“A café?” Finn looked up from the Lagonda’s innards, a lock of hair falling over his eyes. “Why?”
“The happiest day in my life was spent with Rose at a French café. I thought maybe, if I find her . . . It’s an idea, anyway. I have to do something with my future.” Now that I had the Little Problem to think about, I needed a new plan besides my mother’s old one of Get Bs at Bennington until you can hook a nice young lawyer. Strangely, I wasn’t finding my unformed future as frightening as it could have been. I could do something I liked, now. Get a job. What did math majors do, in the practical world? I didn’t want to be a teacher and I couldn’t be an accountant, but . . . “I could run a little business like a café,” I said rather experimentally, seeing a line of orderly account books filled with my neat columns of numbers.
“Donald wouldn’t like it.” Finn had a faint grin as he traded out the small wrench. “His widow, waiting tables and keeping a till?”
“Donald could be a bit of a prig,” I confessed.
“God rest his soul,” Finn said, straight-faced.
What a difference a few days made. He used to talk like he was being charged a dollar for every word that came out of his mouth, and now here he was making jokes. “What do you want to do?”
“What do you mean, Mrs. McGowan?”
“Well, you’re surely not going to work for Eve forever, making one-pan breakfasts to cure her hangovers and disarming her every night before bed.” I sniffed the damp evening breeze—it smelled like more rain might be coming. A pair of old men in crumpled caps were hurrying home across the street, casting anxious looks at the skies. “What would you do, if you could do anything?”
“Before the war, I worked in a garage. Always thought maybe I’d start my own someday. Fix up other people’s cars, do some restoration work . . .” Finn finished up inside the Lagonda, and gently lowered the hood. “Don’t think that’ll happen now.”
“Why not?”
“I wouldn’t be much good at the business side of things. Besides, there are lots of former soldiers looking for work, and even more looking for bank loans. Who’s going to give a good garage job or a start-up loan to an ex-soldier with a Pentonville stint on his record?” He spoke matter-of-factly.
“Is that why you’re haring off to Limoges with Eve and me?” I switched off the flashlight, handing it back. There was dim veiled light from the streetlights overhead, but it seemed very dark without the flashlight’s bright beam. “I know why I’m going, and I know why Eve’s going. But what about you?”
“There’s not much else for me to do.” His soft voice had a smile. “Besides, I like both of you.”
I hesitated. “Why did you go to prison? And don’t say it’s because you stole a swan from Kew Gardens or made off with the crown jewels,” I rushed on, twisting my false wedding ring. “Really—what happened?”
He rubbed slowly at his oil-smeared hands with a rag.
“Eve told us she was a spy in the Great War. I told you I slept with half a frat. You know our secrets.”
He put his toolbox away in the trunk. Turned the rag over to the clean side, and began rubbing at the rain marks on the Lagonda’s dark blue fender. Through the broad front window of the hotel, the night porter watched us idly.
“I saw some bad things,” Finn said, “during the last year of the war.”
He stopped for so long, I thought he wasn’t going to say anything else.
“I have a temper,” he said finally.
I smiled. “No, you don’t. You’re the levelest man I know—”
He brought his open hand down against the fender in a sudden slap. I jumped, voice breaking off.
“I have a temper,” he repeated evenly. “The months after I left my regiment, it wasn’t a braw time. I’d go out, get wrecked, start fights. Eventually I got arrested for one of them. Earned me a term in Pentonville for assault.”
Assault. An ugly word. I looked at Finn and I just couldn’t see it. “Who’d you get in a fight with?” I asked softly.
“I don’t know. Never met him before that night.”
“Why did you fight him?”
“I don’t remember. I was fair smashed, walking around angry.” Finn leaned his back against the Lagonda, arms folded tight across his chest. “He said something, who knows what. I hit him. Kept on hitting him. Six people pulled me off once I started bashing his head against a doorpost. Thank God they got me off him before I cracked his skull.”
I stayed silent. It was misting now, very gently.
“He got better,” Finn said. “Eventually. I went to Pentonville.”
“Have you hit anybody since?” I asked, because I had to say something.
He stared straight ahead, not looking at anything. “No.”
“Maybe your temper isn’t the problem.”
He laughed shortly. “I beat a man to a pulp—broke his nose and his jaw and his eye socket and four of his fingers—and my temper isna the problem?”
“Did you get in fights like that before the war?”
“No.”
“Then maybe the temper isn’t really you. It’s the war.” Or rather, whatever he saw there. I wondered what that was, but I didn’t ask.
“That’s a lousy excuse, Charlie. Or every soldier who came home would be in the lockup.”
“Some go to prison. Some go back to work. Some kill themselves.” I thought of my brother, painfully. “Everyone’s different.”
“You should go in,” Finn said abruptly. “Before you get all drookit.”
“Yank, here. I don’t know what that means.”
“Before you get drenched. Not good for the bairn, Mrs. McGowan.”
I ignored that, leaning up against the Lagonda beside him. “Does Eve know?”
“Yes.”
“What’d she say?”
“‘I have a weakness for handsome men with Scottish accents and prison records, so I’ll give you a try.’ And never mentioned it again.” He shook his head, hair falling over his eyes again. “She’s not one for judging people.”
“Neither am I.”
“You still shouldn’t be hanging around a bad apple like me.”
“Finn, I’m a former good girl, and a current unwed mother-to-be. Eve’s a former spy, and a current drunk. You’re a former convict, and a current mechanic and driver and cooker of English breakfasts. You know why none of us judge?” I bumped his shoulder with mine until he finally looked down at me. “Because none of us have the goddamn right to look down our noses at anyone else’s sins.”
He looked down at me with an invisible smile that began and ended in the corners of his eyes.