Women and Children First by Francine Prose Page B

couldn’t care less. No wonder Marianne wants to be out on that boat, with a whole reservoir between them. Vincent has never cheated on his wife, and though he knows that crises—like pregnancy, or death—drive people to break their own rules, they seem to him like strange times to start. Nothing, these days, is casual.
    What he tells himself is, he’d be satisfied to just be alone with Laurel. Often he has conversations with her in his head. He asks why she became a physical therapist—that’s one thing he wants to know. He also wonders if she has a boyfriend, and though there’s no way he’d ever ask, he wants to know if the way Laurel moves with her boyfriend is anything—anything at all—like the way she touches his father. He would like to go somewhere, anywhere with Laurel—for a ride in the country or just a cup of coffee at some roadside greasy spoon.
    Vincent hears Rose call, “See you tomorrow!” Looking out his father’s window, he watches Laurel slide into her little blue Camaro. Before she leaves there is always a moment when he wants to go out and stop her. It’s a little like the panic he feels sometimes when Marianne and the kids are leaving to go to the grocery.
    Vincent so wants Laurel to stay that he feels slightly funny when Laurel buckles her seat belt, turns the key, and then frowns and turns it again. Nothing happens, and Vincent feels responsible, as if the magnetic pull of his longing could have actually shorted the wires in Laurel’s car. He runs out into the driveway as if that will break the spell.
    Vincent motions for Laurel to slide over. He gets in next to her, behind the wheel. He turns the key: there’s a click. The car sounds completely dead. Vincent is very conscious of how close Laurel is. The front seat is so hot and small and intimate, they could practically be in bed. He closes his eyes, listening for that merciful one-second engine-splutter that sometimes lets you in. Laurel says, “I knew something was up. I drove all the way here with the battery light on.”
    “It’s the alternator,” says Vincent. The reason he can say this so confidently is that the same thing happened to his car earlier in the summer. Now he’s almost glad that it did, and he feels that the two hundred dollars it cost was well spent. He asks if she has a mechanic.
    “Sort of,” Laurel says. “This one guy in Remsenville saved me when another guy in Troy was trying to rip me off for a whole new brake job when all I needed was the drums ground down and some shoes. You know the really awful part? The Troy guy had been my folks’ mechanic for twenty years.”
    “That’s terrible,” says Vincent, but he’s pleased by this image of Laurel—smart and plucky and sensible enough to go get a second opinion on her brakes. The fact that they’re sitting here like buddies talking cars, talking brake shoes and alternators, encourages him.
    “Remsenville isn’t far,” he says. “I’ll drive you there, and maybe the guy can drive you back out here with a new alternator and some tools—put it together. It’s really no big deal.” Vincent is thinking, dispiritedly, that there’s really no sense to this—it’s easier to call the mechanic—when Laurel says, “I couldn’t. I’ve got to be at a client’s at four. This lady’s only fifty, she’s got Lou Gehrig’s disease, and her second husband just left her. I’ve got to be there.”
    That Vincent’s never considered who else Laurel might work for makes him feel small and self-involved and is partly why he says, “In that case I’ll drive you there and wait till you’re done and then drive you to the mechanic’s.”
    Laurel twists toward him. Her left knee up on the seat, her arm on the seat back, the curve of her breast against the upholstery—it’s all one more thing that Vincent is trying not to see. “Oh, no,” she says. “I really couldn’t do that.”
    “Sure you could,” Vincent says. “It’s nothing for