The Umbrella Doctor

The Umbrella Doctor a short story The sign above the shop said UMBRELLA REPAIR, and under it, in smaller letters: No umbrella beyond saving. Mr. Oh had run the shop for forty years, in an alley so narrow the rain had to fall single file. He could fix anything — snapped ribs, bent shafts, canopies torn by ambitious wind. People brought him umbrellas the way they brought pets to a vet: apologetically, cradled in both arms. On a dry Tuesday in October, a young man came in with an umbrella that had nothing wrong with it. Mr. Oh opened it, spun it, closed it. He checked the runner, the springs, the tips. Perfect. Barely used. "There is no problem," he said. "There is," the young man said. "It doesn't work." "It opens. It closes. It is an umbrella." The young man looked at his shoes. "Last spring, I shared it with someone at the bus stop. It rained for eleven minutes. We talked the whole time. She got on the 502 and I never saw her again." He paused. "I've carried it every day since. It hasn't rained on me once. Six months. Not one drop. The sky just — goes around me." Another repairman would have laughed. But Mr. Oh had spent forty years listening to what people said while he worked, and he knew that a broken umbrella was almost never about the umbrella. "Leave it with me," he said. "Come back Thursday." For two days the umbrella stood in the corner while Mr. Oh worked on other things. He replaced a rib here, a ferrule there. Occasionally he looked at it. The umbrella looked back, in the way that objects that have witnessed something important seem to. He did not repair it. Instead, on Wednesday night, he did something he had never done in forty years: he carried a customer's umbrella home. He walked with it through the fish

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