The Good Husband of Zebra Drive by Alexander McCall Smith Read Free Book Online

heaps even, and getting food on their smart clothes. She vowed to herself, That will not happen at my wedding, and the thought filled her with pride.
My wedding. My wedding guests. Chairs.
It was a long way from those days of penury as a student at the Botswana Secretarial College, of rationing herself in what she ate; of making do with just one of anything, if that. Well, those days were over now.
    And Phuti Radiphuti, for his part, thought,
My days of loneliness are finished. My days of being laughed at because of the way I speak and because no woman would look at me—those are over now. Those are over.
    He reached out and took Mma Makutsi’s hand. She smiled at him. “I am very lucky to have found you,” he said.
    â€œNo, I am the lucky one. I am the one.”
    He thought that unlikely, but he was moved very deeply that somebody should consider herself lucky to have him, of all people. The previously unloved may find it hard to believe that they are now loved; that is such a miracle, they feel; such a miracle.
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    WHILE MMA MAKUTSI and Phuti Radiphuti were reflecting on their good fortune, Mma Ramotswe and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, who themselves had on many occasions pondered their own good luck, were engaged in a conversation of an entirely different nature. They had finished their dinner and the children had been dispatched to bed. Both were tired—he because he had removed an entire engine that afternoon, a task which involved considerable physical exertion, and she because she had awoken the night before and lost an hour or two of sleep. The kitchen clock, which always ran ten minutes fast, revealed that it was eight thirty, eight twenty after adjustment. One could not decently go to bed before eight thirty, Mma Ramotswe felt; and so she sat back and chatted with her husband about the day’s events. She was not particularly interested in the removal of the engine, and listened to his comments on that with only half an ear. But then he said something which engaged her full attention.
    â€œThat woman I spoke to,” he said. “Mma What’s-her-name. The one with the husband.”
    â€œMma Botumile.” Mma Ramotswe’s tone was cautious.
    â€œYes, her,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “I thought that maybe…that maybe because I spoke to her first…” He trailed off. Mma Ramotswe was staring at him, and he felt disconcerted.
    Mma Ramotswe thought for a while before she said anything. It was important that she should handle this carefully. “Do you want to be involved?” she asked.
    â€œI already am,” he said.
    She hesitated. “In a way.”
    Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni now became more confident. “Being a mechanic is fine,” he said. “But it is always the same thing. A car comes in, I listen to what the engine has to say, I make my diagnosis, and then I fix it. That is what I do.”
    There was nothing wrong with that, thought Mma Ramotswe. Being a mechanic was a great calling, in her view, and was certainly more useful than many of the white-collar jobs that seemed to carry all the prestige. A country could never have too many mechanics, but it could have too many of the civil servants who wrote complicated and obscure letters to Mma Ramotswe about her tax payments and about various forms and returns that they thought she should fill in.
    It worried her that Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni should find his work repetitive. Everybody’s work was repetitive, if one thought about it; even in a business such as the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency there was a certain sameness to the enquiries that she and Mma Makutsi undertook. Was so-and-so being unfaithful? Was some dispatch clerk making up bogus orders and then claiming that the invoices were lost? Were somebody’s impressive work record and testimonials entirely false? The same things arose time and time again, even if there were features of some cases