The Girl With the Green Car

Thatcher Vandermolen shakes your hand like he's doing you a favor.

"The mechanic," he says, smiling. "I've heard so much."

"From who?"

"Oh, from everyone." His grip is dry and firm and lasts one second too long. "Vandermolen Partners is in your book for twenty million, did Blythe tell you? Small. We like to watch before we commit." He turns the smile on Cressida. "I'm a patient man."

Cressida says nothing at all.

The Boston dinner is in a private room at a steakhouse with dark wood and oil paintings of ships. Thirty investors, the Lindquist Marsh team, Rosh in a blazer she borrowed from Blythe that's two sizes too big. Cressida sits at the far end of the long table, and Thatcher sits beside her, and every time he leans in to say something, his hand finds the back of her chair.

You give your pitch between the salad and the steak. You're good. You're better than good, because you're angry, and anger makes you clear. The Palm. The tendons. The Pittsburgh plant. The forty-year-old machinists you hired back off unemployment and trained to build robot hands. The room leans in.

Through all of it, you don't look at the end of the table. Not once.

You can feel her looking at you the whole time.

You find her in the coat check.

It's not a room, really, just an alcove behind a velvet curtain with racks of coats and a girl who has gone to get more hangers. Cressida is reaching for a long white coat on a high hook, and she's having trouble, and you reach past her without thinking and lift it down.

Your arm brushes her shoulder. She goes still.

"Thank you," she says to the coat.

"Congratulations on Saturday."

She turns. In the dim light her eyes are almost black. "There's no Saturday."

"He seemed pretty sure."

"He's always sure. It's his best quality and his worst." She takes the coat from your hands and holds it against her chest without putting it on. "It's my mother's fantasy, Ethan. Thatcher's firm has wanted a Holt alliance for ten years. My mother has wanted me married to something suitable since I was nineteen. They've decided between them that it's happening. I've never said yes."

"Have you said no?"

She opens her mouth. Closes it.

"Not publicly," she says.

"Why not?"

"Is that your question for tomorrow?"

"It might be."

"Then I'll think about the answer." Her chin comes up a fraction. "I'll tell you one thing for free. He's never kissed me. Not once. That," she nods toward the dining room, "was the first time he's touched my face. I wanted to break his wrist."

The coat-check girl comes back with an armful of hangers, sees the two of you, and freezes. Cressida puts the white coat on in one smooth motion, turns up the collar, and walks out past her without another word.

You stand in the alcove for a while. It smells like wool and her perfume, something dark and green you don't recognize. She used to wear vanilla from the drugstore. She said it smelled like a bakery and you said it smelled like her, and she laughed at you for a week.

You met her on a bridge.

June 2021. A Tuesday, ninety-one degrees, the kind of Pittsburgh summer day where the rivers steam. You were driving the tow truck back from a job in Millvale when you saw a car stopped dead on the 40th Street Bridge, hazards on, hood up, traffic honking around it.

A 1968 convertible. Bottle green. The kind of car men restore in their garages for twenty years and then never drive.

A woman stood beside it in cutoff shorts and a man's white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, her long black hair twisted on top of her head and held there with a pencil. She was staring into the engine like it had insulted her personally.

You pulled over. You got out.

"It made a noise," she said, without looking up. "Then it made a worse noise. Then it stopped making noises."

"Fuel pump," you said, after about thirty seconds.

She looked up at you then. That was the first time. Dark eyes, no makeup, a smear of grease on one cheekbone where she'd touched her face. The most beautiful woman you had ever seen, standing on a bridge in the heat, annoyed.

"Can you fix it?"

"Not here."

"Where?"

"Butler Street. Dunaway Auto."

She paid in cash. Two days later she came back, because the car was "making a new noise." The noise turned out to be nothing. The next week there was another noise. Also nothing. By the fourth week Norrie started calling her the Girl With the Green Car and leaving the coffee on for her, and you started looking up every time a car turned onto Butler Street.

On your third date, sitting on the hood of that green car at the top of the West End Overlook, she told you her real last name.

"Holt," she said. "As in the tower. As in the steel. I left when I was twenty-four. I don't take their money. I don't go to their parties. I work at a gallery in Shadyside and I rent a studio over a bakery and I am never going back." She looked at you sideways. "Is that going to be a problem?"

"Are you going to keep inventing noises in that car?"

"Probably."

"Then no."

You married her ten months later at the Allegheny County courthouse on a rainy Thursday in April. Norrie was your witness. Her witness was the gallery owner, a nervous man who cried. She wore a white sundress and your mother's ring, and afterward you ate pierogies at a bar on Butler Street and she put her feet in your lap and told everyone in the bar that you were her husband, like it was a title she'd won.

Eleven months later, she was gone.

At midnight there's a knock on your hotel door.

You've been lying on top of the covers in your shirt and suit pants, staring at the ceiling, thinking about a coat-check alcove. For one stupid second your heart jumps.

You open the door.

Blythe Vey stands in the corridor with a bottle of red wine in one hand and a laptop under her arm. She's changed out of the dinner dress into soft gray pants and a sweater that slips off one shoulder, and her strawberry-blonde hair is down.

"The order book," she says, holding up the laptop. "We need to talk allocations before Chicago." She holds up the wine. "And I need a drink, and you look like you need two. Can I come in, Ethan?"

You hesitate.

And over her bare shoulder, at the far end of the long hotel corridor, under the exit sign, you see a white coat.

Cressida is standing by the elevators with her key card in her hand. She's stopped mid-step, the way you stop when you've walked into a room you shouldn't have.

She's looking right at you. At Blythe. At the wine.

Her face doesn't change at all.