The Watch I Kept for Thirty Years

The Bathrooms

I did something worse than sign the will, and I want to say it before you hear it from someone else. I took her money after I signed it.

In September of 2019, before the will, she paid $11,400 for nine new windows. I did not know that was coming, because she did it on her own. The back bedroom was so cold in January that she could see her breath, and she did not want to ask me, because she knew what was in the checking account. I was a man with a small pension and no debt, and I let her, and I thanked her.

Then came the second thing. In the summer of 2021 the drought ate Boyd’s corn. He farms the eighty acres I own down the road, and he rents another hundred and sixty, and when the crop failed he came to me with a bank note due that he could not pay. It was sixty thousand dollars. I had never cosigned a thing in my life. I cosigned that, and I told no one. Boyd did not want his wife to know and I did not want mine to know, because I had been proud of being a man with a small pension and no debt, and I was suddenly a man with a note.

So in the spring of 2022, when the hall bathroom tub had a soft spot in the floor beside it, and the plumber said it would cost $11,600 to do both baths right, I had nothing to put against it. What I had was a certificate of deposit the bank was holding against Boyd’s note. So I sat on the edge of the bed on the second of May and let my wife write a check for $11,600, and I said, “I’ll make it right with you, Elinor.”

“We’re married,” she said. “It’s our house.”

Here is the truest thing I can say about that. There was a reason, beyond the will, that I could not look at her when she wrote the check, and it is the reason this story has a watch in it. I will get to that. First I have to tell you about the kitchen.

The Half

On Monday, the fourteenth of September, I had Marv Tilghman out from the lumber yard in Ludlow to price a new kitchen. The old cabinets are the ones Wilda picked in 1983, and the oven door shuts with a bungee cord. The number came back at $28,400 and I almost sat down on the floor. Boyd’s note was due in October. The CD was spoken for. And I did the cowardliest thing a man my age can do, which was to ask my wife for half, as though it were a favor to her.

I said at supper, over chicken and noodles, with my eyes on my plate, “I figure you’d want to put in half. It’s your kitchen too.”

Three days later I asked her to find a property tax receipt in the rolltop desk. I had half forgotten what else was in that drawer, and a man can half forget a thing on purpose. It had been under the receipts for six and a half years, and I think I had decided my life was a place where it could stay.

On the Monday after the sentence, the twenty-first, she stood at the sink with the plates in the drainer and said, “You asked me for half. You will have half.”

That was all. She did not say a word more. On Tuesday she drove to Ludlow. On Wednesday she wrote Marv a check for $14,200, exactly half of his number, and he told me later it was the steadiest hand he had ever seen sign a check. On Monday the twenty-eighth a crew showed up at six in the morning, and I stood in the doorway to the dining room with my coffee and watched four men build my wife’s half of a kitchen.

They hung sage-green cabinets. They set a butcher-block counter and an island. They put in a farmhouse sink with a window over it, and a faucet that does not drip. On Wednesday I asked the foreman when they would start on my side, and he said, “Mrs. Amberg paid for the sink wall, the window wall, the island and the floor. That’s all it covers, Mr. Amberg,” and I said, “I know.”