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I watched her longer than I meant to. For months I'd told myself that women like Lorrie didn't stay in places like Side A. They visited them, took summer jobs, dated someone their parents didn't approve of, listened to records nobody played at the country club, then eventually went back to their house on the lake and men who wore good shoes and knew exactly where their lives were headed, their future already planned out.

Maybe she'd marry Paul and move to Cleveland, and years from now Side A would be nothing more than the record store where she'd worked for a summer before her real life began.

But standing behind the counter while she laughed at Brian, I had the uncomfortable thought that maybe I'd decided all of that before Lorrie had ever had the chance to tell me what she wanted.

She looked up and caught me watching her.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

I picked up the nearest invoice and stared at a column of numbers without seeing any of them.

Twin/Tone needed an answer. Martin Vale's card waited beneath the register. Paul Ellsworth occupied a place in Lorrie's life that I didn't know how to compete with and wasn't sure I had the right to try.

All of that should have mattered more than the fact that she was sitting on the floor of my record store laughing.

It didn't.

And that was when I finally understood I’d fallen for her and I was in way over my head.

7

Lorrie

Wednesday — August 15, 1984

By that evening, State Street had settled into the strange Wednesday-night rhythm I remembered from Side A, when the after-work people were gone, the dinner crowd hadn’t yet decided whether they needed music afterward, and the students who came through the door seemed to have nowhere particular to be.

The front windows reflected the inside of the store. The box fans were still running, and every time the front door opened, a brief wash of cooler air came in from the sidewalk along with cigarette smoke, perfume, and the noise of people moving toward bars and restaurants farther down the street.

I stood behind the register with a pricing gun in one hand and a stack of cassettes in the other, and for the first time since finding myself back in 1984, I forgot to think about the fact that I didn’t belong here.

A woman wearing white sandals came in looking for Tina Turner, then left with Private Dancer and a copy of Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual after she heard Cyndi playing in the store.

A college boy with a mullet and a sleeveless Wisconsin shirt wanted something “less obvious” than Van Halen for the girl he was trying to impress, so I handed him R.E.M. and told him not to claim he’d discovered them.

He stared at the album. “Will she know?”

“If she does, she’s too good for you.”

Dean looked up from the counter.

The boy laughed and bought it along with a used copy of Loverboy Get Lucky.

“That’s excellent customer service,” Dean said after the door closed.

“I made two sales.”

“You also insulted him.”

“He seemed to enjoy it.”

“That’s Brian’s business model too.”

Brian had left an hour earlier after announcing that he needed to recover someplace that served beer. That left Dean and me to finish closing while Otis moved from one favorite spot to another.

I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed this.