It went on like that for both sides, raided from her father's records, the radio, and a Dirty Dancing soundtrack she was, by her own on-tape admission, "not technically allowed to have, but I have not seen the movie, I only have the songs, which is different." She introduced each one. "This one is for if you have to pass a truck. Don't pass the truck unless you can see." "This one is Dad's favorite, it's very old, it's from like nineteen sixty." She gave driving advice. "Don't eat a sandwich while you drive. A man came in once who ate a sandwich and drove into a pond. True story."
And at the end of side A, after the song from 1960, which was the Drifters, there was a silence, and a clunk, and then a different sound: the hollow echo of the garage bay, a radio playing far off, the clank of a wrench, and a man's voice, baritone, not good and not bad and entirely unselfconscious, singing along to "Brown Eyed Girl," getting the words wrong in the second verse and humming through it. And Georgie's voice, very close, whispering, "This is my dad. He doesn't know I'm taping this. He only sings when he thinks there's nobody here. He sang a lot last night. That's all. Bye."
Vivienne pulled off at the next turnout above Lake Champlain and rewound it, and listened again, and then sat for a while with her hands in her lap.
The conference was a ten-day technical meeting of the International Civil Aviation Organization, and it was held in a large, cold, brown hall on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal, and for eight days Vivienne sat in a glass booth with a headset on and turned French into English and English into French on the subject of how not to crash airplanes. A Swiss delegate spoke for forty minutes on checklists, and Vivienne heard herself say, "When the instrument speaks, the crew must listen," and had to put her hand over the microphone for a moment.
The letter from Geneva was in her briefcase the whole time. She had received it in New York the week before she left. It was on the heavy cream paper of the United Nations Office at Geneva, signed by Monsieur Arnaud Valloton, Chief of the French Interpretation Section, who had a beard like a well-trimmed hedge, and it offered her a two-year post as senior interpreter beginning in January 1988, with a reply requested by the thirty-first of October. It was the kind of job people in her profession waited a career for. She would have a flat with a view of the lake, and walk to the Palais des Nations under the chestnut trees, and nobody would ask her to drive anywhere at all. She had brought it to Montreal to decide.
On the first evening she went down to the lobby of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, where there were pay telephones in wood-paneled booths with folding glass doors, and stood in front of one for five minutes, and then went in and dialed the number from the card, which she had taken off Plourde's board and was not at all sure she should have.
"Beaulieu's Garage and Towing," said Georgie, "we tow anything but feelings."
"It's Vivienne," said Vivienne. "Number one hundred."
There was a shriek, a clatter, a muffled bang, and then, at a distance, the sound of Georgie screaming "DAD, IT'S HER, SHE FOUND THE TAPE," and a man's voice saying, "Found what tape?" and a door slamming, and then breathing, and then Luc.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi."
"Car okay?"
"The car is perfect. The car has never been better. I filled it with gas myself in Middlebury."