Clock Dance

by Anne Tyler

Willa loved it when

she sang “Down in the Valley”—especially the part where she asked someone to write her a letter and send it by mail, send it in care of Birmingham Jail.

Which was how she often did after flare-ups—pretending nothing had happened.

“Yes, ma’am,” Derek said. Willa had never heard him say “ma’am” before. It seemed he had switched to a foreign language to accommodate the natives.

It seemed she might at any

moment cross the line, as Willa put it to herself.)

play.) She had had to leave behind

ESL teaching job that she loved,

left another part of herself for yet another man

furnished sparsely

whole thing happen.

It used to be that the

world had rested entirely on her father’s shoulders. He was the steady one, the safe one—the person she could depend on when her mother was in a state.

family. “Charmless” was the word he

used for her.

“It’s a clock dance!”

Already she was back in that

hapless, dithery-mom role she’d been assigned when her sons reached their teens.

Most people would automatically know how to drive back to the place they’d started out from, but Willa wasn’t one of them.

If you wanted to steal

someone’s keys without them finding out, let’s say. Only thing I couldn’t figure was, when you asked the locksmith to cut you a key from the pattern on a Hershey bar, wouldn’t he want to know why?”

“I am puny,” he said. “We all are. We’re all just infinitesimal organisms floating through a vast universe, and whether we remembered to turn the oven off doesn’t make a bit of difference.”

in her room, Willa crossed to the open