Fourteen hundred dollars. That was what Brenda announced the estate lawyer had valued the total remaining liquid assets at, after the truck rentals were paid, after the township disposal fees for Dad’s old shed were settled, and after she took her administrative cut for the trouble of clearing out thirty-four years of his life. Fourteen hundred dollars to divide between the two of us, though she made it clear her kids had already earned their share by doing the heavy lifting of carrying out the flat-screen television and the matched mahogany dresser set.
I sat on the edge of the floral-print sofa that smelled faintly of the peppermint oil she used to mask the scent of damp wool, watching her slide a standard manila envelope across the laminate coffee table. She didn’t offer coffee. She didn’t offer a glass of water. She just tapped her acrylic fingernail twice against the corner of the envelope and told me the bank would clear the check by Tuesday if I signed the release forms right then. Dad had been gone twelve days. The smell of the funeral lilies had barely faded from the front hallway before she started measuring the rooms for new carpet. I didn’t argue with her about the fourteen hundred dollars because arguing took an energy I simply didn’t possess anymore, and besides, the air in that house had felt thin and borrowed ever since the morning the hospital called.
After the funeral, my stepmother handed me Dad’s old wristwatch while her kids loaded the real valuables into their trucks.
Scratched face. Cloudy crystal. A band repaired so many times it barely matched itself. She dropped it into my palm with a tight little smile. ‘It’s nothing special, but you might want it.’ She said it with that particular brand of charitable grace people reserve for things they are throwing away anyway, like an old coat left on a hook in a public hallway. The gold-plated Timex she bought him for their tenth anniversary had already gone into a velvet-lined jewelry roll along with his class ring and the silver tie clip his brother gave him back in seventy-two. Those pieces went into the back of her son Kevin’s Ford F-150 along with the good tools and the snowblower. What remained on the side table by the recliner was this heavy, dull thing. It didn’t gleam. The second hand had a slight stutter to it, catching for a fraction of a beat every time it swept past the eight, as if it had to gather its breath before finishing the circuit.
I closed my fingers around it, feeling the sharp corner of the lower lug bite into my palm, and dropped it into my coat pocket without saying thank you. Brenda watched me do it with the satisfied nod of a woman who felt she had disposed of a charity case with maximum Christian propriety. I wore it for months, not because it was worth anything, just because seeing it made me think of him.
I didn’t take it off to shower, and I didn’t take it off to sleep. The weight of it against my left wrist became a strange sort of anchor during those first few blank weeks when the house felt too large and the silence had a heavy, pressing quality that made my ears ring. Dad had worn that watch through every shift at the machine shop, through the winters when the heater in his truck gave out, and through the long evenings when he sat at the kitchen table with a stubby pencil trying to make the property taxes fit into a pension that hadn’t seen a cost-of-living increase since the Reagan administration.
I used to watch him wind it every Sunday night after supper, his thumb and forefinger gripping the tiny grooved crown with a slow, deliberate care that looked almost like a prayer. He never let anyone else touch it. When I was ten, I asked him why he didn’t buy one of those digital watches with the bright green numbers that all the other kids’ dads had, the ones that beeped on the hour. He had looked down at me over the top of his reading glasses, his thumb still resting on the crown, and said simply, ‘A machine has to earn its keep, kid. That one’s honest.’ I didn’t know what he meant back then, and for a long time I thought it was just one of those stubborn things older men said because they didn’t like change.
Three months and four days after the funeral, I found myself wandering through the municipal pavilion during the monthly Saturday antique flea market, mostly because staying inside my own four walls made my skin crawl with a restless, hollow sort of panic. The air inside the brick-paved hall smelled of stale kettle corn, damp cardboard, and decades of old wool coats hung up in drafty basements. I was drifting past a row of tables loaded with chipped Depression glass and rusted biscuit tins when I stopped at a booth near the back where an old man with thick-lensed glasses was repairing the escapement wheel of an open-cased pocket watch with a pair of needle-nose tweezers. One Saturday I was at a flea market when a man across the table stopped mid sentence and stared at my wrist. At first I thought he recognized the brand. I had my left hand resting on the edge of his scarred wooden folding table while I looked down at a tray of brass drawer pulls, my mind miles away on nothing in particular.
