The Watch I Kept for Thirty Years

The Weeks Since

I left her a voicemail on Monday, the fifth of October. It was forty-one seconds long, and she knows that because the phone told her. I had written it on a feed receipt, and then I lost my nerve and said, “Elinor, it’s Rolf. Call me,” and hung up before my voice could say anything else. I was a man who had spent six years waiting for the right sentence, and he said the wrong one, and then he said nothing at all.

I eat standing up now, at the plywood counter. I cannot make myself sit at the table. Boyd noticed it first. Garrett had told him what was in the will the Sunday after the dinner. Boyd stopped by on Wednesday, the fourteenth, and found me with a plate of beans and a heel of bread, and he asked to read it. I gave it to him, and he stood by the window in the light off her new glass and read it down to the signature.

He folded it and said, “Dad, you ought to be ashamed.”

I said, “I am.”

He said, “Then why haven’t you said so to her?”

I did not have a sentence for him. He drove to Ludlow that afternoon with a sack of apples and found her at Rena’s, and he stood on that porch with his cap in his hand, and he came back and told me she had not said much. She had asked him if I was eating.

On Sunday the eighteenth I went to church and sat down in the last pew, with my hat on my knee. In eleven years we have sat in the third row on the left. I sat at the back where I could see her. She stood in our pew and sang every verse of every hymn with her chin up. After the benediction Pastor Ostby shook my hand and said, “Rolf, you know where my office is.”