"Better than the eggs-in-a-coffin one."
Luc walked her back across the green afterward, to the side door of the diner where the stairs went up to Doris's son's room. It was dark and cold and smelled of woodsmoke. Georgie had been sent ahead to brush her teeth, and had gone walking backward up the hill so as not to miss anything. The stars over Coldwater were outrageous. Vivienne had forgotten there were that many. In New York there were perhaps eleven, and three of them were airplanes.
"She's wonderful," she said.
"She's a lot." But he was smiling. "Her mother used to say she was born talking. Which isn't far off. She was born in the middle of a blizzard. Came out yelling about it."
"Her mother?"
"Danielle. She's in Florida. Fort Lauderdale. Sings on a cruise ship, the Carnival line. Lounge act." He said it plainly, without bitterness and without anything else either, the way you would say a road was closed. "She left when Georgie was two. She wasn't built for winters. Or for Coldwater. Or for me, I guess. She sends postcards. Georgie's got about forty of them on her wall. Every island in the Caribbean."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. Some people are built for passing through." He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked at her, and she had the same sense she had had on the road, of being seen plainly, all at once. "You did good today, you know. Pulling over. A lot of folks with twenty years behind the wheel would've kept on going, figured they'd make it to the next town. You'd be surprised what I tow."
"I was terrified."
"Didn't look it. Looked like somebody waiting for a cab on Fifth Avenue." He nodded at her coat, the scarf, the gold watch. "That's a compliment, by the way."
"I'll take it as one."
"Good night, Vivienne."
He said it the way she had said Beaulieu, carefully, as if he wanted to get it right. She went upstairs and lay under Doris's son's quilt beneath a poster of a submarine and listened to the river, and some time after midnight she got up for a glass of water and looked out of the window across the green, and saw that the light was on in the left bay of the garage, a long yellow rectangle on the gravel, and a shape moving in it, back and forth.
In the morning she learned that he had stayed up until two taking the old pump off, so that when Pudge Fortin arrived with the new one there would be nothing to do but put it on. Pudge Fortin arrived at eight-fifteen in a pickup held together by bumper stickers. He was six-foot-five and roughly the shape of a refrigerator, and he unwrapped the Alfa's water pump from a sheet of the Rutland Herald like a jeweler showing a necklace.