"Nineteen seventy-six Spider," he said. "Girl drove it into a stone wall in Pittsford. Girl's fine. Wall's fine. Car's in four pieces. Pump's perfect. Smell that? That's Italian."
"It smells like antifreeze," said Luc.
"Italian antifreeze."
Luc tried to pay him. Pudge would not take it; Luc had towed his mother out of a snowbank in January. Pudge left a ten-dollar bill under the wrecker's wiper for the coffee, and Luc found it an hour later and put it in an envelope addressed to Mrs. Fortin, Waterbury, without a word.
Vivienne sat on an upturned bucket in the bay and watched the pump go on. She had brought a copy of the conference documents to read and did not read them. She watched his hands. He worked without hurry and without wasted motion, and every so often he talked to the car, not baby talk but the way you would talk to a nervous horse, and once when a bolt would not seat he stood back, wiped his hands on a rag, and said to it, quite seriously, "Signora, per favore," and it went in.
"You speak Italian," Vivienne said.
"I speak Italian to Alfas. Fiats too. That's about all the Italian I've got." He tightened something. "Picked it up off a guy I worked for in Hartford, when I was twenty. He said you got to say please to them or they sulk."
"He was right. Italian is a language for persuading."
"What's French for?"
She considered. "Explaining why something is someone else's fault."
He laughed, a real one, surprised out of him, and Georgie, who had been sitting on the workbench in front of the chalkboard all morning swinging her heels and guarding it, laughed too, though she could not have heard.
By eleven-forty the belt was on and the coolant was in and the Alfa was idling in the bay with a sound like a cat purring in a tin, and the needle sat in the middle of the gauge, and the little red light was out. Luc ran it up and down the road twice, Georgie in the passenger seat with her arms in the air like a girl on a roller coaster, and brought it back and parked it out front by the pumps, facing north, toward Montreal, with the engine running.
Vivienne stood beside it with her purse open and her checkbook in her hand.
"How much do I owe?" she said.