"I can't," she said finally. "I can't be the last one. That's too important. Give it to somebody who needs it."
"You needed it," said Luc.
She looked up. He was leaning in the doorway of the bay with his arms crossed and the October light behind him.
"It isn't the money," he said. "I know you've got the money. Saw the watch. It's—" He stopped, and frowned, and seemed to try again. "That lady in the station wagon. She didn't do it because we were broke. We were broke, but that wasn't why. She did it because I was scared to death and twenty-eight years old and I'd just put my wife and my kid in a ditch, and I'd have spent the rest of my life thinking I couldn't get the people I loved where they were going. And she said drive carefully, and what she meant was, you're going to drive again. You're going to be fine. Go on." He uncrossed his arms. "You're nineteen days into driving. Your first big trip. And the first thing that happens, the car blows up on you in the middle of nowhere. You could go home thinking you're the kind of person cars blow up on. Or you could go on to Montreal thinking you're the kind of person who pulled over right and got helped and kept going. I'd rather you thought the second thing. That's all. That's what it's for."
The bay was very quiet. Out on Route 100 a station wagon full of leaf people went by at eleven miles an hour.
"Also you have to sign the card," Georgie said. "And I have to take your picture."
The card was an index card, ruled, with GOOD TURN #100 lettered across the top, and it said, I, ________, PROMISE TO DRIVE CAREFULLY AND PAY IT ON WHEN I CAN, and there was a line for a signature. Vivienne signed it with her fountain pen, and Georgie blew on the ink, and then made her stand beside the Alfa and took her picture with a Polaroid camera the size of a toaster. The camera whirred and spat out the square, and they all three stood and watched it come up out of the gray, the red car and the woman in the camel coat, her scarf blowing, her face doing something she did not recognize at first and then did. She was laughing. In the picture she was laughing, with her head back, and behind her in the doorway, at the edge of the frame, Luc Beaulieu was watching her do it.
"That's going on the wall," Georgie said.
Vivienne drove out of Coldwater at twelve-twenty, north, with both hands on the wheel at ten and two. In the rearview mirror she could see them for a long time, the man and the girl in the gravel lot under the old flying horse, the girl waving with both arms like someone guiding in a plane, the man with one hand raised and not moving, until the road bent around the shoulder of the mountain and the trees closed over them.
She did not find the tape until Middlebury.
She had pulled into a gas station and filled the tank herself for the first time, and when she got back in the car she opened the glove compartment for her map and a cassette fell out into her lap. It was a Maxell, the cheap kind, in a cracked case, and the label was written in the looping ballpoint she now knew anywhere. FOR #100, it said. DRIVING MUSIC (CAREFUL). And underneath, smaller: DO NOT PLAY UNTIL YOU ARE ON THE ROAD. THIS MEANS YOU.
The Alfa had an aftermarket tape deck, installed by the periodontist, presumably for his Sunday Mantovani. Vivienne waited until she was back on the road, because it meant her, and pushed the cassette in.
There was a hiss, and a clunk, and then Georgie's voice, very close to the microphone, breathing loudly. "Hi. This is Georgie. This is a mixtape. I made it last night after you went to Doris's. I stayed up till ten-thirty, which is a really long time. Okay. The first song is for when you are leaving. It is by U2. Okay. Bye." There was a clunk, and then, recorded off the radio with the first two seconds missing and a disc jockey's voice faintly over the opening chords, the jangling ringing guitar of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For."
Vivienne laughed out loud, alone in the car.