Vivienne opened her mouth and then closed it again. Luc, driving, glanced across at her over his daughter's cap and then back at the road.
"No," Vivienne said. "I suppose I don't."
"That's the saddest job I ever heard of," said Georgie, and wrote it down.
Coldwater, Vermont, population 1,140 according to the sign, sat in the elbow of a river where the valley pinched in between two mountains. There was a green with a bandstand and a Civil War soldier who had lost the tip of his bayonet, a white church, a general store with a post office in the back, and a diner made out of an old railroad car painted cream and red, with a neon sign in the window that said DORIS'S and under it, smaller, WE NEVER CLOSE (EXCEPT SUNDAY NIGHTS AND MOST OF FEBRUARY). Up the road on the north side of the green, on a gravel lot with two pumps out front and an old Mobil Pegasus sign with the red paint flaking off its wings, was a white clapboard building with two bay doors and a hand-painted sign: BEAULIEU'S GARAGE & TOWING. EST. 1946.
Behind the garage, up a little rise, was a farmhouse in need of paint with a porch full of pumpkins and a tire swing in a maple tree and a basketball hoop with no net over the barn door.
Luc backed the wrecker up to the left bay and let the Alfa down onto the concrete as gently as he had lifted it, and then he went into the little office and got on the telephone, and Vivienne stood in the bay among the smells of oil and rubber and cold concrete and looked at the walls. There were calendars going back to 1961, license plates from forty states nailed along the rafters, a crayon drawing of a tow truck pulling a whale, and, over the workbench, a slate chalkboard with a column of figures on it in white chalk, the last of which was 99, circled twice.
"What's that?" she asked Georgie.
Georgie followed her eyes. Something passed over her face, something sly and pleased and enormously secret, and she said, "Oh, that's nothing. That's just a thing. You'll see." And she went and stood in front of the chalkboard with her hands behind her back like a guard at Buckingham Palace.
Luc came out of the office. "Okay," he said. "Here's what I've got. There's a fella in Rutland, Pudge Fortin, runs a salvage yard, says there's an Alfa came in off a wreck in August. Seventy-six, but it's the same pump. He's going to pull it for me tonight and run it up in the morning on his way to his mother's in Waterbury. If it's good, I can have you back on the road by noon tomorrow. If it's not good," he shrugged, "we start praying to Saint Christopher."
"He's not a real saint anymore," Georgie said. "They took him out."
"He's still a saint around here. He's on the dashboard of half the cars in the county." Luc looked at Vivienne. "You'll need somewhere to sleep."
The Coldwater Inn was full. So, it emerged after Luc made four more calls, was every bed between Rochester and Waitsfield, because it was the peak weekend of the foliage, and people had come up from Connecticut and New Jersey by the thousand to stand in fields and point at trees.
"Leaf people," Georgie explained. "They come every year. They drive real slow and stop in the middle of the road to take pictures and then they run out of gas and we tow them. They're very good for business. Dad says God made the leaves turn so the garage would make it through the winter."
"I said that one time."