Free Various Miracles by Carol Shields Page A

in the buff, not that—it was more a question of where her tax dollars were going.
    Milly, who was an intimate friend of the sculptor, said, “I’m really sorry to hear this.”
    “And then,” Ernie’s wife went on, “a gentleman came in here saying he’d had an out-and-out row with his next-door neighbor who’d been a true-blue friend for twenty years.”
    “These things happen,” Milly said. “Just this week my own father-in-law—”
    “Seems the man and his neighbor got on to the subject of politics—in my opinion not a subject for friends to be discussing. The neighbor called my customer a stuffed-shirt fascist right to his face.”
    “That seems a little extreme,” Milly said. “But why should he be the one to send a sorry card when his friend was the one who—?”
    “Exactly!” Ernie’s wife held up a finger and her eyes filledwith fire. “My thoughts exactly. But later that same day who should come in but a sweet old white-haired gent who said his next-door neighbor had called him a pinko bleeding heart and he—”
    “Do you mean to tell me he was the very—”
    “You’re interrupting,” Ernie’s wife cried.
    Milly said she was terribly sorry. She explained that she was feeling unstrung because now she would have to go all the way downtown to buy a card for her father-in-law.
    “Well, if you’re going downtown,” Ernie’s wife said, “would you mind returning a pair of pajamas for me? I bought them in the sales last week and, lo and behold, I got them home and found a flaw in the left sleeve.”
    Milly disliked going all the way downtown. She disliked waiting for the bus, and when she got on the bus she disliked the way a man sitting next to her let his umbrella drip on her ankle.
    “I’m most awfully sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize. I didn’t even notice. In a hundred years I would never have let—”
    Milly managed a smile and made a gesture with her hand that said: it’s all right, I accept your apology. She was glad the umbrella hadn’t dripped on the pajamas Ernie’s wife had given her to return. Returning merchandise can be tricky, especially when it’s wet and when the receipt’s been mislaid. More often than not you meet with suspicion, scorn, arrogance, rebuff.
    But today the gentleman in the complaint department was wearing a yellow rose in his lapel and his eyes twinkled.
    “We take full responsibility for flaws,” he said. “Head office will be sending your friend a letter begging her pardon, and I personally apologize in the name of our branch and in the name of the manufacturer.”
    Milly, triumphant, took the bus home. The driver apologized, as well he should, for splashing her as she stood at the bus stop.
    “It’s not your fault, it’s all this blessed rain,” Milly said.
    The bus driver shook his head. “A regular deluge. But I should have been more careful.”
    The instant the words left his mouth the rain began to fall more heavily. The sky turned an ugly black and soon rain was pelting down loud and musical, slamming on the roof of the bus and streaming in thick sheets down its sides. The windshield wipers did their best to beat back the water, but clearly they hadn’t been designed for a storm of this magnitude and, after a few minutes, the driver pulled over to the curb.
    “I’m awfully sorry, folks,” he announced, “but we’re going to have to wait this one out.”
    Nobody really minded. It was rather pleasant, almost like a party, to be sitting snugly inside a parked bus whose windows had turned to silver, swapping stories about storms of other years. Several passengers remembered the flood of 1958 and the famous spring downpour of 1972, but most of them agreed that today’s storm was the most violent they had ever seen. They would be going home to flooded basements and worried spouses, yet they remained cheerful. Some of the younger people at the back of the bus struck up an impromptu singsong, and the older folks traded their