The Watch From the Ones at Home

I knew what time the truck pulled in. Quarter after three, every afternoon. I knew that for most of twenty years a child was standing at the storm door waiting on it, first Kim, then Jeff, then the two of them fighting over who got to carry the lunch pail in. I knew that on the bad days, the days the line went down or a man got hurt, he would sit in the truck in the driveway for a minute before he came in, and that when he did come in he never brought it to the table.

I knew he went there every day so that he could come home.

I slid the deposit slip across the glass.

Mrs. Abrams put her glasses on and read it out loud, slowly.

“From the ones who were home when you got there.”

She did not say anything for a moment. Then she took her glasses off again and folded them.

“This is for Dennis,” she said. It was not a question.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I heard about Saturday. Larry Combs’s wife was in this morning to have a link taken out of his band.” She pressed her lips together. “She did not think it was right. She said to tell you so if I saw you.”

I opened the bank envelope and counted it out on the counter the way I count for a customer. A hundred, two fifties, a ten, two ones. I reached in my pocket for the change.

Mrs. Abrams put one finger on the stack. She slid a hundred and a fifty to her side of the glass. She slid the rest back to mine.

“That is too much,” she said.

“You told me on the telephone it was $212.”

“I did. That was before I knew whose wrist it was going on.” She pushed the bills an inch closer to me. “One hundred fifty, and that is what I paid the Weaver family for it plus the band. I will not make a dollar on this watch, and I will not charge that man for engraving.”

“Mrs. Abrams, I cannot let you do that.”

“Sit down a minute, Brenda Kay.”

There is a little chair by the ring case, for husbands. I sat in it.

“January of 1998,” she said. “You would have had little ones at home then. Sol had been gone not quite a year. We had that cold snap, eleven below, do you remember it? My furnace quit on a Sunday night. I called every number in the book, and nobody could come before Tuesday. I had the oven door open and my coat on in the kitchen, and I did not know what I was going to do.”

“I called the church, to ask could somebody bring me a space heater. The woman who answered the prayer chain that night must have made some calls. About ten o’clock a truck pulled in, and it was your husband. I did not know him except to nod. He had his toolbox and a flashlight.”

“He was in my basement until after one in the morning. It was the igniter, and something with the blower, I never did understand it. He drove out to the plant in the middle of the night and came back with a part out of his own locker. And when that furnace came on, Brenda Kay, I stood over the register in my kitchen and cried like a child.”

“He never told me,” I said. And he had not. I remembered a night he went out late for somebody from church. I had never known whose house.