The Clock I Kept Running for Tobin

He came home that Christmas and sang the hymns in the pew in a voice that had gotten stronger, and ate his mother’s ham. I said, “Pass the potatoes.” He said, “Sure, Dad.” We were the two most polite men in Indiana.

The next Christmas he did not come, and by the third year he had stopped calling on Sundays, because I had made it so that calling was a thing he did to his mother and not to me. A son can only be turned away from his father’s chair so many times.

I did not call him. Let me say that plainly, because it is the whole sin. Not that I said one cruel sentence on a Tuesday in October. Men say cruel sentences.

It is that for eleven years afterward I held the phone in my own kitchen on my son’s birthday and set it down again, every year, and told myself the door was open and he knew where it was.

And on Sundays I wound his clock.

I never told anyone why. Delphia noticed. She watched me from the kitchen doorway the first Sunday, and the next, and by the third I think we both understood it was a prayer and that neither of us was going to say the word.

I told myself a stopped clock in a clockmaker’s house is a bad look. But I wound it so there would be one place in the room where my son was not yet gone.

Delphia got sick in the third winter after Tobin left. It was her pancreas, and by the time the doctor in Terre Haute said the word, she was already on the other side of it. She had fourteen months. She taught piano until the last four.

She asked me about Tobin the way she asked about everything, gently and from the side. We were at the kitchen table, in March of the year she died, and she had a cup of tea she was not going to drink.

“Alvie,” she said. “Call our boy.”

“He knows the number.”

“So do you.”

I looked at my hands. “When he wants to talk to me, he’ll call.”

She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “He’s been calling. For three years he called. Do you think he stopped because he stopped wanting to?”

I said nothing, which I had always been good at.

“He stopped,” she said, “because he got tired of hearing you not pick up.”

She died on the twenty-sixth of that month. I called Tobin then, of course. A father makes that call. I said, “It’s your mother,” and he said, “I’m coming,” and he was in Weldon Crossing within six hours, in the same truck.

He was thirty-one then, with a beard I had not seen, and he looked like her around the eyes. He held his mother’s hand in the funeral home as long as he was allowed to. He carried the casket with five other men, the pallbearers from our church, and I remember thinking that his shoulders had grown up without me.

And after the funeral, in the fellowship hall of the Methodist church, with seventy people eating ham and green bean casserole around us, my son walked up to me and held out his hand.

I will tell you what I did. I shook it.

I said, “Thanks for coming.”