Dr. Marchand lived over his office on the south side of the green, and he was waiting at the door in his slippers, because Georgie had raised him on the CB from the switchback using the full set of radio protocols she had learned off television, and also, once, a word she had learned off her father.
Emily Winslow was born at nine-forty that night, in the examining room of a country doctor's office in Coldwater, Vermont, in the first snow of the winter, while a nine-year-old girl in a cardboard tow truck sat on the bench in the hall with her flasher still going, and her father sat beside her with his wrist in a bag of frozen peas from Doris's freezer, and a woman in a camel coat with snow melting in her hair sat on his other side with her hands shaking so hard she had to hold them between her knees.
At ten-fifteen Martin Winslow came out into the hallway, crying freely and without embarrassment, holding his checkbook.
"I don't know how to thank you," he said to Vivienne. "Any of you. I don't know what—tell me, please. How much do I owe you?"
Vivienne looked at Luc. Luc looked at Georgie. Georgie looked up at Vivienne with an expression of the most enormous, the most strenuous, the most unbearable anticipation, and Vivienne turned back to Martin Winslow and put her hand over his on the checkbook, and closed it.
"Nothing at all," she said. "Just drive carefully."
There was a sound beside her like a teakettle reaching the boil. Georgie was off the bench and through the door of the office and back again before anyone could stop her, with a fresh index card from the doctor's desk and a ballpoint pen, and she sat down on the floor of the hall in her tow truck and wrote across the top of it in enormous letters, GOOD TURN #1, and under that, VIVIENNE'S, and she held it up for them all to see.
"It's a new book," she said. "It goes on. That's how it works. You don't pay it back. You pay it on."
They named the baby Emily Vivienne. Juliet Winslow insisted, from the examining table, in a voice that did not admit of argument. Georgie said that was how it worked around here.
It was after midnight when they walked back across the green. The snow had stopped. The town was white and silent and all the jack-o'-lanterns had gone out, and the stars had come back over Coldwater as if somebody had swept the sky. Doris had walked Georgie home an hour before, asleep on her feet, the tow truck still on her shoulders. The garage was dark except for the one bulb over the pumps, and the snow lay in a clean sheet across the lot, with only the Bronco's tracks in it.
They stopped beside the Alfa, which was sitting where she had left it with three inches of snow on its black canvas top, like frosting.
"I owe you," Luc said.
"No."