He was tall and long-armed and a little stooped, the way tall men get from years of leaning over engines. He was perhaps thirty-eight. He had brown hair that needed cutting and a blue chamois shirt with the sleeves pushed up over forearms that were frankly unfair, and over that a canvas work vest. His eyes were gray and creased at the corners and they looked at her, she would remember afterward, not up and down, the way men in New York looked at her, pricing the coat and the scarf and the watch, but straight on, once, the way a doctor looks at you when you come in holding your arm funny.
"You all right?" he said.
"I'm fine. Thank you. It's the car."
"Usually is." He walked past her to the Alfa, laid the back of his hand flat against the hood the way you would test a child's forehead, and then reached in through the open driver's window, felt along under the dash on the passenger side, and pulled something. The hood popped up an inch.
"Oh," Vivienne said. "It's there."
"They put it on the wrong side," he said. "Italians. Gorgeous cars. Built 'em like they were writing opera. Every so often they put something on the wrong side just to see if you're paying attention." He lifted the hood and propped it, and a last breath of steam rolled out and away over the corn. He looked in for a while without saying anything. Georgie stood at his elbow with her clipboard and looked in too, with exactly the same tilt of the head, and Vivienne, who had spent fifteen years in glass booths listening to men explain things, found that she was holding her breath.
"Fan belt," he said at last. He reached in and drew out a limp black rubber strip, shredded at one end like a bad rope. "Went to pieces. Took the water pump with it, looks like, or the pump went first and took the belt. That's what that is." He pointed at a crusted pale-green stain running down the front of the engine. "Weeping a while. Coolant. Previous owner drive it much?"
"Sundays. He was a periodontist."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "Well, there you go. Gum man. Sundays. Car sits six days a week, the seals dry out." He looked at her over the top of the hood. "You did right, stopping. You'd have kept going another five miles, you'd have cooked the head. Then we'd be talking about a whole different afternoon."
"Mr. Adebayo said when the car shouts, you stop."
"Who's Mr. Adebayo?"
"My driving instructor."
He looked at her a moment longer than he needed to. She saw him glance past her through the windshield at the dashboard, where her temporary license was tucked into the corner of the speedometer bezel because she had not yet bought a wallet that it fit, and she saw him read it, or read enough of it, and she felt her face go warm. But all he said was, "Sounds like a smart man."
"He's from Lagos. He says New York drivers are the worst in the world except for Lagos drivers, who are the best, because they have to be."