When the Hollander Drug Store in New Zeeland, Iowa, announced it was closing after ninety-one years and selling everything at auction, including the old jukebox by the soda fountain, Joyce Vandermeer took two thousand dollars out of the bank in an envelope, because button B-12 on that jukebox was the only thing left that her husband still remembered.
He did not remember her name. He had not said it in fourteen months.
But when she sang a few bars of B-12 in the car, under her breath, sometimes he hummed along.
Joyce was seventy-nine. Gerrit was eighty-two. They had been married for sixty-one years.
They had met at the soda fountain at Hollander Drug in the spring of 1964. She was seventeen, a junior at New Zeeland High School, sitting at the counter with her friend Marcia, drinking a cherry phosphate. He was twenty, with his sleeves rolled up and a toolbox at his feet, working on the jukebox.
Gerrit worked for a vending company out of Des Moines. He drove all over central Iowa fixing jukeboxes and pinball machines in diners and drugstores and bowling alleys. He had the back of the Hollander jukebox open, and he was frowning into it, and Joyce thought he was the most serious young man she had ever seen.
When he closed it up, he turned around and saw her looking at him.
He fished a dime out of his pocket and put it in the slot and pushed two buttons without even looking. B-12.
The record dropped. The song was "Love Me With All Your Heart," by the Ray Charles Singers. It was all over the radio that summer.
"It works now," Gerrit said to her, very seriously. "Would you like to dance?"
There was no dance floor at Hollander Drug. They danced anyway. Right there between the soda fountain and the greeting cards, while Marcia laughed and old Mr. Hollander pretended not to see.
They were married in June of 1965.
For sixty years, B-12 had been their song.
They played it at their wedding reception in the church basement. They played it on their tenth anniversary and their twenty-fifth and their fiftieth. Every time they went into Hollander Drug, for sixty years, Gerrit put a coin in the jukebox and pushed B-12 and asked her to dance between the soda fountain and the greeting cards.
The jukebox was a 1962 Seeburg, chrome and glass, with a little window where you could watch the records turn. Old Mr. Hollander had bought it new. His son had kept it running. His granddaughter, who ran the store now, had kept the same hundred records in it since 1979.
B-12 had never been changed.
Gerrit started forgetting things in 2019.
Little things at first. His keys. The names of the grandchildren. Then bigger things. How to get home from the hardware store. How to tie his shoes. In 2023, he walked out of the house at two in the morning in his pajamas in January, and the sheriff's deputy found him on Main Street, standing in front of Hollander Drug, waiting for it to open.
In 2024, Joyce moved him into the memory care wing at the Prairie Rose care center, on the edge of town. She visited every day from ten to four.
The last time he had said her name was in September of 2025.
Now he called her "ma'am." He was polite to her. He was polite to the mailman. But he did not know who she was.
Except sometimes, in the car, when she drove him around town on Sunday afternoons, and she hummed B-12 under her breath.
Then he would turn his head and look at her, as if he were trying to remember something just on the other side of a door.
The auction was on a Saturday in October, in the drugstore itself. The shelves were empty. Everything that was left had a little numbered tag on it. The soda fountain stools. The old brass cash register. The glass candy jars. The jukebox.
There were about sixty people there. Most of them were from New Zeeland, buying a little something to remember the place by. But there were a few strangers in the back, men with clipboards and good coats.
One of them was a collector from Chicago. Joyce could tell from the way he looked at the jukebox, walking all around it, crouching to look at the back.
The jukebox was the last item.
The auctioneer started it at five hundred dollars. Joyce raised her hand. Somebody else raised theirs. Six hundred. Seven hundred. A thousand. Joyce kept her hand up.
At fifteen hundred, it was just Joyce and the man from Chicago.
Two thousand. Joyce raised her hand one last time, and then put it in her lap, and held her envelope.
The man from Chicago said, "Twenty-five hundred."
Joyce did not move.
"Going once," the auctioneer said. "Going twice. Sold, for twenty-five hundred dollars, to the gentleman in the back."
Joyce sat in her folding chair while the room emptied around her.
She did not cry. She was seventy-nine. She had done her crying in the car, months ago.
When the man from Chicago came up to the jukebox with his receipt, she got up slowly and walked over to him.
"Sir," she said. "My name is Joyce Vandermeer. I wonder if you'd do me a kindness."
She told him. Not all of it. Just enough. Sixty-one years. B-12. A husband in the memory care wing at Prairie Rose who no longer knew her name.
"I'd like to bring him here," she said. "Once. Before you take it. And play B-12. That's all."
The man looked at her for a long time.
"My truck comes Monday at noon," he said. "Bring him Monday morning."
On Monday morning, at ten o'clock, Joyce brought Gerrit to Hollander Drug in the car.
He walked in slowly, holding her arm, in his good blue cardigan. He looked around at the empty shelves without any expression at all.
The man from Chicago was there, waiting. So was the Hollander granddaughter, with her keys.
Joyce walked Gerrit over to the jukebox. She put a quarter in the slot. Her hands were shaking.
She pushed B-12.
Nothing happened.
The record did not drop. The arm did not move. The jukebox sat there humming, with its lights on, doing nothing at all.
She pushed it again. Nothing.
"It's been doing that for a month," the Hollander granddaughter said quietly. "I'm so sorry, Mrs. Vandermeer. We couldn't find anybody who knew how to fix it."
Joyce stood in front of the jukebox with her hand on the button, and for the first time in months, she felt her eyes fill up.
And then, beside her, Gerrit let go of her arm.
He stepped up to the jukebox. He looked at it for a long moment, his head tilted, the way he used to look at an engine.
Then he put out his old hand and laid it flat on the chrome, on the side, just below the record window, as if he were feeling for a heartbeat.