Artie Farrante called the Exchange at ten o'clock Monday morning. Augie took it standing up.
"Kid," said Artie. "That was the worst song I ever heard in my life."
"Yes, sir."
"You were flat. The kazoo guy should be arrested. The sound was like you were broadcasting from inside a mailbox. My sister thought her radio was broken." A long, gravelly pause. "Best radio I heard all year. You start April first. And kid—bring the kazoo."
---
He left on the last day of March, in the Pinto, with a U-Haul trailer full of records and a box marked TAXES 1979 that now held two hundred and eleven copies of "Lake Street Moon," because one lived at St. Casimir's beside a borrowed record player and was, according to Dolores, already wearing thin.
Frankie came to see him off in the parking lot behind the Exchange. It was raw and gray, the snow gone to slush and black ice, and Gordy stood in the back door smoking a cigar and pretending to be very interested in the sky.
They had already said the things. They'd said them over three weeks of banana cream pie at the Embers and long collect calls and one terrible, glorious Saturday at a roller rink in Fridley where Augie had discovered he could not skate and Frankie had discovered she could not stop laughing at him. They'd agreed it wasn't a goodbye. They'd agreed that four hundred miles was not the moon. They'd agreed not to make promises they didn't know how to keep, because they were twenty-six and twenty-seven and had both, separately, been stupid before.
So now she just handed him a cassette.
"For the drive," she said. "Volume two."
He turned it over. The J-card was pink felt-tip: TERRIBLE MUSIC FOR A. NYQUIST, VOL. 2. Chicago Edition. Play loud on I-94. Footnotes are mandatory.
"I made you one too," he said, and handed her a TDK SA-90 with no label at all, just a strip of masking tape on the cassette shell that said DON'T PLAY THIS YET.
"When, then?"
"You'll know."
She kissed him in the parking lot, in the slush, in front of Gordy and God and a man waiting for the 4 bus, and then she stood back with her hands in her parka pockets and watched him pull out onto Lyndale, the trailer fishtailing slightly on the ice, his arm out the window, already—she could see it—reaching for the tape deck.