She had a reason, worked out at length in the manner of a woman preparing remarks for a hostile delegation. She owed him money, and she paid her debts. She had a week of leave coming. She would stay at Doris's, pay what she owed by force if necessary, and leave on Wednesday.
She pulled into the gravel lot at Beaulieu's Garage at four in the afternoon. Georgie was on the roof of the office, for reasons never satisfactorily explained, and saw her first.
What followed would be referred to in Coldwater, for some years afterward, as the Payment War.
It began that same evening, when Vivienne, having been fed meat loaf by Doris and installed again under the submarine poster, went across to the garage at seven while Luc was at a Little League parents' meeting at the town hall and slipped two hundred dollars in twenties into the coffee can by the register where he kept the petty cash. She felt magnificent. She felt like a spy.
On Saturday morning she came out to the Alfa and found the two hundred dollars folded into a neat square and tucked inside the cassette case of Georgie's tape in the glove box, along with a note on the back of an oil change sticker in square block capitals: NICE TRY.
On Saturday afternoon she went into Doris's and paid for a month of Luc's breakfasts in advance. Doris, who was watching developments like a woman with a front-row seat, took the money and wrote LUC — PAID TO NOV 24 on an index card and stuck it on the cash register with a smiley face.
On Sunday morning Vivienne came out to find the Alfa washed and waxed, the cracked leather treated with something that smelled of saddles, the chrome polished until it hurt to look at, and a new set of floor mats in place with ALFA ROMEO embroidered on them, which could only have come from Pudge Fortin's yard. Under the wiper was another sticker: YOUR MOVE.
On Monday he changed her oil and adjusted her clutch, which he said had been "riding high, like it thought it was better than everybody," and it was like driving on butter.
On Monday afternoon she bought Georgie a new pair of sneakers, white leather high-tops with Velcro straps, the expensive kind, from the sporting goods store in Rutland, and Georgie, who was technically neutral, accepted them with the dignity of a head of state receiving tribute, and then went and wrote on the chalkboard in the garage, under the great sunburst of 100, in two columns: VIVIENNE 4, DAD 4. TIE GAME.
"She can't count the sneakers," said Luc, coming in from the lot and looking at it. "The sneakers weren't for me."
"I'm the dispatcher," said Georgie. "I count what I want."
But the war was not, really, what that week was. It was only the excuse for it. What it was, Vivienne would think later, was the most ordinary week of her life, and the one she could remember most clearly, each hour of it, like stones in a creek.
It was Doris's coffee at six with the farmers coming in from milking smelling of frost. It was the bay doors going up on their tracks and the radio out of Burlington playing Whitney Houston and Bon Jovi, and handing him a nine-sixteenths when he held out his hand for it without looking, and getting it right the second time.