The Watch I Kept for Thirty Years

He told me about the rubber band. He said that Elinor Crowell kept her summer money, from the bus barn’s cleaning job in the off-months, in a Folgers can in her kitchen. Everyone knew. Her husband teased her about it at the feed store. It was twelve hundred dollars. It was twelve hundred dollars and a watch, and it came to sixteen hundred and fifty.

I did not sleep that night. On Sunday I drove to Pastor Ostby’s house and sat on his porch and asked him straight out. He would not say. He said, “Rolf, I gave my word, and she gave hers to God that it would stay between the two of us and Him.” He was a young man and he was shaking. But I knew. I knew the way a man knows his own hand.

I could not go to her. That is the part I have turned over a thousand times. If I knocked on Elinor Crowell’s door and told her I knew, I would be telling a woman who had given secretly that her secret was out. She had asked for no thanks, through a minister. And I thought, if I make her face me over this, I take from her the one thing she wanted, which was to give without being seen.

So I did the other thing. On Saturday, the twenty-seventh, after the cafe, I drove to Ludlow behind Mr. Kessling in my pickup, and I stood in his shop and asked what it would cost to buy the Hamilton back. He said he would take what he had paid, four hundred and fifty, and that he had expected somebody to come. I did not have four hundred and fifty dollars. I had $31 and a county check. He let me pay twenty dollars a month for twenty-three months, on a handshake.

I did not take it to her. I wrapped it in a red work bandanna and put it in the toolbox of the grader. When I retired in 2014 I carried it home in my coat pocket and put it in the sock drawer. I meant to give it back, and I had a plan for it every year. Then Wilda died. Then Elinor was a widow across the table from me at a turkey supper. Then she was my wife.

I took the watch out of the drawer on the morning of our wedding, the tenth of October, 2015. I had it in my pocket in the church basement. I had my hand on it when she walked up the aisle in a gray suit with a spray of white mums, and I thought: tonight. I will tell her tonight what I know, and I will give her her mother’s watch.

I did not. The reason is the one I have not been honest about in thirty years, and I will be honest now. It was not delicacy. It was cowardice with a good coat on. The longer I waited, the more I owed. I had taken her money and her watch in 1996, and a good year in 2019 had her paying for windows, and then it was bathrooms, and every check she wrote made the next sentence harder. How do you hand a woman her mother’s watch while you are taking her money for tile and holding a will that puts her out of the house in sixty days? There was no sentence. So I kept the watch in a drawer under my socks, and I kept it thirty years because I was afraid that handing it back meant saying what I knew.