An Imperfect Miracle by Thomas L. Peters Page B

beating a little faster, because nothing really important ever happened in Millridge. At least that was what Dad was always saying.
    â€œDo you think it’ll happen soon?”
    â€œIt’s possible. But remember that God doesn’t look at things the same way we do. Mary neither.”
    Before I could ask how God and Mary looked at things, I got shoved backwards by some guy with a big butt who wanted to buy a box of little gold crosses that you could pin onto your clothes. Then some other people elbowed in ahead of me looking to buy some beads. They must have outweighed me by a hundred pounds apiece and didn’t look to be in any rush.
    I roamed around awhile until I finally found Mom jabbering with some neighborhood ladies. She must have wanted to go home now too, because she marched right over to me and asked if I’d had a good time at the ceremony.
    â€œYou didn’t cause any trouble, did you?”
    I shook my head.
    â€œYou should’ve paid more attention, Mom. You missed the best part.”
    Then I told her about the old guy with the shakes getting healed, and right away she shook her head and said it must have been all in his mind somehow. She predicted that tomorrow morning the poor old fellow would wake up in exactly the same sorry fix as he was in before. I asked her how she could be so sure of that.
    â€œI’ve been working in a hospital long enough to know a phony story when I hear one.” I told her that Carlos didn’t think it was phony, but she claimed to know a lot more about it than Carlos did. Then she got that know-it-all-nurse-who’s-also-your-mom sort of look.
    â€œThis unfortunate gentleman, who from your description may be suffering from Parkinson’s disease, just got carried away with the emotion of the moment. There is no known cure for Parkinson’s, although there’s a new procedure called deep brain stimulation that offers much promise.”
    When Mom talked real fancy like that, I always got a little suspicious, like she was trying to pull something over on me.
    â€œThat old guy looked pretty sour to me. I don’t think he’d get carried away with much of anything if there wasn’t a good reason. And why couldn’t Mary use her invisible powers to sink down deep into his brain and shake things up a little, if that’s all she had to do?”
    Mom shook her head again, and then her eyes went kind of dark and creepy for a second or two, sort of like some of my teachers at school when they were yelling at us.
    â€œThere’s always a rational explanation for these things. Now don’t go spreading around that Mary can do miracles. It’ll just get people’s hopes up, and what’s worse, they might postpone legitimate medical treatment.”
    I figured she was just jealous that Mary could heal people way faster than she and those uppity doctors could over at the hospital. But I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want her to get all fired up, the way she used to sometimes when Dad was still around causing us trouble.
    â€œLet’s go home. I think we’ve seen enough miracles for one day.”
    That was fine by me because it was getting pretty smelly, what with the heat and how close the people were all jammed together. Plus, I was getting so hungry from having missed breakfast that my belly was starting to growl a little.
    We were pushing through the sweaty bodies when all of a sudden I heard someone shouting across the street near where the bars were. I worked my way through the crowd to a little open space where I could see better and spotted Tim Runyon standing near the curb waving a big pizza around and yelling that it was a miracle. The louder he yelled, the faster people tried to get away from him, and it wasn’t long before I had a clear view. He was holding the pizza up high now and looking around at all the people with his nose way up in the air, like he was some snooty