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Frankie Szymanski fixed things for a living.
Specifically, she fixed the things that Gopher State Amusements leased to bars, bowling alleys, laundromats, and pizza parlors across the Twin Cities: jukeboxes, pinball machines, cigarette machines, and—her favorite—the arcade cabinets that had arrived in a glorious flood in the early eighties and never left. She drove a white Ford Econoline van with a Ms. Pac-Man decal peeling off the side and a heater that worked only when it felt like it. She had a route sheet on a clipboard, a coffee can full of quarters she had to account for to the penny, and a cassette deck she'd installed in the dash herself, with wires that hung down under the steering column like a nest of snakes.
That afternoon she replaced a cracked joystick on a Galaga at Bev's Lanes in Columbia Heights, unjammed a coin mech on a Gauntlet at a pizza place on Central where the owner kept trying to pay her in breadsticks, and spent forty minutes inside the guts of a Wurlitzer at a VFW in St. Anthony because someone had fed it a Canadian quarter and a Life Saver. Every time she closed a panel she found herself smiling again, and had to stop, and then started again.
His face. The way the color had gone out of it like water down a drain. Name three.
She finished at five-thirty, when the sky was already black and the streetlights along Broadway were hazed with ice crystals. She didn't go home. She drove to Northeast, where the church steeples were thick as fence posts and the bars all had Polish names, and parked in the lot behind St. Casimir's Home.
The night nurse was Dolores Mattila, a broad Finnish woman from the Iron Range who had a laugh like a snowplow and hands that could lift a grown man without apparent effort. She looked up from the station as Frankie stamped the snow off her boots.
"She had a pretty good day," Dolores said. "Ate most of her lunch. Pulled the call cord twice just to see me come running. I think she's flirting."
"She always liked a woman in white shoes."
Room 214 was warm in the way of all such places, too warm, the radiator clanking, the air smelling of talcum powder and floor wax and the faint sweetness of canned peaches. A television on a bracket in the corner was showing MTV with the sound off; a man with a remarkable amount of hair was singing silently on a beach. Under it, in a vinyl chair with a crocheted afghan across her knees, sat Wanda Szymanski, seventy-one years old, eighty-nine pounds, with white hair pinned up exactly the way she had pinned it every morning of Frankie's life.
Babcia had had a stroke a year and a half ago. Before it she had been a woman who talked—who talked to the butcher, the mailman, the priest, the television, the pierogi dough, and, at great length, to God, whom she addressed in Polish and occasionally scolded. After it, the words had mostly gone. Not all at once; they'd drained away over months like sand from a sack, and what was left now was a handful—tak, nie, ptaszku, and sometimes, out of nowhere, the name of a long-dead neighbor or the price of a pound of kielbasa in 1952.
Ptaszku. Little bird. That was what she'd called Frankie since the day she was born, and that was what Frankie still answered to, inside.
"Hi, Babcia." Frankie kissed the papery forehead and pulled the other chair close. "I fixed a Galaga today. And I met a boy."
Babcia's eyes moved to her. They were still sharp, sometimes. Sometimes they were very far away.
"Not a boy. A man. Sort of. A man who works in a record store and wears his coat inside and thinks he's better than everybody." She unclipped the Walkman. "He's the one who sings our song."
She didn't expect it to mean anything. She had stopped expecting things to mean anything, mostly. She put one earpad gently against Babcia's ear and kept the other against her own, so that their heads were close, temple to temple, the cord looping between them. She'd rewound it in the van. She pressed play.