From the long table, the old man in the cardigan said, "Go on, son," with enormous gravity, and went back to his undershirts.
So Wes Callahan sat down on an overturned laundry basket in the Suds-O-Matic on Grand Avenue, and opened the chipboard case, and took out the red Silvertone from the Sears catalog with its twelve-year-old strings, and played the song about the street.
He played the first verse, the rain on the hill and the white church on top like a cake left out in the weather. He played the second verse, the boy with empty pockets and the stranger with the coin. And then he came to the place where the silence had always been, the held chord and the hole in the middle, and he did not stop. He went up. He went up where the song had always gone down, seven notes instead of five, and he sang about a boy who had been staring at the rain so long he had forgotten there was anyone else in the room, and how one day he finally lifted his eyes, and found that the girl across from him had been there the whole time, holding out her hand, patient as a lamp left burning in a window. He sang it badly, his voice cracking on the high part, the old strings buzzing against the frets. Dryer number nine went round and round behind her.
And then the last verse, which was not the first verse again. It was new. It was only four lines, and it was about a laundromat.
When he finished, nobody said anything. The dryers hummed. The baby on the young mother's shoulder made a small wet sound in its sleep.
Then the Yale student said, "Huh," in a tone of deep philosophical respect, and the old man in the cardigan began, slowly and solemnly, to clap, and the young mother clapped too, carefully, so as not to wake the children.
Delia was crying again. But it was a different kind of crying. She slid down off the folding table and stood in front of him in her jeans and her fisherman's sweater, and she held out her hand, palm up, the way she had held it down to him last night across the dark.
He put the franc in it.
She closed her fingers around it. Then she pushed her other hand into his shaggy hair and bent down and kissed him, properly this time, not on the cheek, while he was still sitting on the overturned laundry basket with the Silvertone squashed between them, and it was not like the movies, it was awkward and salty and the guitar made a twanging protest and her knee knocked the case, and it was the best thing that had ever happened to him in his life.