The Clock I Kept Running for Tobin

“Why did you come?” I said, to the window. “Truly.”

She was quiet. When she answered, her voice was smaller. “Mom talked to Mrs. Aust from your church on the phone. She said you’d lost the use of your hands and the shop might close.

Later I went to the garage and he was sitting at his bench with a movement in front of him that he wasn’t working on. Just looking at it. For an hour.” She swallowed. “He’d never be the one to come. He thinks you don’t want him.

So I thought, somebody in this family has to be stubborn in the right direction.”

I laughed. It came out of me like a cough, and then it turned into something else, and I held on to the edge of the sink, and Marguerite got up and, very awkwardly, put her hand on my back.

I called him at ten that night.

I had to do it that night, or I would find a reason in the morning. I dialed from the kitchen phone, the old one with the cord, and stood in front of the black clock with the receiver in my shaking hand, listening to it ring in a house in Tennessee.

It rang five times. I nearly hung up. And then a voice that was my wife’s voice at the edges said, “Hello?”

“Tobin.”

Nothing. I heard a television somewhere behind him. I heard it get switched off.

“Dad?”

“Your daughter is here,” I said. “She’s safe. She’s asleep in your room. She fixed a bound hairspring on an Elgin this morning with a bent-thumb grip, and I’d like to know what in the world you’ve been doing in that garage.”

A sound came down the line. I realized it was a laugh and a sob colliding. “She went,” he said. “Annelise said she would. I told her not to. I told them both you’d send her home.”

“I did try.”

“I know you did.”

“Tobin.” This was the moment, and I could feel it, the door in my chest, stiff as a gate rusted shut. It would have been easy to say, we can talk when you come up. I have lived my whole life by the easy thing.

I said, “I need to say something and I want you to let me finish. Hollis told me about the light.”

Silence.

“I said a terrible thing to you. In front of people. A man who will not learn a trade is just noise. That was a lie, and I knew it when it came out of my mouth. You had learned the trade.

You were better at it than I ever was. And your music is not noise. I never listened to it, and I am telling you now that a man who has listened to forty clocks his whole life knows the difference, and you were right.

I was the one who did not know what I was hearing.”

I heard him breathing. A long, unsteady breath.

“I should have called you. For eleven years I should have called you. I stood in this house with the telephone in my hand every year on the thirteenth of April and put it down.

Your mother asked me to, at the end, and I said you knew the number. I shook your hand at her funeral like you were somebody from the bank. I was proud, and I was afraid, and I didn’t know how to be your father without being right.”