Stan Szymanski, beside Frankie, made a sound like a man who'd been punched gently in the chest. "She's singing," he said. "Frankie. She's—"
"I know," Frankie said. She couldn't stop smiling. She didn't even try anymore. "I know. I told you. You had to come and look."
Then came the kazoo solo.
Dwight Nyquist rose from behind his snare drum like a man ascending to heaven. He took the kazoo from his pocket. He played it with his eyes closed and his whole soul, sixteen bars of the most gloriously awful sound a human being has ever produced on purpose, and the dayroom—the residents, the aides in pink, the janitor, Marit with her Tupperware, three boys in Vikings sweatshirts—came completely apart. An old man in a cardigan laughed so hard his teeth slipped. Dolores had to sit down on the piano bench. And Babcia laughed too—Frankie saw it, actually saw it, the old laugh from the Buick in the DMV parking lot, head back and mouth open—and then came in again, right on time, for the last chorus, as if she had never been away.
X.
The dayroom phone rang four minutes after the song ended, which was a problem, because the dayroom phone was currently a radio station. Neil yanked a wire, Dolores answered, listened, and held out the receiver to Augie at arm's length as if it might bite.
"It's a man named Gordy," she said. "He says he needs you to know that the request line has been ringing since the kazoo, and he's run out of paper, and somebody named Duane wants to hear 'Muskrat Love.'"
Augie looked at Frankie. Frankie looked at Augie.
So that was how Frostbite became, for the remaining hour and fifty minutes, Terrible Music Night. Augie went back to the microphone and confessed, on the air, that he had danced in his record store to Laura Branigan, and then he opened the lines and asked the Twin Cities to call in and confess too: the song you love that you're not supposed to, the one you turn down when someone gets in the car. Neil patched the dayroom back in. Gordy, alone in the basement of Ingeborg Hall, spun whatever they asked for, from whatever he could find in the station's crates and his own trunk. A plow driver confessed to Barry Manilow. A nursing student at the U confessed to "Rock Me Amadeus." A man who said he was the bass player in a punk band everyone in the room had heard of confessed, after a long pause, to the Carpenters, and asked them not to use his name. The residents of St. Casimir's danced—some in chairs, some on their feet, one with Stan's youngest standing on his slippers—to the Captain & Tennille, under a banner Augie had lettered himself.
At the end, Babcia fell asleep in her wheelchair with frosting on her chin and a paper crown from the bakery tipped over one ear, and Stan stood beside her for a long time with his big hands in his jacket pockets, not saying anything.
"Lakeview's real nice," he said finally, to nobody in particular. "You can see the lake."
"I know, Stan."
"She can't see the lake from up here anyway. She's watching the parking lot." He cleared his throat. "Dziadek's Buick's still in her garage. Carol thinks it'd fetch maybe fifteen hundred from a collector. That's four months. And I can do another hundred a month if I pick up Saturdays." He looked down at his grandmother asleep in her crown. "One more year. We'll look again in a year. All of us. In the same room."
Frankie leaned her head against her brother's big shoulder, which she had not done since he was fourteen and yelling about the Twins.
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