"This is what I've got," he said.
The clock over the dayroom door said 6:59. Neil held up one hand, fingers spread, and began folding them down. Five. Four. Three. On the radio on the piano, the hiss changed, deepened. Two. One.
Neil pointed.
Augie leaned into the microphone, and the voice that came out of the radio on the piano—a half-second late, tinny, thin as a voice on a long-distance call—was the low, dry, bored voice of Frostbite. Except that it wasn't bored. Not tonight.
"Good evening. This is KHLC, 89.3, St. Paul. My name is Augie Nyquist, and on most nights at this hour I'm asleep, and at one in the morning I come on here and play you records you've never heard of by bands who'd hate you if they met you. I've done that for four years. I've been very good at it. I have never once taken a request."
He looked at Frankie. He didn't look away.
"Tonight I'm coming to you live from the dayroom at St. Casimir's Home in Northeast Minneapolis, which is, I'm told, a first for this station and possibly a violation of something. I'm here because ten years ago, when I was sixteen, I made a record. It was called 'Lake Street Moon.' A lot of you who were at the Longhorn in 1979 remember it, and some of you sang it at me, and one of you spray-painted it on my car, and I want you to know that I've thought about each of you every day since, and not always kindly." Laughter from the half-circle; a delighted cackle from Dolores. "It's a terrible song. It is objectively, technically, historically terrible. A zine called it the worst record ever pressed in the state of Minnesota, and I've spent six years agreeing with them as loudly as I could."
He took a breath.
"And then a woman walked into the record store where I work, singing it. And she told me that there's a lady in Northeast who can't say much anymore, who can't say her own granddaughter's name, but who knows every word to the worst record ever pressed in the state of Minnesota. And I said that was impossible. And she said—" his voice caught, very slightly, just on the edge of the coupler's range—"she said that music isn't for being right. It's for when the kitchen's too quiet."
The dayroom was very still. Even Neil had stopped sweating.
"So this is for Wanda Szymanski, who turns seventy-two tonight, who learned to drive at sixty-two and passed her road test with this song on the radio. And it's for her granddaughter Frankie, who fixes things for a living. Including, it turns out, me." He turned to the Farfisa. "Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time since the Ford administration—the Vestibules."
Dwight hit the snare with the brushes. Tick-tocka-tick-tocka. Bossa nova. Of course it was bossa nova. Augie's fingers came down on the Farfisa, and it wheezed into life, flat and bright and absolutely itself, and he leaned into the microphone, twenty-six years old and terrified, and began to sing.
He was flat. He reached for the high note on moon and missed it by a mile, and everyone in the room heard him miss it, and he didn't stop.
And in her wheelchair, in front of everyone, Wanda Szymanski lifted her chin and began to sing along.
Not a thread this time. Out loud. Her voice was cracked and old and high and furiously sure of itself, and it found the words one after another—rising up like a big balloon, over the Dairy Queen and the laundromat too—and the microphone picked it up, and the coupler carried it down the telephone line to a basement in St. Paul, where Gordy Haugen, who had sold records through Elvis and the Beatles and disco and had never once been seen to cry, pushed up the fader with a hand that was not entirely steady, and sent it out at one hundred watts into the March night over the frozen Twin Cities.