Free Various Miracles by Carol Shields

to keep herself from disappearing.
    In each of Meershank’s fictions there is what the literary tribe calls a “set piece,” a jewel, as it were, set in a spun-out text, or a chunk of narrative that is somehow more intense, more cohesive, more self-contained than the rest. Generally theatrical and vivid, it can be read and comprehended, even when severed from the wider story, or it can be “performed” by those writers—Meershank is not one—who like to gad about the country giving “readings.”
    In Meershank’s recently published book,
Malaprop in Disneyfield
, the set piece has four characters sitting at dusk on a veranda discussing the final words of the recently deceased family matriarch. The sky they gaze into is a rainy mauve, and the mood is one of tenderness—but there is also a tone of urgency. Three of the four had been present when the last words were uttered, and some irrational prompting makes them want to share with the fourth what they heard—or what they
thought
they heard. Because each heard something different, and there is a descending order of coherence.
    “The locked door of the room,” is what one of them, a daughter, heard.
    “The wok cringes in the womb,” is the enigmatic phrase another swears she heard.
    The bereaved husband, a blundering old fool in shirtsleeves, heard, incredibly, “The sock is out of tune.”
    All three witnesses turn to their listener, as lawyers to a judge. Not one of them is superstitious enough to place great importance on final words. Illness, they know, brings a rainbow of distortion, but they long, nevertheless, for interpretation.
    The listening judge is an awkward but compassionate woman who would like nothing better than to bring these three fragments into unity. Inside her head she holds a pencil straight up. Her eyes are fixed on the purpling clouds.
    Then it arrives. Through some unsecured back door in her imagination she comes up with “The mock orange is in bloom.”
    “Of course, of course,” they chime, nodding and smiling at each other, and at that moment their grief shifts subtly, the first of many such shiftings they are about to undergo.

Pardon

    ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON Milly stopped at Ernie’s Cards ‘n’ Things to buy a
mea culpa
card for her father-in-law whom she had apparently insulted.
    “Sorry,” Ernie’s wife said in her testy way. “We’re all out.”
    Milly found this hard to believe. The card rack was full. You could buy a happiness-in-your-new-home card or amind-your-own-beeswax card, even a spectacular three-dollar pop-up card announcing to the world that you were feeling underappreciated. Surely there was such a thing as an I’m-sorry card.
    “You can believe what you want,” Ernie’s wife said. “But we’re sold right out. At the start of the week I had at least a dozen sorry cards in stock. We had a real nice selection, all the way from ‘I boobed’ to ‘Forgive me, Dear Heart.’ They went like hot-cakes, the whole lot. That’s more than I sell in an average year.”
    “How strange,” Milly said. “What on earth’s everyone being sorry about all of a sudden?”
    Ernie’s wife made a gesture of impatience. She wasn’t there to stand around jawing with the customers, she snapped. There was the inventory to do and the ordering and so on.
    Milly at once apologized for taking up her time; she had only been speaking rhetorically when she asked what everyone was being sorry about.
    At this, Ernie’s wife had the grace to blush and make amends. She’d been under strain, she said, what with people in and out of the shop all week grousing about her stock of sorry cards. There was one poor soul who came in weeping her eyes out. She’d had a set-to with her husband and told him he was getting so fat he was no longer attractive to her. It turned out he wasn’t really getting fat at all. She was just in a miffy mood because she didn’t like the new statue of Louis Riel in the park. She didn’t object to Louis