If Lily’s father comes in he’ll ask after Zack, so maybe she should distract him with the watch. She doesn’t want to talk about her son. Zack went camping with his girlfriend Eli, and Lily’s father doesn’t approve of premarital camping. He’s much more gentle on the subject than he was when Lily was young, but even so he can be tiresome. She doesn’t want to defend Zack’s sex life to her father. She doesn’t want the conversation to then proceed, as she suspects it will, to her affair with Pete, and what her father thinks of that. Most of all she doesn’t want to share her growing worry. Zack and Eli are late reporting in, and Lily is beginning to freak out. She thinks her father will agitate rather than soothe her.

Thinking about Pete, Lily phones him. Gets his voicemail. Leaves no message. She wants someone to talk her down from her mounting anxiety. Zack and Eli are only a few hours later than she expected. But she has crossed some worry threshold and is now completely distracted.

She looks around her study and notes her old broken clock/radio. It’s a battery-powered machine and the clock doesn’t work, but she keeps it around because the radio is good and the clock amuses her.

She likes to have an analog timepiece near her bed. She doesn’t want a lighted display; she can see the hands of a clock face even in the dim of middle night. She needs battery power because she’s short on outlets and her neighborhood often loses electricity. Her old clock/radio was perfect until she dropped it: the black blade-like minute hand somehow fouled with the red wand-like second hand and now both sweep around the face together, once a minute. Lily likes to say her clock is absolutely correct every minute of the day and it is: for exactly one second out of that minute.

She wasn’t able to find another battery-powered analog clock/radio. She wakes now to the beep of a battery digital. So she keeps the old clock/radio around, tuned to an all-news AM station, for those quick reports after earthquakes. And it entertains her to watch the clock hands sweep around the face. She appreciates the metaphor and keeps replacing the battery.

Lily begins pacing, desperate to hear from Zack. Her Luddite son refused to pack a cell phone. She tries distracting herself with erotic thoughts about Pete, but all she can recall is their last lunch. She paces some more.

(to be concluded tomorrow)