Not one person in the drugstore moved.
Gerrit stood with his palm flat against the side of the jukebox. His eyes were half closed. He tilted his head, listening.
Joyce knew that look. She had not seen it in five years.
It was the look he got when he had the back off a jukebox in a diner in Pella or Knoxville or Oskaloosa, with a cup of coffee going cold on the counter, listening to a machine tell him what was wrong with it.
He moved his hand two inches lower. Then a little to the left.
Then he made a fist, and he struck the side of the jukebox once, hard, with the flat bottom of his hand.
Thump.
Somewhere inside the machine, something clicked.
The man from Chicago took a step forward.
"Well, I'll be," he said softly. "The Seeburg thump. I've read about it. The old route men used to do that when the selector got sticky. You had to know exactly where to hit."
Gerrit did not hear him. He reached into the pocket of his blue cardigan, the pocket where for forty years he had always kept a few coins for jukeboxes. There was nothing in it now. Joyce had emptied his pockets for years.
He looked down at his empty hand in confusion.
Joyce opened her purse with shaking fingers and found a quarter and put it in his palm.
Gerrit looked at the quarter. He looked at the coin slot. He put it in.
Then, without looking, the way he had at twenty years old, he pushed two buttons.
B. Twelve.
The arm moved. The record slid out of the rack and dropped onto the turntable. The needle came down.
A soft crackle.
And then, in the empty drugstore, between the bare shelves and the old soda fountain, "Love Me With All Your Heart" began to play.
Joyce put her hand over her mouth.
Gerrit stood very still in front of the jukebox, listening. His head was tilted. His eyes were on the little window where the record turned around and around.
The first verse played. Then the chorus.
Then he turned around.
He looked at Joyce. Not past her, the way he had for fourteen months. At her. His eyes moved over her face slowly, as if he were reading something written there in very small print.
"It works now," Gerrit said.
Joyce could not speak.
"Would you like to dance?" he said. And then, after a moment, very carefully, as if he had found it somewhere in a dark room and was carrying it out into the light:
"Joyce."
They danced between the soda fountain and the empty greeting card racks, slowly, the way old people dance, holding on to each other more than moving. His cheek against her hair. Her hand on his shoulder, where it had been for sixty-one years.
The Hollander granddaughter was crying openly. The man from Chicago had turned his back and was looking out the front window at Main Street with his hands in his pockets.
The song lasted two minutes and forty seconds.
When it ended, Gerrit did not let go. He stood there holding her, swaying a little, in the silence.
"Joyce," he said again, quietly, into her hair. "Where have you been?"
"Right here," she whispered. "I've been right here the whole time."
By the time she got him back in the car, he was gone again.
He sat in the passenger seat in his blue cardigan, looking out the window at the houses going by, and when she spoke to him, he turned and smiled at her politely and said, "Yes, ma'am."
Joyce drove him back to Prairie Rose with both hands on the wheel. She did not cry. She was too full of something else.
He had said her name. Twice. She had heard it.
On Tuesday morning, the man from Chicago called her at home.
"Mrs. Vandermeer," he said. "My name is Paul Lisowski. I've been collecting jukeboxes for thirty years. I have forty-one of them in a warehouse outside Chicago." He paused. "I don't need forty-two."
Joyce did not understand.
"I talked to the people at Prairie Rose this morning," he said. "The director says they have a sunroom off the memory care wing. With a good outlet. And a little floor space." He cleared his throat. "My truck can be there at noon. If that's all right with you."
Joyce sat down at her kitchen table.
"Mr. Lisowski," she said. "I can't let you do that. You paid twenty-five hundred dollars."
"Mrs. Vandermeer," he said. "I've been to a thousand auctions. I've never once seen what I saw yesterday. I'd say I got my money's worth."
The jukebox arrived at the Prairie Rose care center that afternoon, and the maintenance man plugged it in, in the corner of the sunroom, by the window where the light came in.
The Hollander granddaughter came by with a roll of quarters and taped a note to the top.
FREE PLAY. SINCE 1964.
It still sticks sometimes. The nurses have all learned where to hit it.
But Gerrit does not need them to. Every afternoon at three o'clock, when Joyce comes to the sunroom, he walks over to the jukebox, lays his hand flat on the side, feels for the place, and thumps it once.
Then he pushes B-12, without looking.
Most days, he does not know her name.
Some days, when the song begins, he does.