Miracle Monday Read Free Page A

bored.
    Jonathan Kent had sold the farm for less than it was worth; bought the general store in Smallville from old Whizzer Barnes for more than it was worth; and moved into a little clapboard house he couldn't afford next to Sarah and Martin Lang. Young Maynard Stone, the former backyard turkey entrepreneur, was now John M. K. Stone, the chief loan officer at the Smallville branch of Heartland Bank and Trust. Young Stone floated a loan to Jonathan for ten years, betting on Clark's eventual ability to pay it off. That was the way people did business in Smallville, especially with a man whose smile was as infectious as Jonathan Kent's.
    Clark was thirteen when he sat on the school bus and stared through the window at the installation ceremony for a new queen bee in a hive four miles away. Lana sat next to him and talked incessantly about how incredibly old Clark Gable was starting to look and how she couldn't understand why her mother said he was such a hunk every time she saw a picture of him in a magazine and was Clark listening to her?
    "Yeah, Lana. Clark Gable's a hunk. Mostly I like his name."
    "Oh, Clark, you're always daydreaming. I don't know why I talk to you at all."
    "No, I was listening, Lana. Honest," he said, as the new queen's nuptial flight carried her above all the drones but one. Clark turned to look at the girl, taking an instant to notice her incredible red hair for the seven hundredth and twelfth time, and said, "You said that he's nearly sixty and his wife at home is pregnant and he's filming a movie somewhere out of the country with Marilyn Monroe and every woman your mother's age is drooling for him all the time and you don't see how his poor wife can handle even looking at a man like that because he's so old and presumably overrated and outside the country with Marilyn Monroe and I suppose I agree completely."
    Clark smiled the way his father smiled (if people knew he was adopted they had very likely forgotten by now) and Lana let out a deep breath and said, "Oh Clark," and the bus driver slammed on his brake.
    They were on the Totten Pond Road, on a little hill that was the highest point for fifty miles, and the window on the right side of the bus looked out over Smallville. If Clark pointed the fingers of his right hand upward, with his thumb on the gold-leafed town hall bell tower and his ring finger at the point of the light blue steeple of the old Methodist Church, then the span of his hand held the entire town.
    Clark looked up when the bus stopped short. So did Lana and the thirty-one other kids on their way to school this morning. The driver threw the handle to open the double-door and hopped out. The fifteen kids on the left side of the bus gaped out their windows and said things like "Wow," and "Aww," and "Oh the poor thing," and the eighteen kids on the right side got out of their seats to see what was going on.
    "This old fella look familiar to any of you kids?" the driver wanted to know. The driver was kneeling next to his left front wheel, gently stroking the fur of an ancient black Labrador retriever, dying or dead, who had just been hit by that wheel.
    Clark gulped, looked at the dog thoroughly from his vantage point on the bus. The animal was not breathing, its heart had stopped; its brain was still radiating electromagnetic energy but it would not be doing that for long. It probably died of shock the moment the bus hit it. There was nothing Clark or anyone else could do for it.
    "That's Tim," Pete Ross said, "the dog that lives in the chicken coop on the Johnson farm."
    "Is that Tim?" somebody said.
    "Aww," somebody said.
    "There was so much dust on the road," the bus driver said, "that I didn't see him until I was almost on top of him. He just stood there, didn't even try to get out of the way."
    "Mr. Johnson said he had arthritis," somebody said.
    The driver wrapped the old dog in his coat and put him under his seat, saying that he would take the animal to the Johnson farm as soon as