The Watch From the Ones at Home

I went back to bed without a word. And I lay there until the window turned gray, and by then I knew what I was going to do, and I knew I was not going to ask anybody’s permission.

I want to be plain about why I did not pick up the telephone Monday morning and call the plant office. I thought about it all through church on Sunday.

If I called, the best that could happen was a blue box in our mailbox in three weeks with a form letter. And then my husband would have a watch because his wife complained. He would know it every time he looked at it. He would never wear it.

A watch that had to be asked for was not worth having. But nobody said I could not give him one that did not.

Monday I took the early lunch, and I drew $212 out of my Christmas club. Carol Ann counted it to me twice the way we are trained to and did not ask, though I could see she wanted to.

I had called the jewelry store from the break room at nine. I told Mrs. Abrams I wanted a man’s gold watch, a good one, and something written on the back, and I asked what that would run me. She said she had one in her estate case she thought I ought to look at, $179, and engraving was $20, and with the tax it would come to $212 and some cents.

So I walked the two blocks down Main with $212 in a bank envelope and forty-three cents loose in my coat pocket.

Abrams Jewelers has been on that corner since before I was born. Mrs. Abrams herself is past eighty now, small and straight, with a loupe on a cord around her neck.

“Brenda Kay,” she said. “Come look.”

She had it out on a square of black velvet already.

It was a Bulova, gold-filled, with a cream face and plain gold hands and a brown leather band she had put on new. It was not flashy. It looked like a watch a man’s father would have worn to church.

“1972,” she said. “It came out of the Weaver estate. I cleaned and oiled it myself. It keeps time within a minute a week, which is better than I do.”

“Does it take a battery?”

“No, ma’am. You wind it. Every morning, a dozen turns, same time each day if you can.” She looked at me over her glasses. “The ones the plant hands out are battery watches. They are fine watches. But they run whether anybody thinks of them or not. This one wants a person.”

I picked it up. It was heavier than it looked. When I held it to my ear it was ticking, quick and small, like something alive.

“I will take it,” I said.

“What do you want on the back?”

I had written it on a deposit slip Sunday night, sitting on the edge of the bathtub with the door shut. I had crossed out about nine other things first, his name and the years, the name of the plant, because every one of them was something the plant might have put, and I was not the plant.

What did I know about those thirty-eight years that nobody on any list in Tennessee would ever know?