"Danielle," she said, more gently. "That's it, isn't it? You never asked her to stay either."
"I asked her," he said quietly. "I asked her every way I knew how. For two years. And she left anyway. And Georgie was two, and Georgie stood in that driveway in her pajamas and waved at a Greyhound bus." He looked at her. "So no. I'm not going to ask you not to take the best job in the world. I'm not going to ask anybody for anything. I'm going to fix your car and tell you to drive carefully. It's what I know how to do."
There was a sound from the door of the office.
Georgie was standing there with her backpack over one shoulder. School had let out early for teachers' conferences. She had heard. Vivienne could see in her face exactly how much she had heard.
"You're going to Switzerland," Georgie said.
"Georgie—"
"That's like an ocean away. That's farther than Florida." Her chin was doing something. "I was going to show you the parade. I was going to show you my costume. I've been making it for a month. It lights up." And she turned around and ran, out of the bay and across the lot and up the hill to the house, her new high-tops flashing white, and the screen door banged behind her like a gunshot.
Georgie did not come down for supper that night, and on Thursday, when Vivienne climbed the hill with a bag of Doris's maple doughnuts as an offering of peace, the voice from the top of the stairs said, "The dispatcher is closed," and a door shut. Luc was polite. That was the worst of it. On Thursday night she sat on the bed under the submarine poster with her suitcase packed at her feet and the Geneva letter on the quilt and listened to the river, and some time after midnight she looked out of the window and the light was on in the left bay again, and the shape was moving in it, back and forth, though there was nothing in there to fix.
On Friday morning she went up the hill before the bus, and stood at the bottom of the porch steps, and called up at the window over the porch roof, which she knew by now was Georgie's, the one with the cardboard bat taped to the glass.
"I need a dispatcher," she called. "I have a broken costume and no idea how to fix it."
There was a long silence. Then the window went up two inches.
"You don't have a costume," said Georgie.
"I have a costume that belongs to someone else. I've heard it lights up. I've heard it's been a month in the making and that the parade is tomorrow night. I've heard that the light doesn't work."