Unclaimed Hours

Evelyn Hart had learned to read the world in the angle of a tooth on a gear and the fainting cadence of a mainspring unwinding. Her shop smelled of brass and lemon oil and the dry chalk dust that collected where metal met cloth. By day the street outside gave the rhythm — a cartwheel, a dog’s bark, the bell from the church tower — and by habit she translated those sounds into the tiny conversations of mechanisms. The silver wristwatch lay open on her bench like a small patient. It had arrived in the morning wrapped in moth-eaten paper sent by her mother, a parcel that moved across the county with more hope than direction. Evelyn had not wanted to touch the watch at first; some objects carried a weight that worked against good tools. But she was a maker, and making kept her grief from congealing into something that smelled like regret. The case back was worn at the edge where a thumb would keep time in a pocket. The movement inside had little peculiarities: a hairline scratch no larger than spider silk on the third wheel, a tiny darkened smear on the balance staff where an old improper repair had left a burr. Those traces spoke of a single pair of hands. Lucien's, she thought, because hands have memory even when people do not. He had left one night five years before and the house had learned to fold around the absence of him. People said time would soften the edges of such hollows, but she knew that the wrong kind of time could harden them like sugar left in the rain. The market clock had missed an hour that afternoon, the hands skipping with a faint mechanical cough and setting the vendors into a small argument about what had been measured and what had not. Jokes came first, then an examination. The baker’s boy returned an hour older and could not say how he had spent the missing span. Small things piled into a feeling: a wallet found in a hedge with receipts for hours that never were, a telephone call answered with a question already asked twice. In her shop, as dusk took the light away, the watch moved in a way she did not approve. It progressed, then slid back, rehearsing a lie it could not hold. When the town slept, the escape wheel gave a tiny reluctant sigh, and a fingernail of cool metal slid from a seam and clinked on the bench. She bent close and read the shallow letters stamped there: KEEP. The tag was no larger than a fingernail and colder than she expected, heavy despite its size. She closed her fingers around it and in the quick pressure she felt both the humidity of the room and a memory like a smudge, the sense of someone on a porch stepping back into the wronging of a night. It made her mouth dry and precise like a wound that expected tending.

She set the watch under her magnifier and found that its teeth bore marks of a life that had bent both ways. The pivots were oil-stained on one face and polished on the other, worn by two different decades. There were hairline creases on the dial where the paint had been kissed by a cigarette some years ago and then smudged with a thumb in the span of a second that was not consistent with the rest of its life. Nonsense, to say a watch had a story; but Evelyn had been told all her life that nonsense was a better teacher than despair. She worked the little flathead screw with a hand that did not shake, and beneath the dust she found an enamelled heart etched on the inside of the case, a child's carving done clumsily with a pocketknife. Under normal circumstances she would have set the watch by its beat, regulated the balance, oiled the pinions, and sent it back with a neat note. Normal circumstances had retreated from the town like a tide. The next morning the baker said his day had lost an hour; the grocer discovered his ledger had an extra line blank where sales should have been; a schoolteacher sat counting the minutes to see whether she might find out when, exactly, the children had eaten their lunch. They had begun to measure the absence with a furtive hunger. Evelyn found herself listening to neighbors through walls, catching fragments of sentences where people tried to name the missing slivers. In conversation things kept falling through, sentences dropping off mid-line like a poor connection. She might have left the watch to its own strange habits and chalked the tag up to coincidence, but her mother had sent it with a letter that folded into the parcel like a confession. 'I cannot bear the silence any more,' the letter said in her mother’s thin black ink, asking her to take it in hand. Evelyn had never received that letter as anything but an order she had accepted. The watch had always meant Lucien, even before she had proved the fact. There is a quiet violence to objects that return: they demand inventory.