The window went up another inch. "Who told you that?"
"Doris."
"Doris has a big mouth." A pause. "It's the flasher. It goes on but it won't go off-on-off. It just stays on. It's supposed to go off-on-off."
"I don't know anything about flashers," said Vivienne. "But I know a man who does, and he's in the bay pretending to work on nothing. And I know that I'm not leaving until Sunday. I was going to leave tomorrow. I'm not. I'd like to see the parade. If the dispatcher will have me."
The window shut. Vivienne stood in the frost and thought she had lost. Then the front door opened, and Georgie came out in her pajamas and her father's barn jacket, carrying in both arms, like an infant, a tow truck.
It was made from refrigerator boxes, painted white for the cab and green for the bed, with GEORGIE'S on the doors in gold glitter, a boom made from a broom handle, and a bent coat hanger for a hook. It went over her shoulders on a pair of old suspenders. On top of the cab was the amber dome of a flasher lamp off a road-construction barrier, wired with great ambition and very little science to a lantern battery.
"Oh, Georgie," Vivienne said. "It's magnificent."
"It doesn't flash."
"Then we'll make it flash."
They made it flash. Or rather, Luc made it flash, because when the two of them came marching down the hill and into the bay with the tow truck held between them, he looked at it for a long moment and then at his daughter and then at Vivienne, and something in his shoulders let go, and he cleared the bench and got out his soldering iron and a turn-signal relay from an old Plymouth, and the three of them stood around the workbench in the cold early light with their heads together until it went off-on-off, off-on-off, amber across the walls and the license plates and the great chalk sunburst of 100, and Georgie missed the bus, and nobody cared.
On Saturday, the thirty-first of October, it began to snow.
It was not supposed to. The radio had said flurries in the high elevations, and the morning came up clear and blue, and Vivienne went across to Doris's at ten o'clock and used the pay telephone at the end of the counter for twenty-two minutes, with a stack of quarters and a number in Geneva, speaking French very quietly with one hand over her other ear. Doris, who heard everything, refilled the same cup of coffee four times and said not a word, which in Doris was heroic. When Vivienne hung up, she sat with her hands flat on the counter. "I told him what I wanted," she said, sounding surprised. "In my own words. I've said a million words into a microphone and I don't think I've ever done that before. Don't ask me what. I have to work out how to say it in English first."
By three o'clock the clouds had come over Hazen Gap like a lid on a pot. By four it was snowing in earnest, big wet flakes that lay on the last of the red leaves and the pumpkins on the porches, and Coldwater looked out of its windows and went on with the parade anyway, because it had held one every year since 1947.