Excerpt from Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

That Mr. Martin didn't just stand up and say forget it, I have no interest in directing Our Town, was a testament to his fortitude. Instead, he coughed and thanked Mr. Anderson for his time. Mr. Anderson, nodding gravely, departed.

Every Stage Manager came with an unintended lesson: clarity, intention, simplicity. They were teaching me. Like all my friends, I was wondering what I should do with my life. Plenty of days I thought I would be an English teacher because English was my best class and the idea of a life spent reading and making other people read appealed to me. I was forever jotting down ideas for my syllabus in the back of a spiral notebook, thinking how we'd start with David Copperfield, but no sooner had I committed myself to teaching, I wrote off to request an application for the Peace Corps. I loved books, of course I did, but how could I spend my life in a classroom knowing that wells needed to be dug and mosquito nets needed to be distributed? The Peace Corps would be the most direct route to doing something truly decent with my life. Decency, a word I used to cover any aspect of being a good person, factored heavily into my thinking about the future. Being a veterinarian was decent—we all wanted to be veterinarians at some point—but it meant taking chemistry, and chemistry made me nervous.

But why was I always reaching for six-hundred-page British novels and hard sciences and jobs that would require malaria vaccinations? Why not do something I was already good at? My friends all thought I should take over my grandmother's alterations shop because I knew how to sew and they didn't. Their mothers didn't. When I turned a hem or took in a waistband, they looked at me like I was Prometheus coming down from Olympus with fire.

If you wonder where the decency is in alterations, I can tell you: my grandmother. She was both a seamstress and a fountain of human decency. When Veronica spoke about the jeans I diverted from the Goodwill bag by tapering the legs, she said, "You saved my life!" People liked their clothes to fit, so making them fit was helpful, decent. My grandmother—who always had a yellow tape measure hanging around her neck and a pin cushion held to her wrist with a strip of elastic (the pincushion corsage I called it) taught me that.

Watching these men recite the same lines so badly while polishing their glasses with giant white handkerchiefs really made me think about my life.

* * *

"Wait, wait, wait, you wanted to be a vet?" Maisie shakes her head. "You never wanted to be a vet. You never said that before." Maisie will begin her third year of veterinary school in the fall, if in fact there is school in the fall.

"I did for a while. You know how it is in high school."

"You wanted to be a pediatrician in high school," Nell says to her sister in my defense.

"Could someone explain to me what any of this has to do with Peter Duke?" Emily asks. "What does sewing have to do with Duke?"

My girls have directed me to start the story at the beginning when they have no interest in the beginning. They want to hear the parts they want to hear with the rest cut out to save time. "If you think you can do a better job then tell the story yourself," I say, standing, though not in a punitive way. I stretch my hands up over my head. "The three of you can tell it to one another." God knows there's work to be done around here.

"Shush," Nell says to her sisters. She pats the sofa. "Come here," she says to me. "Come back. We're listening." Nell knows how to move people around.

Emily, the eldest, sweeps her magnitude of silky dark hair over one shoulder. "I just thought this was going to be about Duke. That's all I'm saying."

"Stop flipping your hair," Maisie says, irritated. Maisie had her father cut her hair short in the spring and she misses it. Her little dog Hazel stands up, turns three awkward circles on the couch then falls over into a comfortable ball. They tell me they're ready.

Excerpted from Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. Copyright © 2023 by Ann Patchett. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.