"I do. I've been standing in that hallway for two hours trying to figure out how I could ever pay it back, and I can't. So I owe you." He looked at her. His wrist was strapped in an elastic bandage from Dr. Marchand's cabinet, and there was snow on his shoulders, and he looked tired and battered and about twenty-eight years old. "Vivienne. How much do I owe?"
She had thought about this. She had thought about it in French and in English, coming down the mountain, with her hands on the wheel and a woman crying in the back seat and the tape playing.
"You have to ask," she said. "That's the price. You have to ask me for something. Out loud. In your own words. And you have to let me give it to you."
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said it, very low, as if it were a language he was only just learning.
"Come back."
She let out a breath she seemed to have been holding since a cornfield north of Rochester.
"I called Geneva this morning," she said. "From Doris's. Monsieur Valloton is a very patient man, it turns out, when you tell him exactly what you want. I'm not going for two years. I'm going for the winter session. January to June. Six months. He was not happy. He said I was a very difficult woman. And then he said that interpreters with nerves of steel are hard to find and he supposed six months of me was better than none." She looked up at him. "I fly out of Montreal on the fourth of January. And I come back in June. And I was going to ask whether you could look after my car while I'm gone. I think it needs a proper going-over. The kind that takes a long time."
He looked at the Alfa. He looked at her.
"Could take six months," he said.
"That's what I'm counting on."
He laughed, a real one, surprised out of him, the way he had laughed in the bay the first morning, and he kissed her there in the snow beside the little red car, with his good hand on her face and his bad one held out to the side so as not to hurt, and up the hill a window went up in the dark farmhouse, and a small voice that had clearly not been asleep at all called down across the snow, "I SAW THAT," and the window came down again, and an amber light behind the glass began to go off-on-off, off-on-off, like a signal to a plane coming in.
In the morning, when Luc came down to open the bay, he found the green ledger open on the workbench under the chalkboard. The last page, which ended with Vivienne's name and the gouged figure 100, had a new entry at the bottom of it, in looping ballpoint, written, by the look of it, by flashlight, in a hurry, after bedtime.
OWED BY DAD TO VIVIENNE W.: ONE (1) RIDE HOME FROM THE AIRPORT. DATE: JUNE. PAY ON TIME. DRIVE CAREFULLY.