The Watch From the Ones at Home

I started to push my chair back.

Dennis put his hand on my knee under the table. Not hard. Just the weight of it.

“Not here,” he said, very low.

“Somebody made a mistake. I am only going to go and tell him.”

“There are two hundred people in this room,” he said. “If you walk up there, every one of them will watch you do it. And then I am the fellow whose wife had to go ask for his watch.” He looked at me then. “Please. Not here.”

I have been married to that man thirty-six years. In all that time I could count on one hand the things he has asked me for with the word please in front of it.

So I stayed in my chair, and I ate a piece of cherry pie that I could not taste.

When the evening broke up, the line to shake Mr. Fisk’s hand went right past the coat rack. He is a tall man, younger than us, maybe fifty, and he had only been at the plant four years. He took Dennis’s hand in both of his.

“Dennis Lowe,” he said. “Good to see you up and around. How is the back?”

“It holds me up,” Dennis said.

“Glad to hear it. Glad you came.” And he meant it. That was what I could not get around, standing there. There was nothing in the man’s face. No embarrassment, no dodge. He did not know.

He turned to me. “Mrs. Lowe.”

I had about four sentences ready. I had been building them through the pie.

What I said was, “Thank you for the dinner, Mr. Fisk. It was very nice.”

“Our pleasure,” he said, and turned to the next couple.

We walked out to the truck. It was cold for October, and the parking lot was full of men holding blue boxes and wives holding their arms.

He drove. He always drives. We went down Main, past the bank where I have worked the teller line for twenty-two years, and out the county road toward home.

For four miles neither of us said a word.

Then he said, “It does not matter.”

“Dennis.”

“It is a watch, Brenda Kay. I have a watch. It is a nothing thing. I went out on disability, and I expect that is a different list. I am not going to lose sleep over a thing like that.”

“All right,” I said.

He did not sleep.

I know, because I did not either. I lay on my side with my eyes shut and listened to him not sleeping, which after thirty-six years is a sound I know as well as his voice. Around two in the morning the bed shifted, careful and slow. I heard him go down the hall. I heard the kitchen light click on.

I gave him ten minutes. Then I got up and stood in the hall where he could not see me.

He was sitting at the kitchen table in his undershirt with nothing in front of him. No coffee, no newspaper. He was holding his own left wrist in his right hand, and looking at it, at the old steel Timex he has worn since our son was in diapers. Just looking.

A man can say it does not matter. His hands will tell on him every time.