The Lost Umbrella ☔

The bus was late again, and Mia Banks was in a terrible mood. It had been one of those mornings. She had missed her toast, spilled orange juice down her sleeve, and her little brother Theo had called her “Grumpy Mia” three times before she even got out the door. Now she stood at the bus stop on Marlow Street with her backpack hanging off one shoulder, glaring at the empty corner where the bus was supposed to be. Normally Jonah would have been there to cheer her up. He always had a joke ready, or a ridiculous fact about octopuses, or a spooky story about the old well behind the library. But Jonah had a dentist appointment, so today Mia was on her own. She kicked at a pebble. It skittered under the wooden bench, and that was when she saw it. Something yellow was poking out from beneath the seat. Mia crouched down and pulled it free. It was an umbrella, a big, old-fashioned one, the kind with a curved wooden handle and a canopy as bright as a lemon drop. The handle was worn so smooth that it felt like a river stone in her palm, as if a hundred hands had held it before hers. There was no name on it. No tag, no label, no little note saying please return to. It smelled faintly of something she couldn’t place at first. Then she had it: rain on hot pavement, that sharp, clean smell right before a storm. Mia looked up and down Marlow Street. A pigeon pecked at a crushed paper cup. A delivery truck rumbled by. Nobody was looking for a yellow umbrella. “Finders keepers,” she said, mostly to the pigeon. She pressed the little button on the handle, and the umbrella opened with a satisfying whump. For one strange second, a shiver ran from her fingers all the way up to her shoulder, like touching a doorknob on a dry winter day. Then it was gone. The canopy glowed over her head like a small yellow sun. The sky above Tilbury Creek was a perfect, cloudless blue. “Well, that’s dumb,” Mia muttered, feeling a little silly. Who opens an umbrella when it isn’t raining? She was about to close it when she heard the stomping. Down the sidewalk came Mr. Dobbs, the owner of Dobbs Hardware, carrying a heavy cardboard box and wearing his usual expression, which looked like he had just bitten into a lemon and found a second lemon inside. Everyone in Tilbury Creek knew Mr. Dobbs. He yelled at kids for leaning their bikes against his window. He yelled at dogs for walking too close to his flowerpots. Last week, he had yelled at Mia’s little brother for drawing a chalk rocket on the sidewalk outside his shop, and Theo had cried the whole way home. Mia had not forgotten. Mr. Dobbs spotted her and slowed down, just enough to scowl. “You,” he snapped. “This is a bus stop, not a playground. Quit standing around with that ridiculous thing and get out of the way.” He shifted the box in his arms. “And you tell that brother of yours that if I see one more piece of chalk on my sidewalk, I’m calling the police.” Mia opened her mouth to say something. She wasn’t sure what. But she never got the chance. A smudge of gray appeared in the air above Mr. Dobbs’s head. It was no bigger than a dinner plate at first, small and puffy and a little crooked. Then it swelled to the size of a trampoline, dark and heavy and swirling. And it opened up like someone had flipped a switch. Rain poured down. It didn’t drizzle or sprinkle. It poured, in thick, cold, gleaming sheets, and every single drop landed on Mr. Dobbs and nowhere else. The sidewalk next to him stayed completely dry. Mia’s sneakers stayed completely dry. “AAAGH!” Mr. Dobbs dropped the box. Hundreds of silver screws bounced across the sidewalk like hailstones. He spun in a circle, sputtering, water streaming from his bushy eyebrows, and he stared up at the sky. It was blue. It was blue all the way across. “What in the—” He stomped. He splashed. He glared at Mia, then at the umbrella, then at the sky again, as if it had personally insulted him. “Blasted weather in this town!” he roared. Then he began scooping screws off the pavement, grumbling and dripping and soaked to the bone. The cloud stayed with him the whole time. When he finally grabbed the last screw and marched back toward his shop, it followed him all the way down Marlow Street like a very small, very angry pet, until the two of them disappeared around the corner. The umbrella felt warm in Mia’s hand, the way a mug of cocoa feels. She stared at it. She looked at the empty street where Mr. Dobbs had been. She thought about Theo and his chalk rocket. “No way,” she whispered. Then she laughed, a big, helpless, snorting laugh, the first one of the whole morning. The bus finally came wheezing around the corner, and its doors folded open. Mia snapped the umbrella shut, jammed it under her coat, and climbed aboard with her face as straight as she could make it. All through first period, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Coincidence. It had to be a coincidence, a freak local cloud, one of those weird weather things from the news. But a cloud didn’t follow a person down the street. And a cloud didn’t pick someone out at the exact moment he was being mean. At lunch, Jonah found her in the cafeteria, still numb on one side of his face and grinning about it. “You will not believe the weirdest thing,” he said, sliding his tray across from hers. “Mrs. Pruitt from the bakery saw Mr. Dobbs get rained on this morning. By nothing. Clear sky. One cloud, just for him. She says it chased him halfway down Marlow Street.” Mia nearly choked on her sandwich. “Weird,” she said. “Weather’s weird.” “Weather isn’t that weird,” said Jonah, and he gave her the look he always got when a story didn’t add up. Then somebody dropped a tray across the room, and the moment passed. Mia almost told him. The truth was right there in her backpack, folded up under her gym clothes. But Jonah would ask a million questions, and she didn’t have a single answer yet. So she bit her tongue and finished her sandwich. That night, she propped the umbrella in the corner of her bedroom, between her desk and her laundry basket. It was closed. It was dry. It hadn’t been outside since three o’clock. Plink. A single drop of water fell from the tip of the umbrella onto the floorboards. Mia looked at the ceiling. No leak. She looked at the window. Closed. Plink, went the umbrella again, as if it were clearing its throat. She sat on the edge of her bed, hugging her knees. “Okay,” she whispered. “What are you?” The umbrella, of course, did not answer. But outside her window, the stars were disappearing behind a thin gray haze, and Mia realized that for the very first time in her whole life, she was hoping it would rain tomorrow.