The Clock I Kept Running for Tobin

“Once a year. On your birthday. The ninth of November. He’s done it every year since he left. He calls the store line around six in the evening, after you’ve closed up, and I pick up, and he says the same thing every time.” Hollis’s voice was thick. “He says, ‘Hollis, is the light on over the shop?'”

“The light.”

“The light over the door. The one your dad put in. And I go to the window, and I look across the street, and I tell him yes. It’s on. Because you’ve never once turned it off, not in eleven years, Alvie. That’s what he’s asking.

Is the shop still open. Is he still welcome. He doesn’t dare ask about you, so he asks about the light.”

The shop was very quiet. Even the clocks seemed to be holding their breath.

“He asked me not to tell you,” Hollis said. “The first year, he made me promise. He said if you wanted to know he was thinking about you, you’d have to pick up the phone. I kept my word for ten years because I thought it was decent.

I think now I’ve been a coward alongside you.” He put his cap on the counter, where Tobin’s key had been. “That’s his daughter out there.

She’s seventeen, and she’s sitting in the sun waiting for a bus because she believed her father when he said to stay anyway.”

I could not answer him. I found I was gripping the edge of the bench so hard my tremor stopped.

“I was standing in this shop when you said it,” Hollis said, more gently. “I should have said something. I’m saying it now. You were wrong, Alvie. You’ve been wrong a long while. It isn’t too late, but it will be.”

He picked his cap up off the counter, and he left.

I took my glasses off, wiped them on my shirt, and put them back on. Then I walked to the front window. She had folded the canvas jacket over her knees, and she sat very straight, hands on top of it, like her grandmother at the piano waiting for the first measure.

I have replaced a mainspring in a hundred-year-old Howard watch without cracking the case. But the hardest thing I have ever done with my hands was open that door.

The bell rang. She looked up.

I said, “The bus doesn’t go until four.”

“I know.”

“You’ll want to get out of the sun.”

She stood. The tall girl, the braid, the tool jacket. She did not smile, and I understood that she was afraid of me, which was only right.

I said, “Marguerite.” And it was the first time I had said it out loud, and it cost me something, and it came out rough as a file. “Come and show me what your father taught you.”

I put her at Tobin’s old bench.

I had not moved a thing on it in eleven years. His pegwood was still in the jar. His loupe was on its hook. There was a skin of dust over everything, and I took a clean rag and wiped it away, and my hand shook doing it, and she noticed and did not say a word.

I took a ladies’ wristwatch from the failed-repairs drawer, a little Elgin that a customer’s widow had left two years earlier, and I handed it to her. “The balance is bound. Hairspring’s been bent. Fix it.”

I want you to understand what I was doing. It was a test I would not give a first-year student. I was setting her up to fail, God forgive me, so I could send her to the four o’clock bus with a clear conscience.