“I get my share.”
I wondered what they were about. I didn’t ask, just patted the fender again. Strange to think I wouldn’t be driving off in her in the morning. Tomorrow it would be a train to Vevey for me, and then—what did they have in Switzerland to ferry girls to their Appointments? Cabs with cuckoo clocks? Drivers in wooden clogs? I shivered in the summer night.
Finn opened the Lagonda’s door, sliding across to the far side of the seat. “Get in if you’re cold.”
I wasn’t, but I climbed in anyway. “Can I have a light?”
He flicked a match. The brief flare gave me a shot of his profile and then left me night-blinded, wrapped in shadows. I drew in a mouthful of smoke, letting it out slowly. “How did you end up with a car like this?” I asked just to be saying something. If you weren’t in the backseat of a car to make out, it seemed appropriate to make polite conversation.
“Inherited a little money from an uncle,” he said, surprising me. He rarely answered direct questions, not with the truth anyway. “He wanted me to go to school, make something of myself. But a boy with engine grease under his nails has other ideas when he gets his hands on some silver.”
“You mean he goes out and spends every cent on the car of his dreams.” I could almost hear Finn smile.
“Aye. Couldn’t quite stretch to a Bentley, but I found this girl here, being driven to scrap by a bawface idiot. I bought her, fixed her up, and she liked me right away.” Finn thumped the seat, affectionate. “During the war, most of the soldiers I knew had pictures of their lasses. Maybe their mother, if they were fresh out of school. I didn’t have a lass, so I had a picture of my car.”
I pictured Finn in a uniform and a helmet, looking at a snap of the Lagonda on the deck of a transport ship. The thought made me smile.
He tossed his cigarette butt and lit another, match flaring in the dark. “So you’re off tomorrow?”
“Yes.” I nodded. “My mother found me here. We’re off for Vevey in the morning.”
“Not Limoges? I thought you were ready to burn Limoges down to find your cousin.”
“Limoges later. This”—I waved at the Little Problem, even though he probably couldn’t see the gesture—“won’t wait much longer, Maman says. What do I know, I’m just the girl who got in trouble.”
“And Vevey is where you go for—trouble?”
“You never heard of a Swiss vacation?” I stretched my lips in a smile. “It’s where girls like me go.”
“Thought they went down the aisle in a white dress.”
“Only if they’ve got a boy on the hook.”
He had that grim Scottish amusement in his voice. “Unless you’re the Holy Virgin, you’ve got a lad on the hook.”
I gave a harsh little laugh. “Finn, I’ve got half a fraternity on the hook. And I can’t marry all of them.”
I wondered if he’d exhale disapproval. If he’d pull away. But he just sat on the other end of the soft upholstered seat, looking at me through the dark. “What happened?”
If it had been broad daylight, I couldn’t have said it. It was all so cheap and commonplace, so stupid. But the enveloping shadows were kind, and I turned my head so he’d only be able to see my profile and the glowing tip of my cigarette. My voice come out flat and matter-of-fact.
“If you’re a girl, you’re divided up into three neat parts.” The fractions of dating, as I thought of it, and even the dumbest girls in my sorority knew exactly how to add those fractions up. “There are the parts boys can touch,” I went on, “the parts boys can touch if you’re engaged or at least pinned, and the parts they can’t touch till you’re married. Everybody knows the map. But boys try anyway, because that’s what boys do, because we say no. Boys try, girls deny. That’s the dance.”
I stopped, tapping my cigarette out the window. The air smelled cooler—summer rain on the way, I thought. Finn sat silent.
“My brother was one of those soldiers who didn’t adjust too well to being home. And by that I mean he ate a shotgun.” Brains and blood splattered everywhere, a neighbor had said incautiously, not realizing I was in earshot to hear the gory details my parents had kept from me. I’d run inside and vomited, not able to shake that terrible image from my eyes. “My parents were . . . I came home from Bennington early that semester, so I could take care of them.” Bringing my mother flowers, tying my father’s tie for him, making burned meat loaf when it was clear no one else could manage Sunday lunch. Trying anything at all that would help fix how terribly broken they’d become.
“After the winter holidays, I finally had to go back to school, and when I didn’t have anyone to take care of anymore, I just—stopped, like a broken clock. I couldn’t feel anything. I was dead inside. I couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning. I’d just lie there thinking about James and Rose and my parents, and then back to James again. Crying and crying.”
It was around then that I’d started seeing Rose everywhere. Little girls with bouncing braids turned into the young Rose, tall sorority girls sauntering off to class turned into the older Rose—I saw her everywhere, superimposed on the faces of complete strangers. I imagined her so often I started thinking that I was going crazy . . . Or that maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t dead.