The Clock I Kept Running for Tobin

“Dad.”

“I wind your clock,” I said. “Every Sunday. Eleven years. Not a one missed, not when I had the flu, not when the roof leaked in the front room. Five hundred and seventy-two Sundays. I never knew why, and I know now. I was keeping your place.”

I could not go on. I stood with my forehead against the cool wood of the cabinet and the telephone against my ear, and from three hundred and some miles away I heard my son crying, quietly, the way he had always done everything.

“I never stopped,” he said, finally. “Loving the shop. I never stopped. Dad, I fix clocks every Saturday. I couldn’t. I couldn’t stop. I thought if I could just keep my hands in it, you’d still be on the other end somehow.”

“I know,” I said. “I know. I’m saying it out loud so you’ll know I know.”

He said, “I’m coming up.”

“It’s ten at night.”

“It’s five hours. I’ve made worse drives for worse reasons.” He blew his nose. “Leave the light on.”

I said, “It’s never been off.”

He pulled up in front of the shop at a quarter to four in the morning.

I had not gone to bed. Marguerite had, in his old room, and I sat in my chair by the mantel with the lamp on and listened to the black clock strike the half hours. When I heard the truck, I went out through the back and down Main Street in my slippers.

He was standing under the light. The one my father had put in over the door in 1974, with the gold leaf sign beneath it, Rennick and Son. He had gray in his beard that I had not seen at the funeral. He looked up when he heard me.

I want to tell you that we said something wonderful. We did not.

We stood on the sidewalk in the dark and he said, “Hi, Dad,” and I said, “You made good time,” and then he crossed the distance between us in two steps and put his arms around me, and I felt how thin my shoulders had gotten, and how solid his were.

It was the first time I had held my son since he was twenty-six years old.

When we went inside, Tobin stopped at the door.

“It smells the same,” he said. “Oil and brass.” He walked down the length of the shop slowly, the way you walk through a church, putting a hand out toward each clock without touching it. He stopped at the Gilbert regulator, tilted his head, and said, “Limping.”

“Since March.”

“I’ll fix it before I go.”

“Before you go.” I heard myself say it. “You’ll go. Of course you’ll go. You have a house, and a wife, and a life.”

“Dad.”

“I’m not asking you to stay,” I said. “I’ve got no right to. I did that to you once. Do what you do, play your music, play it good, and let me hear it. Send me a record.

I’ll sit in that chair and listen to every song you ever made, and I’ll tell you truly what I hear.” I put my hand on his arm, my bad hand, shaking against his sleeve. “That’s all. I just want to be let in to the room.”