The Good Husband of Zebra Drive by Alexander McCall Smith

involved mechanical matters—distraught owners feeling desperate about cars which were needed for some important occasion; the non-arrival of spare parts; the eventual arrival of spare parts, but the wrong ones—there were many ways in which difficult situations could arise in a garage, but he had found that the best response to these was the same in every case. He would sit down and consider the situation carefully. Not only did this help to identify the solution to the problem, but it also gave him the opportunity to remind himself that things were not really as bad as they seemed; it was all a question of perspective. Sitting down and looking up at the sky for a few minutes—not at any particular part of the sky, but just at the sky in general—at the vast, dizzying, empty sky of Botswana, cut human problems down to size. It was not possible to tell what was in that sky, of course, at least during the day; but at night it revealed itself to be an ocean of stars, limitless, white in its infinity; so large, so large, that any of our problems, even the greatest of them, was a small thing. And yet we did not look at it like that, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni thought, and that made us imagine that a blocked fuel feed was a disaster.
    He had not wanted Charlie to hand in his resignation, but when the apprentice had asked him about the possibility of using that car as a taxi, he had resisted the temptation to refuse him point-blank. That at least would have solved the problem in the short term. It would have put an end to his immediate plans to start a taxi service, but it would not have scotched the young man’s hopes. So he had agreed to the proposition and had watched Charlie’s face light up. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had his reservations about the feasibility of the idea; there was scant profit to be made from taxis unless one over-charged—which some taxi drivers did—or drove too quickly—which all taxi drivers did. Charlie now had his driving licence, but Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni had little confidence in his driving ability and had once stopped him and taken over when they were travelling together to pick up a consignment of parts and he had let Charlie take the wheel of the truck.
    â€œWe are not in a hurry,” he said. “Those parts are not going anywhere. And there are no girls to impress.”
    The apprentice had sat in the passenger seat, shoulders hunched. He had been silent.
    â€œI’m sorry to have to tell you off,” said Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. “But that is my job. I have to advise you. That is what an apprentice-master has to do.”
    That conversation came back to him now. If he were really serious about his duties, he would have warned Charlie of the folly of not completing his training. He would have spelled out to him the risks of starting one’s own business; he would have told him about cash-flow problems and the difficulty of getting credit. Then he would have gone on to warn him about bad debts, which presumably even taxi drivers encountered when people fled the car without paying or when, at the end of a journey, they confessed they did not have quite enough money to pay the fare and would five pula do?
    He had done none of this, he reflected; he had said nothing. But his failure, and Charlie’s departure, were not the end of the world. If the taxi service did not work, then Charlie could always come back, as he had done the last time he had given up his apprenticeship. That had been when he had gone off with that married woman and had come back, his tail between his legs, when that affair had come to its predictable end. That showed how these young men worked, he thought. They bounced back.
    Mma Makutsi’s departure, however, was a more serious matter altogether. Mma Makutsi resigned shortly before tea-time, when he and Mr. Polopetsi came into the office, their mugs in their hands, expecting to find the tea already brewed. Instead they found Mma