"Yes."
"Huh." She thought about it. "You know what you are? You're a hypocrite. You told me my music was terrible, and you're over there listening to a cat."
"That is a carefully structured piece of—" He stopped. He was not going to argue about Sonic Youth at four in the morning with a jukebox repairwoman. "Look. I'm going to be honest with you. That song ruined my life."
"It saved my grandmother's," said Frankie.
The line was quiet. Sonic Youth went on stepping on the cat.
"What does that mean?" he said finally.
"It means I'm at the Lantern on Monday from two to four, fixing a Galaga that keeps eating quarters. Corner of 26th and Nicollet. Come find out." A yawn. "Bring quarters."
---
The Lantern was a narrow, dark, wood-paneled bar that had been serving Grain Belt and pickled eggs to the same eleven men since the Truman administration. At two on a Monday afternoon it was nearly empty. A television over the bar was showing MTV, which the bartender kept on because, he told Augie unprompted, "it keeps the regulars from talking to each other." A man with a guitar and a sweatband was being animated in pencil sketches. Augie looked away from it on principle.
Frankie was on her back on the floor with her head inside a Galaga cabinet and a flashlight in her teeth.
"You came," she said around the flashlight.
"You said bring quarters." He rattled a paper roll of them.
She slid out on a square of cardboard, sat up, took the flashlight out of her mouth, and studied him. In daylight—or what passed for daylight in the Lantern—she had a dusting of freckles and a scar through one eyebrow and a way of looking at a person as if they were a machine she was about to open up and fix. "You look like you haven't slept."
"I do the overnight at KHLC. I never sleep."
"KHLC? The little Lutheran station? Is that what you were playing at four in the morning?" Her eyes widened. "Oh my God. You were on the air when you called me."
"During a long track."