The Clock I Kept Running for Tobin

He looked down at my hand on his sleeve. He did not say anything for a while. Then he said, “You’ve got it backward, Dad. I was never the one who left the room. You’d put a lock on it, and I stood outside waiting for you to turn it.”

He put his hand over mine. It was steady. It was a clockmaker’s hand, and it was warm.

That was five months ago.

Marguerite stayed the summer. She worked at Tobin’s old bench from seven in the morning until the Farmers Bank clock struck five. I taught her from the chair beside her, with my voice, the way my father taught me when his eyes failed. “Slower.

Let the spring tell you. Never force the last quarter turn.” She wound the mantel clock on the second Sunday, and I stood at the kitchen door and watched, the way Delphia once watched me.

Tobin came on the weekends when he could.

He worked Saturdays at the bench beside his daughter, the box fans going, and the two of them did the fine work I could no longer do while I sat in the window chair and told every customer, with considerable pride, that the Rennick boy was back.

Opal Strawn brought in the same cuckoo clock that had sat in her lap the day he walked out, stopped again after all these years. He had it calling hours in twenty minutes. She cried, and he pretended not to see.

The week before Marguerite went home for school, we repainted the sign. The Son stayed. We added a line underneath it, smaller, in the same gold leaf. And Daughter.

I will tell you the thing I did not expect. On the last Saturday in September, after closing, Tobin took the old Harmony out of its case, sat on a stool in the middle of my shop, and tuned it. Forty clocks ticked around him. And he played.

I had been wrong about so many things, but I was wrong most of all about that sound. It was not noise.

It was a song about a house, and a mantel clock, and a man in a doorway who couldn’t say the word, and he had written it in a hotel room in Tulsa in the sixth year and never played it for anyone.

My granddaughter sat on the floor with her back against the counter and mouthed along to the chorus. The Gilbert regulator, newly set in beat, ticked steadily under the melody like a heart keeping time.

When he finished, nobody moved for a moment.

I said, “That one’s not limping.”

Tobin laughed, and put the guitar across his knees. “No,” he said. “I don’t believe it is.”

On Sunday mornings now I still stand on the hearth rug. I still take the key, and I still give it eight slow turns on the time side and eight on the strike, and I stop when the spring says stop.

But I don’t do it alone and I don’t do it as a prayer. I do it because it is Sunday, and my son’s clock is running, and by Saturday somebody will be in the shop tuning a guitar.

It took me eleven years and a seventeen-year-old girl on a wooden bench to learn what a clock has been telling me my whole life. You keep it wound, and you keep the light on, and you do not wait to be asked.

And when they get to your door, the first thing they need to hear is not a speech. It is the plain sentence you have been too proud to say.

I was wrong. Come in.