By Olivia Murphy-Major
The week before Christmas I gave my mother one of her gifts. Two ornaments; felt mice
dressed in plaid, soft and expressionless. She touched their faces, the mouths—downturned lines sewn in black thread. I watched as she hung them on the tree and stepped away. She frowned, came back, put them someplace else, and stepped back again.
I asked my mother—remember the man who fixed our clocks? She thought for a moment. She walked to the armoire, lowered the wooden panel, shuffled through drawers and pulled out a mall, white card. She smiled as she handed it to me. The Clock Doctor Inc., it read. Alan L. Wilson, Middletown Springs.
I remember him vaguely. There was a short stint of time after we moved to Vermont when my mother took our clocks to be fixed. It started with the grandfather clock. Alan lived in the next town over. Sometimes we stopped there after she’d picked us up from school. I just have to check and see how it's coming along. It's a very special clock. My sister and I waited in the Volkswagen. We watched her walk across the lawn, up the stairs, and into the white house. I remember Alan having a lazy eye and wearing a lab coat, but that can’t be true. He wasn’t a real doctor, and I was never close enough to see whether he had a lazy eye. I only saw him from the car window, grey-haired and waving on the stoop.
When the grandfather clock was repaired, my mother took the living room clock to be
fixed. It was smaller, with a mauve face. I always thought it was decorative. When my mother
brought it home, it was alive, the hands keeping time. After that, she bought a cuckoo clock and
took it to him. I remember the turquoise-painted birds peeking from their little doors. I started to
think my mother had a crush on Alan, but I never asked her. Months later, the cuckoo clock
broke. My mother took it off the wall and placed it on a shelf in the garage.
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