"Okay," Stan said. "Okay. We'll come."
---
She didn't see Augie that week. He called every night, late, from the booth or the payphone, and he was cheerful and evasive and kept saying things like "I have to go, Neil's here with a soldering iron," and she told herself this was the Chicago show, that he was nervous, that it was fine. She brought one clean copy of "Lake Street Moon" to St. Casimir's and played it for Babcia on a portable record player Rhonda lent her, and Babcia sang, and the warbling tape went into a shoebox under Frankie's bed, retired with honors.
On Saturday the eighth, at a quarter to seven, she came through the back door of St. Casimir's with a cake from the Polish bakery on Broadway, and Dolores was waiting for her at the nurses' station with an expression of such enormous, barely contained satisfaction that Frankie stopped dead.
"What did you do," Frankie said.
"Me? Nothing." Dolores took the cake out of her hands. "Your grandmother's in the dayroom. Everybody's in the dayroom."
Everybody was.
The St. Casimir's dayroom was a long, low room with a linoleum floor and a wall of windows facing the parking lot, an upright piano nobody had tuned since Vatican II, and a television that had, for once, been turned off. Tonight the chairs had been pushed back in a ragged half-circle, and every one of them was full: residents in wheelchairs and housecoats, nurses' aides in pink, a janitor leaning on his mop. Stan was there, enormous in his Carhartt jacket, with Carol and three boys in matching Vikings sweatshirts and a look on his face like a man who'd walked into the wrong church. Marit Nyquist was there, in her UFF DA sweatshirt, handing out krumkake from a Tupperware. Gordy Haugen was not, but a portable radio sat on the piano tuned to 89.3, and from it came the low hiss of a station waiting.
And at the front of the room, under a hand-lettered banner—HAPPY 72nd BIRTHDAY WANDA, in blocky black capitals she would have known anywhere—stood a red-and-gray Farfisa organ on spindly chrome legs, with a long orange extension cord snaking to the wall. Beside it was a single snare drum on a stand. Behind the snare sat Dwight Nyquist in his bowling shirt, holding a pair of brushes and, tucked into his shirt pocket like a fountain pen, a kazoo.
Neil Tollefson, the station manager, crouched by the wall in his cardigan beside a beige metal box the size of a lunch pail, bristling with wires, one of which ran into the dayroom's telephone jack and another to a microphone on a stand. He was sweating. He looked up at Frankie with the face of a boy who had not slept for six days and said, "It's a phone-line coupler. I built it. It might work."
And in the middle of it all, in front of Babcia's wheelchair, crouched down so his face was below hers, in the same terrible tie, was Augie.
He stood up when he saw Frankie. He looked very pale and very determined, like a man about to jump off the high board at the Y for the first time.
"Augie," she said. "Your show. Artie Farrante. Seven o'clock. You're supposed to be at the station."
"I am at the station," Augie said. "The station's here. Gordy's back at KHLC running the board. Neil's going to patch us through the phone line. It'll sound like garbage. Like we're broadcasting from inside a coffee can." He swallowed. "Artie said show him what I've got."
"Augie—"