The Clock I Kept Running for Tobin

She did not fail.

She set the watch in the movement holder and put the loupe in her right eye, and the grip she used on the tweezers was my grip, the odd bent-thumb way my father taught me and I taught Tobin, and she had it from Tobin.

She worked in silence for forty minutes, lifting the spring coil by coil under the glass, correcting the bend a hair at a time.

I stood behind her chair and watched, and at one point I made a small sound in my throat that I could not have explained.

When she finished, she set the balance wheel in and gave the watch the small tap with the tip of her finger. It began to beat. A fast, clean, steady tick, like a bird’s heart.

She listened. She tilted her head. “It’s a little fast,” she said. “Four, five seconds a minute. I’ll regulate it.”

“Who taught you this?”

“I told you. My dad.”

“Where did he learn it?”

She turned and looked at me then, and her face had the surprise of a person asked what color the sky is. “From you,” she said. “He says everything he knows is from you.”

I sat down in the chair that had been my wife’s, the one by the window, because my legs gave out.

She told me the rest over supper that night in my own kitchen, a thing that had not happened in that room in six years. I made grilled cheese and canned tomato soup.

She ate like a girl who had not eaten since the bus, and the things came out of her in the plain voice of a person who has been carrying them a long time and never been asked.

Her father played sessions at night, she said, on records people had heard of. He had a small brick house in Nashville, a wife named Annelise who taught school, and a daughter he had taken on at seven who listened the way he did. It was a decent life.

“He fixes clocks on Saturdays,” she said. “In the garage, at a bench he built out of a door. The old people on our street bring him their clocks, and he doesn’t charge most of them. He just says it’s practice.”

“Practice.”

“He says it keeps his hands honest.” She took a bite of the sandwich. “He says you taught him that a clock is a promise. Somebody wound it for you, so you keep it going for the next person.”

I put my spoon down.

“He has one of those in our hall,” she said. “A mantel clock. It’s not like yours, it’s a Waltham, he found it at an estate sale. He winds it every Sunday night after church.

I asked him once why he does it when we have a phone with the time on it. And he said, ‘A house needs somebody keeping time.'”

“He talks about you,” Marguerite said. “Not a lot. He never says anything bad. I used to want him to, because it would have been easier. When I was twelve, I asked him why we never went to Indiana, and he said, ‘Your grandpa is a very good clockmaker,’ and he walked out to the garage.”

“A very good clockmaker,” I said.

“He said it like it was the best thing a person could be.”

I got up from the table because I did not wish her to watch my face. I stood at the sink with my back to her.