The Watch From the Ones at Home

Wednesday night I woke at two and the kitchen light was on again.

Thursday I picked up the watch on my lunch hour.

Mrs. Abrams had it in a small box, not blue, a soft brown one with a hinge. She opened it and turned the watch over on her velvet and handed me her loupe.

The lettering was in three lines, in a plain, upright hand. It was not fancy. It was cut deep, so it would not wear off against a man’s wrist.

From the ones who were home when you got there

“Tell him to wind it in the morning,” she said. “Not at night. A watch likes to start the day full.”

I waited until after supper. I washed and he dried. Then he sat back down at the kitchen table in his flannel shirt with the paper, the way he does of an evening, and I went to my purse.

I set the brown box on the table in front of him, on top of the sports page.

He looked at the box. He looked up at me.

“What is this?”

“Open it.”

“Brenda Kay. What did you do?”

“I did not call anybody,” I said. “I did not say one word to anybody at that plant. I promise you that. Open it.”

He picked it up. The box looked like a toy in his hands. He got his thumbnail under the lid, the black one, and raised it.

He did not say anything. He sat and looked down at that watch for so long that I came around behind his chair, because I could not stand to watch his face from the front. I put my hand on his shoulder. I could feel him breathing.

“That is a Bulova,” he said finally. His voice was not quite right. “My dad had one about like this.”

“It is from 1972. You have to wind it.”

“I know how to wind a watch.”

“Turn it over, Dennis.”

He lifted it out of the box. He turned it over in his fingers, and held it out at arm’s length, and then he fished his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket with his other hand and put them on.

He read it. I watched him read it. I watched him get to the end and go back to the top and read it through again.

Then my husband, who did not cry at his own mother’s funeral until we were alone in the truck, took off his glasses and put the heel of his hand against his eyes, and his shoulders shook under my hand.

I put both arms around him from behind and laid my cheek on the top of his head, and we stayed that way.

“I did not go there for them,” he said after a while. It came out rough. “Thirty-eight years. I never one time went there for them.”

“I know it.”

“I went so I could come back here.”

“I know it, honey. That is why it says so.”

He laughed, a short wet laugh, and wiped his face on his sleeve. He unbuckled the old Timex and set it on the sports page. He put the Bulova on. He had to go to the fourth hole on the band. He turned his wrist to the light, this way and that way, exactly as Larry Combs’s wife had done on Saturday.

“How much did you give for this?”

“Less than I meant to. Mrs. Abrams would not take all of it.”

He looked around at me.