CHAPTER FIVE — TIME FREELY GIVEN #2
He flexed his hands, took the watch in his palm, and did what a conservator does before any intervention: he asked the object, with his hands, what it was for.
He ran a fingertip around the case. He found the wear patterns—the crown's worried spot, a bright patch on the back where a thumbnail had pried the cover thousands of times.
A man who'd checked this watch constantly.
A man for whom the watch was not a device for knowing the time, since there were clocks everywhere in a machine shop, but a gesture. A heartbeat he carried.
The metal began to warm under his hand.
He knew the sensation now, or thought he did, and so he was braced for the orange peel, braced for grief, braced for something with a face.
It wasn't that at all.
It was a waiting room.
That was the only language his body had for it.
A specific gravitational boredom, the weight of minutes that don't move, chairs with vinyl seats, a floor tiled in green and cream, the fluorescent hum at the edge of hearing.
His pulse didn't quicken; it flattened. Time around him went syrupy and institutional.
And in the echo his right hand rose, his thumb found a crown between finger and pad, and turned the watch over and over and over—not reading it, just touching, the way a man touches a watch when the person he's waiting for is behind a door he can't go through and there is nothing in the world to do with his hands.
Simon's own right hand lay flat on the bench and still, in the corner of his vision, he felt the other hand checking.
Counting nothing. Keeping vigil with a small cold machine.
It wasn't the father's grief. It was the father's patience. Hours of it, decades of it, condensed like sap.
Simon's breath had gone shallow. He eased the watch down onto the cork mat, and the echo let him go slowly, reluctantly, like a hand releasing a sleeve.
"Simon." Philip's voice, closer now. "You went somewhere."
"Nowhere," Simon said. His mouth was dry and tasted faintly of vending-machine coffee, which was absurd, which he was not going to say out loud. "Waiting room."
Philip was quiet for a moment. Simon could hear him processing, could practically hear the horticultural translation happening: a plant that flowers only under certain conditions, a seed that won't take until the frost.
"All right," Philip said. "Can you fix what you found?"
"That's the thing." Simon turned the loupe in his fingers.
"There's nothing to fix. Everything's sound.
It's stopped because—" He stopped himself, because the sentence he'd been about to say was because it wants something, and he had rules about sentences like that, rules that were holding by an increasingly frayed thread.
"Because it's not being used the way it was meant to be used.
This watch's whole job was shared time. Timing a shift, timing a break, timing the drive home.
Time that two people spent together. It stopped when the man who carried it stopped carrying it.
I don't think it will run for an owner. I think it runs for an occasion. "
"You're saying the watch is on strike," Philip said.
"I'm saying the watch has standards."
Philip laughed—one short exhale through the nose—and Simon found, to his private annoyance, that the sound had improved his afternoon.
He brought the brothers back to the bench.
He showed them the clean movement, the sound parts, the wound mainspring going nowhere, and he told them the truth in the smallest version he could manage: "The mechanism is fine.
Whatever's stopping it isn't in the gearing.
I can clean and regulate it, and it may start.
But I can't promise you what will start it or what it will do afterward.
It belonged to a man who used it to time the parts of his day that involved other people. Objects like that can be particular."
"Particular," Thomas repeated.
"Objects hold what we do with them," said Daniel, unexpectedly, and both Simon and Philip looked at him.
Daniel was staring at the movement with its small silver cities, and his voice had dropped its edge.
"Dad never once looked at that watch alone.
I mean it. If he checked it, it was to say five minutes and we're loading the truck, or your mother's expecting me at six.
It was his way of talking to whoever was standing there. "
Thomas made a sound that wasn't quite a word. Then: "He'd check it at appointments. When I drove him. Look at it every two minutes and never once tell me the time."
"Yeah," Daniel said. "Yeah, that."
And for a moment, standing at Simon's bench, in Ada's shop, over their father's watch, the two of them were not arguing.
They were both looking at the same memory from opposite ends, which is its own kind of sharing, and Simon, watching, kept his hands still and let it happen.
He did not repair it. Some joins you only witness.
Then he did his work. Cleaning solvent, pegwood, a watchmaker's breath of oil at the pivots, regulation checked against his phone in a way that felt vaguely sacrilegious.
He worked for an hour and forty minutes with the brothers gone to get coffee at their separate paces—Thomas pacing the main street, Daniel reading in the car—and Philip staying, handing him the loupe when his fingers were full, saying nothing for long stretches in a way that Simon found he was increasingly reluctant to disturb.
At the end of it the movement was as clean and true as it had been at the start, and the watch lay on the bench, ticking.
Actually ticking. Simon felt it before he heard it, the faint quick heartbeat against the cork, and he looked up and found Philip already looking at him.
"It's running," Philip said.
"It's running," Simon agreed, and there was a strange flatness in his own voice, because the tick was a fact with a shape he didn't yet have.
He'd wound it. He'd cleaned it. But he had also simply been sitting here, working, with another person, in shared time, for an hour and forty minutes, and he could not for the life of him separate the maintenance from the company.
He wrote in his log: Movement sound. Cleaned, regulated.
Running as of 11:40 a.m. Cause of stoppage: undetermined.
Cause of resumption: undetermined. He looked at those last two lines for a long time.
Out front, the doorbell rang. The brothers had come back. Together, at the same time, from opposite directions, without apparently having arranged it.
Simon picked up the watch, and it ticked against his fingertip, quick and warm and alive.