Rain or shine, storm or blue skies, everything was all fine by me. The weather might get other people down but never me. I knew better.

“Fine” was a great word.

My wonderful mama used to say: “Fine by name—Rory Fine, that is—and fine by nature.”

She peppered my life with that word from the day I entered this world. Until she drew her last breath, haggard and weary, she still insisted everything was fine.Always had been and always would be, no matter how much Adversity knocked at her door she wouldn’t allow those bad thoughts in.

According to her, my manners were fine enough for the President, should he ever come to visit. My friends, my quite average school results, my smile, my sandy, red hair—the butt of schoolyard jokes—my stories, everything, was just fine. Nothing earned her reproach. Nada.

“You’re the finest thing in my life,” she’d say.

“And you’re the finest in mine,” I’d reply.

The day she left this earth was certainly Heaven’s finest and the saddest day I’ll ever live. Her last words, spoken in broken syllables and wisps of sound to me, her sobbing seventeen-year-old who’d kept vigil by her bed hoping for a miracle.

“Don’t … cry, my darling boy. God smiled the day you were born. Have a fine life my son. That is your destiny.”

She may have revised her prediction if she’d known about this hell-hot day that awaited, nine years down the road. There was too much of what St. Alban folk call the Madness Air. The kind of hot that never helps anyone’s mood. Or troubles.

A slight breeze blew in off the Dawson River, trying for all it was worth to cool things down just a little. Without that freshening whisper people’d be crawling up the walls by nightfall. Three days straight the heat had invaded our city and sure made my job all that much harder. At the end of a day, all the passengers wanted was to get to their air-conditioned or fan-cooled homes. You know how people look when they’ve had enough, their muscles stretched beyond capacity and energy on low flow? Well, this described my passengers today. Every single one of them.

I’ve been driving buses for five years now. A peculiar job for a young man, I know. I know. At twenty-six I should be exploring the world, making my mark, building some kind of résumé to show I’ve done something with my life and secured my future.

For me though, this job is perfect fitting like a glove with my other more important work. Life Job, as I think of my sideline business.

Probably what I do is a smaller scale version of solving global warming by switching off a single light bulb one lamp at a time. So a big job. Big. Yet, one by one, I switched off those bulbs, because who knew the effect that might have? Think of my intervention as saving one butterfly that might flap its wings in Bangkok and, in flapping those little wings averts a bushfire in Australia and saves a town. You know the Butterfly Effect, right? That’s me, the Butterfly Effect guy. Except, I call this thing I do troubles keeping, which makes me a Troubles Keeper.