CHAPTER FIVE — TIME FREELY GIVEN
The bell over the door rang at ten past nine, and two men came in arguing about a parking space neither of them had won.
Simon could hear the shape of the argument from the back workshop.
It had the worn groove of a disagreement long past its useful life, the verbal equivalent of a hinge that had lost its bushing: it still moved, but it ground.
He set down the brass brush he'd been cleaning and came to the counter, and Philip, who was at the far end of the front room sorting object tags into Ada's shallow drawers, looked up with the expression of a man deciding how much of his morning he was about to lose.
The older of the two men did the talking.
Mid-forties, broad through the shoulders, a canvas jacket with a hardware-store logo worn to a ghost on the chest. The younger one hung back near the door, hands in the pockets of a good coat that didn't match the rest of him, and studied the glass-fronted cabinets as if the cabinets might need something from him.
"Morning," the older one said. "You the one doing Ada's work now?"
"I'm Simon Luray. I'm here on a six-week contract, inventorying the estate." Simon kept his voice level. "And you are?"
"Thomas Mercer. This is my brother, Daniel." Thomas said my brother the way a man reads a line item on an invoice. "Our father's watch stopped. Our father passed in the spring. The watch stopped right around then, and we'd like it running again."
"Running," Daniel repeated, from the cabinets, with a small dry emphasis that suggested an entire editorial.
Thomas's jaw moved. Simon watched the muscles along it work once, twice, then release. Whatever the fight was, it was old enough to have calluses.
"Let's see it," Simon said.
Thomas drew a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, unfolded it on the counter with ceremony, and there in the cotton fold lay a silver open-face pocket watch, decent middle-grade work, maybe 1940s, the kind of case that had been carried daily for decades and showed it: a soft matte bloom where a thumb had worried the crown, hairline scratches crossing and recrossing the back like a skating rink after a busy afternoon.
Simon didn't pick it up yet. He leaned and looked.
"May I?" He waited for the nod before touching it, because a watch that had been fought over was an object with a perimeter.
It was cold. That was the first thing. Cold the way things get when they've been stored rather than carried, and lighter than its size promised, which told him the movement inside was a modest one.
He pressed the crown with the ball of his thumb.
It turned a quarter turn and stopped, hard, the resistance of a fully wound mainspring with no escape.
So the power was there. The watch had been wound, recently and hopefully, by somebody who thought running out of juice was the problem.
He turned it in the light from the high windows. The dial was clean, the crystal uncracked, the blued-steel hands parked at eleven and four, meaningless to anyone but whoever had last set them.
"The movement's wound," he said. "The balance isn't turning."
"Can you fix it?" Thomas asked.
"That depends on what's wrong, and on what you want." Simon set the watch on the counter, flat, equidistant between the two brothers, an act of small diplomacy he didn't think either of them noticed. "Tell me about it."
"It was our father's," Thomas said. "He carried it his whole working life. Machine shop over in Harlow. He timed everything with that watch. Breaks, shifts, the drive home." A pause with weight in it. "It should run. He'd want it running. It should go to—" Thomas stopped, and the stop was loud.
"To who," Daniel said. He came off the cabinets and stood at the other end of the counter.
"That's the part we don't say out loud. Who gets the watch.
Because whoever gets the watch got the house, and the shop tools, and the last two years of driving him to appointments, and—" He cut himself off, which Simon noted with interest. Both of them stopped at the same cliff, from opposite directions.
"Neither of you needs to tell me any of that," Simon said. "I mend objects. I don't adjudicate estates."
"Good," said Philip, from the drawers.
Simon glanced over. Philip had stopped sorting tags entirely. He was leaning against the cabinet with his arms folded, watching the brothers with the particular stillness of a man holding a position he hadn't yet argued for.
"It's a watch," Philip went on, mildly enough. "It'll need cleaning, an oscillator check, maybe a part. Any decent watchmaker in the valley could do it. Why bring it here?"
It was a fair question, and Simon watched it land wrong on Thomas, whose color came up.
"Because Ada promised," Thomas said. "Years ago.
