The Clock I Kept Running for Tobin

“Does your father know you’re here?”

“No.” She said it without any shame at all. “Mom knows. Mom drove me to the bus station and gave me forty dollars and the number of the Methodist church, because she said if you turned me away, Mrs. Aust would find me a bed.

I rode the Greyhound to Terre Haute last night and Mrs. Aust picked me up at the depot.”

I was a long time getting the question out. “Why are you here?”

She took a breath. “I’m going to be a clockmaker. I want to apprentice with you this summer. I’ll work for nothing. I can sweep, I can clean movements, and I can set a jewel. I’ve been doing it since I was nine.”

“Since you were nine.”

“Dad teaches me. Saturdays, in our garage.”

She said this plainly, like a person reporting the weather, and the floor of my shop tilted under me.

I stood behind my counter with the tweezers still in my fist. I did not go to her.

What I did was say, “I’m not taking anyone.”

I said it in the estimating voice. Level and cold. And I watched her face, and for a moment I saw something go across it that I recognized, because I had seen it on her father’s face eleven years earlier, standing at the bench with his hands open.

“Dad said you’d say that,” she said.

“Your father knows me.”

“Yes sir. He says it every time I ask.” She let the duffel slide down her arm until it rested on the floor. “He says you’ll tell me no. And he says to stay anyway.”

I turned back to my bench. It was cruel, and I did it with perfect calm. “I have work,” I said. “You can wait outside. The bus to Terre Haute goes at four from the feed store.”

She did not argue. She nodded once, picked up her duffel, and went out through the door, and the bell rang over her. And through the front window I watched my granddaughter sit down on the wooden bench outside my shop, in the sun, to wait.

I sat at the bench and tried to work, and the strike train would not come together under my shaking hand. I dropped a pivot wheel and stayed on my knees under the bench, in the dust, longer than a man looking for a wheel should.

At noon the bell rang again.

It was Hollis Brandt.

Hollis is seventy-three. He has run Brandt Feed and Seed since his father died. He has sat three pews behind me at the Methodist church for as long as I can remember, and he has never said a word to me about anything more personal than the price of seed corn.

He came in with his seed cap crushed in one fist, and he said, “That girl on the bench.”

“I know who she is.”

“She’s been there two hours. She’s got no hat.” He turned the cap over. “Alvie, I need to tell you something and I need you to let me get all of it out before you do what you do.”

“What I do?”

“You go quiet,” Hollis said. “Like a door closing.”

I said nothing. He took that as permission, or as proof.

“Your boy calls me,” he said.

I think I stopped breathing.