. You're good, Augie. You're really good. You should be somewhere people can hear you." She looked out the window at the dark front yards of Roseville, the blue flicker of televisions in the windows. "I'm not going to ask you to stay. I don't want to be one more reason you didn't do something."