He brought the watch in when the crystal cracked—Dad did—and Ada fixed it, and she told him, 'This one I'll look after as long as I'm here.
' He liked that. He trusted her." Thomas's thumb moved on the counter, tracing a circle the size of a crown. "She's not here. But the shop is."
"An estate can't look after anything," Philip said. "That's the trouble with promises like hers."
"Philip." Simon kept it low.
"No, I want to say it plainly, because it matters.
" Philip unfolded from the cabinet and came to stand near the counter, though not behind it, Simon noticed.
On the public side. On the brothers' side.
"My whole trade is inheriting living things from people who made promises.
Plants don't care who promised what. They live if you care for them and they die if you don't, and half the time what the dead person intended and what the plant needs are two different things.
" He nodded at the watch. "That's a machine.
Machines are simpler. But the thing you two are asking it to do isn't mechanical, and I'd rather say so now than after this man's spent a day at the bench. "
Daniel had gone very still, watching Philip. Thomas had gone red to the ears.
"You don't know what we're asking," Thomas said.
"No," Philip agreed. "Neither do you. That's my point."
The silence in the room got thick enough that Simon could hear the radiator ticking, which at least was a clock with no opinions.
He looked at the watch lying on the counter, cold and wound and stopped at eleven-four, and he thought about the cup, about the click under his thumb and the orange peel and the warmth that had belonged to somebody else's breakfast. He thought about the ledger's RETURNS column, dates marching down the page with nothing written beside them.
He thought, with an unfamiliar prickling, that Philip was probably right and that Simon wanted to take the repair anyway, and that the distance between those two facts was exactly the kind of gap he'd spent twelve years pretending was a professional judgment rather than a personal appetite.
So he did what he'd been trained to do with an appetite. He made it a procedure.
"Here's what I can and can't do," he said.
"I can examine the movement and tell you what's mechanically wrong.
That's just diagnosis; it doesn't commit anyone to anything.
I can tell you both, plainly, that I will not repair this object to prove a point for either of you—not about the house, the appointments, the shop tools, or the drive home.
If the object gets worked on, it gets worked on for its own sake.
And I will need something from you before I open the case. "
"What?" the brothers said, nearly in unison, and then glared at each other for the unison.
"Consent. From both of you, separately, out loud. Not to make peace. To the object work. Two different things, and I want it on record that we all know they're different."
Thomas looked at Daniel. Daniel looked at the watch. Somewhere in the exchange, an old arithmetic visibly ran, the kind siblings do without either one admitting it's being done.
"Fine," Daniel said. "Yes. To the object work."
"To the object work," Thomas said. "Not to—" he gestured vaguely at the space between the three of them, which contained the entire year since their father's death.
"Not to anything else," Simon said. "Agreed."
He carried the watch back to the oak bench.
The bench was cool under his forearms, the grain worn into shallow rivers, and the north window gave its flat honest light.
He laid out a cork mat, a case knife, his loupe, the finest tweezers he owned.
Behind him, he heard Philip come into the workshop and stop at a respectful distance, close enough to see, far enough not to crowd, which was a line Philip seemed to draw by instinct the way he drew them on purpose.
Simon opened the case back.
The movement was clean. That was the first surprise.
No corrosion, no gummed oil, no broken balance staff that would have explained the stillness.
The hairspring sat in its proper breathing curve.
The escape wheel was intact. Under the loupe, every pivot gleamed.
This was a movement that had no mechanical reason in the world to be stopped, and it was stopped as completely as a stone.
He tried the crown again, watching the works. The mainspring was tight with power. Power sat there and went nowhere, like a crowd pressed against a door that had been latched from the other side.
"Find anything?" Philip asked.
"A healthy movement that won't run." Simon sat back.
His fingertips were resting on the bench edge, and he was aware of them, aware of the wood's coolness, in the way he'd learned to be aware of the bench since the cup.
Waiting, he thought, the bench is waiting, and then told himself firmly that a workbench could not wait, and noticed that he didn't quite believe himself anymore.