Night of Miracles

Elizabeth Berg's Night of Miracles is set in Mason, Missouri, a small Midwestern town where interconnected lives converge around love, loss, community, and quiet miracles.

Lucille Howard, an 88-year-old retired fourth-grade teacher, lives alone in the house once owned by her late friend Arthur Moses. Arthur willed the house to Maddy Harris, a young woman he took in when she was eighteen, pregnant, motherless, and bullied. Lucille rents from Maddy, who is finishing college and raising her daughter, Nola, named after Arthur's late wife. Lucille lost the love of her life, Frank Pearson, to a heart attack after they reunited at 83, having first fallen in love in high school. Their time together lasted less than a month. After Frank's death, Lucille attempted suicide, but Arthur helped her through. Now she runs popular baking classes from her kitchen and believes she is owed one specific miracle before she dies. A persistent pain in her midsection goes ignored.

Iris Winters, a 47-year-old divorcée, has recently settled in Mason after leaving Boston. Her marriage to Ed ended after years of conflict: Iris desperately wanted a baby, but Ed kept deferring. When she got an IUD, an intrauterine birth-control device, she developed a life-threatening infection requiring a hysterectomy. At her bedside, Ed said, "Maybe it was for the best," planting a bitterness that never left. After the divorce, seeing Ed with his visibly pregnant new wife drove Iris to Mason, where she lives in a riverside apartment and finds solace in birdwatching and new friendships.

Chief among those friendships is Tiny Dawson, her neighbor, a very large, kind-hearted taxi driver of 39. Over breakfasts at Polly's Henhouse, the local café, Iris and Tiny bond. Tiny is deeply in love with Monica Mayhew, a Henhouse waitress, but too shy to act. Monica has her own crush on Tiny. When the café owner, Polly, urges Monica to ask Tiny to a movie, he panics and declines, following a friend's bad advice to play hard to get. Crushed, Monica nearly quits. Instead, Polly takes her to New Orleans, where a fortune-teller predicts Monica will marry a man whose name starts with P.

Lucille's next-door neighbors, Abby and Jason Summers, face a crisis when Abby learns she has acute myelogenous leukemia, an aggressive blood cancer. She begins chemotherapy, and her hair starts falling out. When they finally tell their 10-year-old son, Lincoln, he asks if she will die. Abby answers honestly that she will try hard not to.

As Abby's treatments intensify, Lincoln begins staying with Lucille. The arrangement proves a gift for both. They bake pinwheel cookies, build card cities, and discuss faith, death, and love with surprising candor. Lucille challenges Lincoln's father's atheism, arguing that believing in heaven requires no more faith than trusting the sun will rise.

Iris applies for two jobs: one at a daycare, where she sobs in the baby room, overwhelmed by grief over never having had a child, and one as Lucille's assistant. She fails Lucille's baking quiz but wins the job by offering business skills. Their partnership flourishes, with classes growing to 15 students and Iris designing embossed pink bakery boxes bearing Lucille's name in gold.

Romantic threads tangle and sort themselves. Tiny begins a strict diet, dreaming of proposing to Monica. Monica, meanwhile, meets Phil Porter, a truck driver whose name starts with P, matching the fortune-teller's prediction. She dates Phil, convinced he is her destiny, but his controlling nature soon emerges. Iris works to bring Tiny and Monica together, and a friendship forms between the two women. Monica breaks up with Phil, who admits he never intended to buy her a ring.

Woven through these stories is a supernatural thread. Lucille dreams of a slight, winged man who crash-lands in her backyard and announces himself as the angel of death. He knows details no one else could, including her suicide attempt. Lucille refuses to go, insisting she has not received her miracle. The angel visits twice more, and each time she refuses. On his third visit, during a snowstorm while Lincoln sleeps down the hall, Lucille argues that the boy needs her and his mother is gravely ill. The angel says he cannot be influenced, but he tries one of Lincoln's pinwheel cookies and weeps, saying he can taste what the boy feels. He relents and tells Lucille she can stay. The next morning, Lincoln tells Lucille a man in jeans and a flannel shirt appeared in his dream and whispered the name "Hope," which Lincoln gives his new puppy.

Jason calls: Abby is much worse. Tiny drives Lincoln to the hospital, picking up Monica along the way. She gives Tiny a muffin, and he asks if she would like to have dinner that night; she immediately says yes. That evening, Tiny arrives at Monica's door and declares his love. Monica confesses she loves him too. Tiny reveals his real name is Percival, starting with P. Monica is astonished: As a child, her imaginary prince was named Prince Percival.

Iris, after months of ripping up unsent letters, finally emails Ed. She asks his forgiveness and acknowledges the divorce was both their faults. Ed replies that he needs her forgiveness too: Every time he looks at his child, he knows he was wrong to deny her one. They say a proper goodbye.

Lucille's final moments arrive quietly. Unable to get out of her bathtub, she receives the angel one last time. She asks for her miracle: Let Abby live. The angel says that would require two miracles, one for Abby and one for Frank to escort Lucille. She must choose. Weeping, Lucille chooses Frank. She experiences a finch's song, vanilla, cirrus clouds, and then Frank appears. Pain in her chest bears down, then stops. She rises easily, reaches for his hand, wearing a necklace of stars.

At the hospital that night, Abby wakes, smiling, her fever gone. She tells Jason a "kind of big woman" leaned down and embraced her. Her doctor confirms the experimental treatment appears to have worked.

Iris discovers Lucille dead the next morning. At the funeral, only a small group attends the church service, but at Lucille's house afterward, both sides of the street are lined with cars. Dozens of former students have come, many wearing Lucille's vintage aprons, each bringing something she taught them to bake.

Maddy, who earlier transferred the house's deed to Lucille, had planned to marry Matthew Allbright, her photography professor, at Lucille's house with a cake Lucille would bake. She changes course and holds the wedding in the Mason cemetery, where she once met Arthur. The night before the ceremony, she feels what seems to be Arthur's presence, reassuring her that half of a good marriage is being loved for who you really are. Standing on the hill where she once lay alone and unmoored, Maddy marries Matthew. Nola contributes a single pronouncement: "Fish! Are good in life!" As Maddy closes her eyes for the kiss, she feels points of warmth on each shoulder.

Iris assembles Lucille's checkerboard wedding cake and decides to rent the house from Maddy, continuing the baking classes as Lucille's legacy. In the final chapter, Mason stirs on a late January morning. Abby and Jason plan a bookstore called Menagerie. Lincoln sleeps with Hope beside him. Monica and Tiny sleep curled together, wedding rings on their hands. Iris prepares for class in Lucille's kitchen. The epilogue mirrors the opening airplane passage but changes the ending: Instead of landing and losing the hopefulness visible from above, the traveler lands and feels something tangible, as though the unnameable is suddenly within reach.