"Lot of sense in that." He let the hood down gently, not slamming it. "Well. I'm Luc. We're going to tow you into Coldwater, it's about eleven miles. I can get a belt easy, but the pump's going to be the trouble. Nobody between here and Burlington keeps an Alfa pump on the shelf. Might be Monday. Might be Tuesday. Where you headed?"
"Montreal," Vivienne said. "I'm due on Monday morning. I'm working at a conference."
"Monday morning." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Okay. Let me make some calls. No promises."
"He always says no promises," Georgie said, "and then he promises."
"Go hook up the chains, dispatcher."
Vivienne watched them work, the man and the girl, as though it were a piece of choreography they had rehearsed for years. Georgie dragged the chains out of the bed with both hands, staggering, refusing help, and fed them to him under the front of the Alfa, and he lay down on his back on the gravel in his vest and reached up under the car and hooked them to something, talking to it under his breath. "There you go. Easy. Nobody's going to hurt you." Then he worked a lever on the side of the truck and the boom groaned and the Alfa's nose rose slowly into the air like a lady being helped up from a low chair.
"Beaulieu," Vivienne said, when he came round to check the chains. She said it the way it was written, the way her grandmother in Lyon would have said it, the vowels round and forward: bo-lyuh. "That's a beautiful name. Beautiful place."
He stopped, with one hand on the chain.
"Nobody's said it like that," he said, "since my grandmother died. Around here it's Bool-yer. Been Bool-yer since about nineteen-twenty."
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to correct you."
"No," he said slowly. "No, you didn't." And then, as if it had cost him something he hadn't budgeted for: "Say it again?"
She did. Georgie, from the far side of the Alfa, said, "What? What'd she say?" and Luc said, "Nothing. Get in the truck," and did not look at Vivienne again until they were all three sitting in the cab of the wrecker with the Alfa hanging off the back of it, Georgie in the middle with her clipboard on her knees and her Walkman playing tinnily around her neck, rolling north toward Coldwater through a tunnel of burning trees.
The cab of the wrecker smelled of coffee and diesel and, faintly, of strawberry, which turned out to be a lip balm Georgie applied every four minutes with the air of a pilot running through a checklist. On the dashboard there was a CB radio, a plastic hula girl, and a Polaroid of Georgie at perhaps four, sitting on an engine block with a wrench in each hand, grinning like a bandit.
"So," Georgie said, uncapping a pen. "I have to do the form."