It was the afternoon he taught her to drive the wrecker.
"Absolutely not," she said, when he held out the keys.
"You drive a five-speed Alfa. This is a four-speed Ford. It's the same idea. It's just bigger and it doesn't care about your feelings."
"I'll kill us both."
He looked at her. "Who told you that?"
She did not answer. He did not ask again. He just got in the passenger side and waited until she climbed up into the driver's seat, which required a step and a handle and a small sound she was not proud of. The gearshift came up out of the floor like a walking stick. She stalled it four times in the lot, and he did not say a single word, only looked out at the mountain with an expression of profound patience, and on the fifth time it went, it rolled, she had it in second and it was going and the whole great thing was moving under her and she let out a sound she had not made since she was nine.
"Where to?" she said.
"Up," he said. "Take the Gap Road."
The Gap Road left Route 100 north of the green and went up the side of the mountain to the west in a series of switchbacks to the pass called Hazen Gap, two thousand four hundred feet up, and then down the other side into the Champlain Valley. It was narrow and steep, with a stone wall on the downhill side, and there was a sign at the bottom that said ROAD NOT MAINTAINED NOV 1 — MAY 1 USE AT OWN RISK. She drove it in second gear the whole way, at fourteen miles an hour, with her knuckles white and her teeth together, and he never once reached for the wheel or told her to slow down or speed up. At the top there was a gravel turnout and a split-rail fence and the whole of Vermont laid out below them, east and west, the color going off down the valleys like fire racing through dry grass, and the light going gold, and the Adirondacks far off in the west like a row of blue sleeping dogs.
She turned off the engine. The silence came in.
"Oh," she said.
"Yeah."
"You see this all the time."