The old man’s hand froze, the tiny tweezers hovering a millimeter above the delicate steel teeth of the watch movement. He didn’t blink. He just stared at the scarred steel band of my father’s watch with an intensity that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Then he stepped closer, asked if he could see it, and the moment I unclasped it, his whole face changed.
He didn’t take it with the casual, practiced grab of a dealer looking to appraise a piece for resale. He reached out with both hands, his palms trembling just slightly, and cupped it the way a priest handles a chalice during communion. He brought it up toward his thick glasses, squinting against the harsh glare of the overhead fluorescent tubes, and his mouth parted slightly as he traced the outer rim of the bezel with the pad of his thumb. He turned it over, read something engraved on the back, he looked up at me, his voice dropped low, and for a second the noise of the crowded pavilion seemed to drain completely out of the room, leaving only the dry hum of a vending machine against the far wall. ‘Where did you get this?’ he asked. His voice was thin and raspy, like dry leaves scraping across concrete, but underneath the age there was a sharp, iron-straight tone that didn’t invite any evasion.
I told him it was my father’s, that he had just passed away, and that my stepmother had given it to me because she thought it was junk. The old man let out a short, wet breath that sounded almost like a laugh, though there wasn’t any humor in it at all. He turned the watch over again, his thumb rubbing furiously at the cloudy crystal as if he were trying to wipe away forty years of dust with a single motion.
‘Junk,’ he muttered, shaking his head so hard his glasses slid another inch down the bridge of his nose. ‘Arthur didn’t build junk. Not once in his life.’ I stared at him, the name hanging in the air between us like a dropped tool. I told him my father’s name was Walter, not Arthur, and that he must have mistaken it for something else. The old man looked up at me then, and his eyes behind those thick lenses were watery and bright with something that looked entirely too much like tears. He introduced himself as Arthur Miller, though he said people around the county had stopped calling him that back when the old jewelry store on Main Street went under and the bank took the building for back taxes. He told me he hadn’t seen this particular case design since the winter of nineteen-seventy-eight, back when the river froze solid enough to drive a tractor across and the two of them spent three weeks in an unheated basement with a kerosene heater and a set of jeweler’s files they had borrowed from an old German watchmaker who died owing money to half the parish.
He set the pocket watch he had been working on down onto a dirty rag, pushed his stool back with a sharp screech of metal against wood, and motioned for me to follow him behind the curtain that divided his cramped booth from the damp storage area behind it.
The back room smelled of machine oil, flux, and old tobacco smoke, a heavy, familiar scent that brought back the exact memory of my father’s old work jacket hanging on the hook by the back door. Arthur didn’t turn on a lamp right away. He sat down on a folding chair beside a scarred workbench lit by a single goose-neck desk lamp with a dented metal shade, and he motioned for me to hand the watch back to him. I laid it in his palm, and he immediately reached into a leather case for a small loupe, pressing it firmly into his left eye socket. He didn’t speak for nearly two minutes. I stood there in the narrow aisle between stacks of empty cardboard boxes and spare clock faces, listening to the muffled shouts of people haggling over cast-iron skillets out in the main hall. Every few seconds, Arthur would mutter something under his breath, a low, rhythmic sequence of numbers and technical terms about balance springs and jewel counts that meant nothing to me. Then he carefully unscrewed the back casing, using a tiny three-pronged wrench that fit into the microscopic notches along the rim. The metal gave way with a faint, dry pop, like a seal breaking on an old jar of preserves.
