The Clock I Kept Running for Tobin

Thanks for coming, to my son, at his mother’s funeral.

He looked at me for a long moment. I think he was waiting for me to say one more thing, and I could not find it. It was right there in my chest, enormous, and I could not find a door in myself to push it through.

So he nodded. He said, “I’ll call you, Dad.” Then he left before the pie.

He did not call. And I did not call. And that was six years ago.

You would think that was the worst of it, and it was not. The worst of it came slowly, over the next few years, in my hands.

I have a tremor. Doctors call it essential tremor, which is a kind name for a thing that takes the one skill a man has built his life on.

It started in my right hand about four years ago, and by last winter I was refusing every watch that came through the door. I sent them to a man in Indianapolis.

What I could still do were the big things, the mantel clocks, the grandfather cases, the Farmers Bank clock out front which I have kept for thirty-eight years and which only needs a crank.

I was closing down. Slowly, and without saying so. I had stopped ordering parts. I had stopped cleaning the ultrasonic tank. The shop smelled less of oil and more of dust.

And every Sunday, I wound that mantel clock.

She walked in on a Tuesday in June.

I was alone in the shop, about ten in the morning, already warm, the box fans going, the corn along the county road knee-high and green. I was sitting at the bench with a Seth Thomas strike train in pieces, doing the part of the work I could still manage, when the bell over the door rang.

A girl stood in the doorway with a green duffel bag over one shoulder. Seventeen, maybe. Tall. Dark hair in a rope braid down her back. She had a tan canvas jacket in June, which struck me as odd until I saw the pockets, because they were full of tools.

She did not say hello. She stood with her head tilted, the way a person does when they are listening, and I watched her eyes go around the room, the forty clocks all ticking just slightly apart from one another, like rain on a tin roof.

Her eyes stopped on the regulator.

“That one’s limping,” she said.

I put down my screwdriver.

I could not feel my hands. My mind had gone clean and blank, like a dial with the hands removed.

“It’s been out of beat since March,” I said. My voice sounded like somebody else’s. “I haven’t had the heart to fix it.”

“You’ve had the tremor,” she said. “Dad said you might have it, eventually. He said his hands would be like yours if he didn’t watch it.” She shifted the duffel. “I’m Marguerite. Dad adopted me when I was seven. I’m your granddaughter.”

I knew her name. Delphia had told me, in the last winter, over the tea she wasn’t drinking. She said, “He married a woman with a little girl, Marguerite, and the girl has our name now,” and I’d said, “That’s nice,” and gone to wash a cup.

I had known for years that I had a granddaughter named Marguerite, by way of a courthouse paper and a wife’s kindness, and I had not once said her name out loud.