Mrs. Lessard's Umbrella

It started raining Wednesday afternoon, the serious kind, the kind that comes straight off the water and means it, and at about half past three Mrs. Lessard came into the store to wait it out.

This is a normal thing. Half the town waits out weather at R&C; it's one of the unofficial services of the place, along with directions, change for the meter, and a warm dog. Mrs. Lessard settled into the chair by the front window with the particular sigh of a woman who has been on her feet since dawn and considers the sitting to be earned. Reagan went and put her chin on her knee, because Reagan knows exactly who in this town slips her crackers, and she is at the top of the list.

"Filthy day," she said, pleased. She loves a filthy day. Gives her something to be indoors about.

We talked. About nothing, which is the best kind of talking, the shop across the way, whose awning had finally been fixed, and whether the fixing counted as an improvement or an insult to the old awning, which had character. About her sister in Rockland. About the crackers, which Reagan received with the manners of a duke.

And when the rain let up, around four, she gathered herself to go, and reached for her umbrella, and it was not where she'd left it.

Now. I need you to understand that Mrs. Lessard leaves things. This is established fact, discussed at the hardware store and the post office and probably the select board. Umbrellas especially. Umbrellas flee her like she's a bad landlord. But she does not experience herself as a woman who loses umbrellas. She experiences herself as a woman whose umbrellas are constantly being moved, by forces unclear, and she narrates each disappearance with the wounded surprise of the first time.

"Now where," she said, "has that gone."

We looked. I looked by the door, where a person would leave an umbrella. Sarah looked in the poetry section, on the theory that Mrs. Lessard had wandered while I wasn't watching. Reagan looked too, in the sense that she followed us around wagging, delighted that a game had broken out. No umbrella. It was a green umbrella. It was, Mrs. Lessard informed us, a good green umbrella, from her sister, the one in Rockland, and it had a duck's head for a handle.

"A duck," said Sarah, with feeling.

"A mallard," said Mrs. Lessard, correcting a slander.

We could not find the mallard. We looked everywhere a mallard could be. And Mrs. Lessard, defeated, borrowed one of the anonymous black umbrellas from the stand by the door—the stand where umbrellas accumulate, orphaned by exactly this kind of person, a little ecosystem of forgetting—and went off into the drizzle promising to bring it back, which she would not, because that is not how umbrellas and Mrs. Lessard work. They only travel one direction.

Here is the part I love.

Two hours later, closing up, I moved the chair by the window to sweep under it. And there, tucked down alongside the cushion where it had slid when she sat, its little carved duck's head peering up at me with what I can only call reproach, was the good green umbrella. It had never left. It had been six inches from her the entire time, keeping her company through the whole conversation, patient as a dog.

I could have run it up to her that evening. I did not. I set it behind the counter, and the next morning when she came by—she always comes by—I said, "Mrs. Lessard, I believe this is yours," and produced the mallard like a magician.

Her face. You'd have thought I'd found the Ark. "Where was it?"

"Right where you'd been sitting," I said. "It waited for you."

She took it back and tucked it under her arm and told me I was a good girl, which I am not, I am forty-some years old, but I'll take it from her. And she went off up Water Street in the clear morning with her duck, and I know, I know the way I know the tide, that within the month that umbrella will end up here again, or at the hardware store, or in Doris's own kitchen circulating like the cat, and one of us will hand it back, and she'll be astonished all over again.

That's the whole job, some days. Handing people back the things they never really lost. I can't think of better work.