‘Look here,’ he whispered, gesturing with the tip of his tweezers toward the inner brass plate. I leaned over the table, my shoulder brushing against his flannel sleeve, and looked down through the magnifying glass. Stamped into the raw brass of the movement plate, right beneath the balance cock where nobody would ever see it unless they tore the whole machine apart, was a series of tiny, hand-punched characters: W.H. to A.M. ‘Your dad didn’t buy this at a store,’ Arthur said, and his voice was steadier now, stripped of the initial shock and replaced by a quiet, heavy certainty. ‘We made these together. Two of them. One for him, one for me. We swore an oath in that freezing cellar that whatever happened to the world outside, whatever scrap metal we had to pull out of the junk yards just to keep the heat on, we’d never sell out our trade.
We were twenty-four years old. We didn’t have two nickels to rub together between us, but we had the tools.’ He set the wrench down with a tiny metallic click that seemed to echo in the small room. He looked up at me, his gaze fierce and uncompromising. ‘Your stepmother thinks it’s trash because she only knows the price of things that have a label on the outside. But this? This is the only thing Walter had that couldn’t be measured by an auctioneer.’
He turned the casing over again, pointing to the outer edge of the back plate where a series of faint, cursive scratches formed a Latin phrase I had never seen before. Ad Astra per Aspera. Through hardships to the stars. Arthur traced the letters with the edge of a fingernail. ‘Your father carved that himself with a graver I gave him for his twenty-fifth birthday,’ he said softly. ‘He spent three nights doing it by the light of a single propane lantern because his hands were shaking from working the pneumatic drills at the quarry all day. He told me he wanted something that would outlast the mortgages, outlast the politicians, and outlast whatever bad luck was coming down the road.’ He looked at me, and his expression softened into something that felt like a judgment and a blessing all at once. ‘He kept it hidden in his pocket the whole time he was with that woman, didn’t he?
He never wore it to church. He never wore it to her family dinners. He kept it in the dark because he knew what she would do to it if she understood what it was.’ I felt a sudden, sharp tightness in my chest, the kind of breath that gets stuck behind your ribs because your brain refuses to process it all at once. I thought about Brenda’s smug little smile when she handed it to me, her certainty that she had handed me the worthless leavings of a broken man.
We sat there in the back room for an hour while Arthur told me things about my father I had never known, things from a time before I was born, back when Dad wasn’t just the tired man who sat in the armchair watching the six o’clock news with a can of beer. He told me about the winter they tried to repair the clock tower at the old courthouse after the fire, working twenty-four hours straight in sub-zero temperatures because the town didn’t have the money to pay a professional firm from Grand Rapids. He told me about how Dad used to fix watches for widows and neighborhood kids for free, taking payment in jars of blackberry jam or a bag of fresh sweet corn because he couldn’t bear to take money from people who had less than he did. Every story sounded like a different person entirely, yet as I looked down at the scratched steel casing of the watch sitting on the green felt mat, every single piece of it fit together with the terrifying precision of a well-oiled gear train.
Brenda had taken the flat-screen. She had taken the mahogany dresser, the gold-plated Timex, and the fourteen hundred dollars from the estate account. She had taken every last shiny token of a life she had managed and curated down to the last penny. But she had missed the one thing that actually mattered, because she couldn’t see past the rust.
When I left Arthur’s booth that afternoon, the sun was already dipping below the flat horizon of the parking lot, casting long, bruised shadows across the asphalt. I didn’t go back to Brenda’s house. I didn’t call her to tell her what I had found, and I didn’t check the mail to see if the fourteen hundred dollar check had cleared the bank yet. Those things belonged to a different world, a flat, grey world where everything had a price tag and everyone was waiting for someone else to slip up so they could take a larger share of the leftovers. I walked out to my truck, sat behind the steering wheel, and unclasped the watch from my left wrist. I turned it over in the fading daylight, running my thumb over the rough, hand-carved letters along the back plate until I could feel every single stroke of the tool my father had held forty years ago in a freezing basement. Then I slipped it back on, buckled the repaired leather strap one notch tighter than usual, and turned the key in the ignition. The old motor caught with a familiar, rattling cough, and as I pulled out onto the highway, I could hear the second hand ticking against the quiet of the cab, steady and unbroken, refusing to miss a single beat.
