"What's Geneva?" he said.
So she told him. She told him all of it, standing in the bay with the envelope in her hand and Georgie at school and the radio playing something by the Bangles that seemed wildly inappropriate. Two years. Senior interpreter. January. A flat on the lake. Reply by the thirty-first, which was Saturday.
He listened without interrupting. When she had finished he wiped his hands on the rag and put it back in his pocket and nodded, slowly.
"That's a big deal," he said. "That's—that's the top, isn't it? For what you do."
"It's very near it."
"Then you should go."
She was not braced for that, and it went into her like the cold.
"That's it?" she said. "You should go?"
"What do you want me to say?"
"I don't know. Something. Anything. Ask me—" She stopped. "You didn't even think about it. You just handed it to me. Like the water pump. Like the oil change. Like everything. Here, take it, it's free, drive carefully."
"Vivienne—"
"You never let anyone give you anything. Do you know that? Not Pudge. Not me. Not Doris, she told me you haven't let her give you a free cup of coffee since nineteen-seventy-nine. You've spent nine years paying back a woman in a station wagon you'll never see again, and you'll do anything for anybody, and you won't let a single person do one thing for you, because then you might owe them, and if you owe them, they might stay, and if they stay—" She heard her voice and could not stop it. "And if they stay they might leave."
He had gone very still.