Clock Dance by Anne Tyler

Author:Anne Tyler
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-07-09T16:00:00+00:00

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Peter was the one who’d suggested pork chops, because that morning he had spotted a gas grill in the backyard and he prided himself on his grilled pork chops. “That’s a wonderful idea!” Willa had said, almost singing. (It made her happy to see him involving himself in a project.) Cheryl, it turned out, had never eaten pork chops, or at least she couldn’t remember eating them. Willa added this information to the other clues she’d gathered; she suspected Denise of specializing in SpaghettiOs and frozen fish sticks.

While Peter was tinkering with the grill, Cheryl set to work on the biscuits. First she studied the recipe with almost comical absorption, collecting each ingredient one by one as she read. Willa, reading over her shoulder, pointed out that if they added an extra quarter-cup of milk to the batter they could make drop biscuits—much easier than rolling and cutting them. But Cheryl said, “I like rolling and cutting,” and took a very professional-looking white-marble rolling pin from a drawer.

So Willa left her to it and started cleaning up after Peter. Peter believed in brining, and everything he had used for the brine was still on the kitchen counter: an uncapped bottle of vinegar, an open box of brown sugar, a container of salt…“I can’t believe she doesn’t have kosher salt!” he had fumed. “I knew I’d have to buy juniper berries, but it never occurred to me I should get kosher salt too, for God’s sake.”

The silverware—stainless steel—was stored in a wooden divider tray in a drawer, and each compartment had a thread of crumbs and grit and dried parsley flakes lining its seams. Willa felt a great urge to empty out the tray and scrub it down, but she worried that might offend Denise. Then she decided Denise would most likely not even notice, so she went ahead and did it. Cheryl, meanwhile, was efficiently chopping the butter into the flour. She hadn’t put an apron on, and the front of her T-shirt was dusted with white where her belly mounded out.

“How come Erland wears a knit hat on such a hot day?” Willa asked her.

Cheryl said, “Cuz he’s a dork, I guess.”

“What are his parents like?”

“He doesn’t have any parents. He just has Sir Joe.”

“Who,” Willa asked, “is Sir Joe?” She had been wondering this for a while now.

Cheryl said, “Erland’s half-brother, maybe? Or whatever you call it when the man and the woman each have a kid of their own and then they get married to each other.”

“Stepbrother,” Willa said.

“Right, and then they died somehow and Sir Joe got stuck with Erland. Sir Joe has a motorcycle,” Cheryl added. There was something worshipful in her tone. “Everything he wears is black leather, even his pants.”

“He wears leather pants in the summer? Gee, it must run in the family.”

Willa was teasing, but Cheryl sent her an unamused look and then dumped her batter onto the counter and reached for her rolling pin. Clearly Sir Joe was a whole different order from his stepbrother.

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