"I see it every October," he said. "Doesn't help."
They sat there. A hawk was turning over the valley without moving its wings. She was aware of him beside her on the bench seat, of the warmth of his arm along the back of it a quarter-inch from her shoulders, and of the fact that neither of them was looking at the view anymore.
"Vivienne," he said.
The CB radio on the dashboard crackled and said, in a voice that was clearly a child's, doing its absolute level best not to be, "Breaker breaker, this is Dispatcher Georgie for Big Tow, come back. Big Tow, Doris says supper is pot roast and she says you have to come down now or she's giving it to the raccoon. Over."
Luc closed his eyes. Then he picked up the handset.
"Big Tow copies, Dispatcher. We're coming down. Over."
"Is Vivienne driving? Over."
"Vivienne's driving. Over."
There was a pause, filled with static and the sound of someone breathing very hard into a microphone. "TEN-FOUR," said the CB, at volume, and went silent.
Vivienne put her face in her hands and laughed until she cried, and then drove them back down the mountain in second gear, carefully, all the way.
On Tuesday night it was movie night, which in the Beaulieu house was a sacrament. They rented Back to the Future on VHS from the shelf at the back of the general store, between the motor oil and the fishing lures, and they ate popcorn out of a mixing bowl on a sofa under a crocheted afghan the colors of a traffic accident. Georgie sat in the middle and narrated, in advance, every single thing that was about to happen, and was asleep by the time the DeLorean hit the clock tower, her head on Vivienne's arm and her feet in her father's lap and her mouth open.
Luc carried her up to bed. Vivienne stood in the living room among the evidence of the household: the forty postcards from forty islands taped along the hallway wall, and in the middle of the refrigerator, newest, held up with a magnet shaped like a lobster, a Polaroid of a woman in a camel coat laughing beside a red car.
He walked her out onto the porch. It was cold, the first really cold night, the kind that comes down out of Canada with stars in it, and their breath went up white. Down the hill the light was still on over the pumps. The old flying horse was creaking on its post in the wind.