“Yes,” said Alice, beaming at her. “You drove the truck. Now do it again. It’s just repetition—like sewing. The more you do it, the less you have to think about it.”
“A friend offered to teach me once, in Newport,” Emmie confided to Alice, “but I was afraid I would take the car over a cliff.”
“Well, there aren’t any cliffs here,” said Alice. “Now I’ll show you how to back her up. . . .”
The fence, Alice assured her, had been rotten and on the verge of falling over anyway. And the Tommy she nearly hit was very nice about it and didn’t even bother to check her pass, even though he was standing there as part of a checkpoint. In fact, he seemed very eager to see them on their way.
“Oh no,” said Alice, when Emmie suggested that maybe that was a sign she shouldn’t be driving after all. “If that were the case, no one would let Red Cross Dave behind the wheel. Or Alfalfa Bill.”
Alfalfa Bill had spent two days living in the basse-cour, doing odd jobs for the Unit, after ditching his truck in the mud by the gate and declaring himself incapable of getting it out again.
“Yes, but do you think they’re really that bad at driving, or they just want Madame Gouge’s coffee?” Emmie asked seriously.
Alice shrugged. “Either way, by the end of the week, you’ll be a better driver than either of them, I promise.”
Emmie wasn’t sure about that, but Alice was relentless. Emmie drove on every straight stretch. She drove when they took out the store on Monday and Wednesday, distributing milk and seeds and selling the usual selection of aprons and sabots and kitchen implements. She drove when they took Nell to Canizy and Anne to Verlaines, where both were working on outfitting social centers for the villagers. She’d thought they might be nervous at driving with her, but they weren’t; they were too taken up with talking about the social centers and the various classes they intended to hold.
“I’m fitting up a corner as a dispensary,” said Nell, who had raided the Hague trunks for first-aid supplies. “Don’t you think that will be a huge help? Then the doctors don’t have to carry everything with them when they make their rounds. We can start working out of the villages instead of carrying everything on our backs like a snail. Or do I mean a turtle?”
That afternoon, Emmie managed to drive the truck through the gates and over the bridge, a feat that Dave and Bill had yet to master.
Alice gave her an approving nod. “You see? You should get Mrs. Barrett to add you to the chauffeur list.”
The chauffeur list. They depended on their chauffeurs like nothing else. The idea that she could climb into a truck and take them where they needed to go, without asking Kate or someone else to drive . . . according to Mrs. Barrett’s schedule, of course. “Won’t I need a driving license?”
“It wasn’t very hard to get one—when Kate and Julia come back, you could go to Paris and take the test. It would make such a difference having another driver.”
Emmie climbed down, lingering by the side of the truck. “Aren’t two of the new girls meant to drive? Williams and White?”
“Yes, but we can always use more. We started out with Fran and Margaret and Liza as well as me and Kate—and now look. We’re down to two of five. It really wouldn’t hurt to have an extra.”
If she left . . . but that didn’t really matter, Emmie told herself. She’d promised Kate she’d stay at least until the new people got here, and the new people showed no signs of getting here. They were all still in Paris, waiting for the British authorities to issue passes. Given the way the British felt about women in their war zone, that might be quite some time.
Florence knew how to drive, but Florence was fully occupied with the spring planting, moving from village to village on a two-day schedule to make sure the crops were put in properly with a combination of community and government effort.
The store needed to be taken out at least two times a week; the doctors needed to be driven （or would, once they had doctors again）; the social workers could walk to the nearer villages, but not the farther ones, not the ones that needed help the most. And it really wouldn’t be fair leaving Alice and Kate doing all of that on their own.
She would go see Mrs. Barrett before she lost her resolve.
Unlike Kate, who was generally fifteen places at once, one always knew where to find Mrs. Barrett. She ran the Unit from the living room of the new building, which doubled as both the Unit meeting room and the director’s office.