XI.
It came in the middle of May, when the lilacs were out along the parkways and the lakes had finally thawed and people were walking around Lake Nokomis in shorts that were frankly premature.
A padded envelope with a Chicago postmark, left with Rhonda at the Gopher State office. Inside was a single folded page in blocky marker—NOW.—and nothing else.
Frankie took the masking-taped cassette out of her glove box, where it had been riding for six weeks between the route sheets and a spare coin mech. She was parked outside St. Casimir's in the Econoline with the windows down and the smell of cut grass coming in. Up in room 214, she knew, Babcia was watching the parking lot, and in a few minutes Frankie would go up and play the record, and Babcia would sing, or wouldn't; some days now she didn't, and some days she did, and nobody could say which kind of day was coming. Stan called every Sunday after 60 Minutes. The Buick was gone to a man in Hopkins who'd cried when he heard it start. One more year, they'd said. One more year was a long time, and no time at all.
On the dash, under the route sheet, lay a mimeographed flyer Rhonda had slipped her a week ago without a word: WINDY CITY VENDING — CHICAGO — EXPERIENCED ARCADE TECHNICIANS WANTED. Frankie hadn't thrown it away. She hadn't done anything else with it either.
She slid the tape into the deck she'd wired herself. She pressed play.
Hiss. A click. Then his voice—the real one, not the Frostbite voice, close and nervous and a little hoarse at the edges, recorded somewhere quiet. She could hear an El train go by in the background.
"Okay. Hi. It's me. It's one in the afternoon, which for me is the middle of the night, so forgive me. This is Side A. It's called Things I Didn't Know I Liked Until You. There are no footnotes, because every footnote was going to say the same thing, and that's boring." A pause. A breath. "The first song is new. I wrote it last week. It's about a woman who fixes jukeboxes. It's not very good. It might be the worst thing I've ever written, which, as you know, is a high bar. I recorded it in a closet at the station with a guy from the morning show on bass. Dwight mailed me the kazoo part on a separate tape. Don't ask."
Another pause.
"Side B is blank. That's on purpose. That one's yours. Whenever you want. Whatever you want to put on it." The El train again, fading. "Okay. That's all. Press play, Szymanski."
The tape hissed, and clicked, and then a Farfisa organ—the Farfisa, she'd know that flat wheeze anywhere, he must have hauled it to Chicago in the U-Haul—came in bright and wrong, and a drum machine started up underneath it in a rhythm that was, unmistakably, bossa nova.
And a man's voice, twenty-six years old, reaching for a high note and missing it by a mile, began to sing about a woman in a coverall who could beat anybody in the Twin Cities at Galaga.
Frankie sat in the Econoline in the parking lot of St. Casimir's with the windows down and the lilacs blooming and the flyer on the dash and the blank side B waiting in the dark of the cassette, and she put both hands over her face.
It didn't help. She couldn't stop smiling.
After a while, she stopped trying. She turned it up.