And at the bottom of the last page, freshly written that morning in ballpoint with the 100 traced over three times so that it had gouged the paper, was VIVIENNE WAINWRIGHT, WEST 74TH STREET, MANHATTAN. RED ALFA. WATER PUMP + BELT. SHE PULLED OVER RIGHT AWAY.
"I don't understand," Vivienne said, though she was beginning to.
"Tell her, Dad."
"You tell her. You're going to anyway."
Georgie took a deep breath. She had clearly been waiting to tell this story to someone who had not heard it for a very long time, possibly her entire life.
"Okay," she said. "So. It's February, nineteen seventy-eight. There's a blizzard. The biggest blizzard ever in New England, you can look it up. And my mom is going to have me. Like, right then. And the hospital is in Hanover, New Hampshire, which is like an hour away when it isn't a blizzard. So Dad puts Mom in the truck. Not this truck. The old truck. And they go. And the truck goes off the road on Eighty-Nine by the exit for Sharon and gets stuck in a snowbank and won't come out, and Dad is a mechanic, and he can't fix it, because it's not broken, it's just stuck, and you can't fix stuck. And my mom is yelling. And I'm coming."
She paused for effect. She had, Vivienne thought, a natural sense of theater.
"And then," Georgie said, "a snowplow comes. And the guy driving the snowplow is named George Ouellette, and he's like a hundred years old with a beard down to here, and he says, 'Get in.' And they get in the plow. And then behind the plow there's a lady in a station wagon who also stopped, and she has blankets, and she gives them to my mom, and she follows the plow all the way to Hanover with her flashers on so nobody hits them, and they get to the hospital, and I'm born in the hallway because there's no time to get to the room. In the hallway! And Dad tries to give them all his money, which was like sixty dollars, and George won't take it, and the station wagon lady won't take it either. And she says—"
Georgie turned to her father, and Luc took his hand down from his face, and said, quietly, in a voice that was not quite his own, as though he were hearing it again across nine years of winters:
"'Nothing at all, honey. Just drive carefully.'"
"And he said," Georgie said, "'How do I pay you back?' And she said, 'You don't. You pay it on.' And so he promised. One hundred. One hundred people, for free, no matter what. And I got named Georgiana, after George, which is George with a dress on, which is okay, because I'm the only one in my whole school. And we never found out the station wagon lady's name. She just drove away. And Dad's been doing it ever since and now he's done and you're the last one." She took another breath. "Number one hundred. And I picked you."
"You picked me?"
"He lets me pick. Since I was six. I pick who gets to be on the list. Not everybody. Some people are jerks. And I picked you yesterday on the phone, because you said you stopped right away, and you said your name like you meant it." She frowned. "I almost picked the guy last Tuesday with the Buick, but he called me 'sweetheart,' so."
Vivienne looked down at the ledger, at her own name in its tremendous careful letters at the bottom of nine years of strangers. A nun. A calf. Pepper, Ginger, and Mr. Biggs. She found that she could not, for a moment, say anything at all, in any of her languages.