It started at one corner of her mouth, and she tried to stop it—he watched her try—pressing her lips together, looking at the ceiling, looking at the Herb Alpert sign, looking at anything else. It didn't work. It spread. It got into her cheeks and crinkled up the corners of her eyes and then it was everywhere, a smile so wide and so delighted that the Edina kid took a step back from it, as if it might be contagious.
"Augie," she said.
"It's a common name."
"Is it."
"There are lots of Augies."
"Name three."
He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. In his ears Big Jim Brekke was reading the farm report.
Frankie put both elbows on the counter and her chin in her hands, and she looked at him with an expression he had seen before only on small children at the Minnesota State Fair seeing their first two-headed calf.
"You," she said, and couldn't stop smiling, "are going to help me find that record."
II.
He did not help her find that record. What he did, in point of fact, was say "Excuse me" in a high, strangled voice, put her headphones down on the counter as carefully as if they were wired to explode, and walk into the back room, where Gordy Haugen looked up from a stack of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass and said, "You look like you saw a ghost."
"I heard one."
"Anybody I know?"
"Me," said Augie, and sat down on a box of Mantovani.
Gordy, who was sixty and had sold records through Elvis, the Beatles, disco and the Bee Gees, and had survived all of it by never asking a follow-up question, went out front and rang up the woman in the coverall himself. She bought nothing. She left a note on the back of a receipt. Gordy brought it back between two fingers like a summons.
It said: Augie Nyquist. Sixteen years old. Reaching for high notes. I'll be back. —F.S. And underneath, a phone number, and underneath that, as if she couldn't help herself, a small drawing of a crescent moon with a smile on it.