“Watch,” I read aloud, and my voice failed me. Under the photograph, in the careful block printing of Frank, someone had written a date and a few words. Travis, outside Gold Coast Pawn, Nashville, March. He pawned the watch of my granddad. I pressed my hand over my mouth. That pocket watch had come from Ireland in 1891. Frank had carried it to church every Sunday for forty years, in the pocket of his vest, and he used to let our grandchildren hold it to their ears. After the funeral, I had searched the house for it, and Heather had told me gently that it was probably in a box somewhere.
Marcus stayed at the door. “Mrs. Edna,” he said, “I should tell you what Travis said on the phone. He said that if I brought the box to him, nobody would need to know what was in it. He said I would be doing a favor for the family.” He looked at his boots. “I was raised to know when a man is not asking for a favor.” I thanked him. I told him I had not been so well served by a stranger since I could remember. He turned red to the tips of his ears.
I read the letter on the arm of my chair. “Edna,” it said, “I am putting this where Travis cannot find it. Last year, he asked me to cosign a loan on his lawn business. I said no. In October, a man from a lender in Nashville called the shop and asked whether I was aware that I had put my tools up as collateral for thirty eight thousand dollars. I had not. Travis forged my name on the loan papers. I made him tell Heather. He wept and promised to pay it back. He did not. I am too tired to fight him, and I am afraid of what he will do after I am gone.”
Some men leave tools behind, and the best of them also leave a trail of dovetails leading to the truth.
I held the bank papers up to the window. There was the signature, plain as day. It looked like Frank at first glance. But Frank crossed his F with a short slash, and this one had a long, looping tail, the hand of a man who had practiced. Underneath was a list of tools, all three hundred hand tools and the table saw, with a dollar value beside each one. The lender had put a lien on the shop. If I had paid the dollar and handed them over, the lender would have taken the tools from Travis and then, when he defaulted, from me.
Heather had not said a word. She sat on the edge of the sofa with her hands between her knees. Finally she said in a thin voice, “Mama, I knew he had debts. I did not know he did this. I did not know about the watch.” I told her I believed her. “I do not know what to do,” she said. I said she could begin with the truth. She nodded slowly. She got up, walked to the telephone in the hall, and called the sheriff of Warren County herself, in front of me, and gave the name of her own husband.
Travis was arrested at the shop of a cousin in Smiths Grove, in a pair of overalls, with a half finished birdhouse in his hands. He said it was for me. The deputy lifted it out of his fingers with great politeness and put it in a paper bag. At the arraignment, the lawyer for the lender, a calm woman in a navy suit, examined the signature on the loan documents beside a signature from the bank card of Frank, and the court ruled in an afternoon that the lien was a forgery and void. Travis pleaded guilty to forgery and fraud. He received five years.
The pawn shop in Nashville held the watch for me without charge once the detective called. A clerk in a bow tie placed it in my palm in a velvet pouch. I opened the case. It was ticking, steady as a heartbeat. I carried it home in my fist for two hours on the interstate, and I did not let go of it until I was sitting in the chair of Frank in his shop, among the pegboards and the traced outlines of tools, in the afternoon light, with the smell of cedar and machine oil all around me.
Heather and the children moved in with me. She found a job in the office of the high school and a lawyer who handled the divorce for a modest fee. I put her in the bedroom with the new windows, so she could sleep without plastic over the glass. The first night, she cried herself to sleep. The second, she slept. By the end of the month she was humming in the kitchen again, and the grandchildren were building a fort with the couch cushions in the shop.
Marcus Bell kept the tools. Of course he did. He had paid me fair, in cash, and he had not asked a thing he was not asked. But I wanted him to have more. So I went to see him in his apartment above the hardware store and proposed a partnership. He would run the shop. I would teach the sewing room, and the children of the neighborhood would come after school to learn to measure and cut and join. He turned the idea over for a minute. “Mrs. Edna,” he said, “what would we call it?”
We called it The Frank Shop. Marcus painted the sign himself, in black on white, and hung it above the door of the old workshop. On a Saturday in March, we opened to a crowd of eleven neighborhood children, who stood in a row in safety glasses, listening to a young man explain the difference between a rip cut and a crosscut. I stood at the back with my arms folded. When he put a saw into the hands of a small girl in braids and showed her how to start the line, I thought I heard Frank clearing his throat in approval.
Every evening now, after the children go home, I sit in the old rocker in the corner. The pegboard is full again. The outlines have all been filled. On the shelf by the lathe, Marcus has set a small velvet cushion, and on the cushion, in the afternoons, lies the pocket watch of my husband, open, ticking, with its glass catching the sun. He says it keeps the shop on time. I think it keeps something larger than that. I think it keeps us honest.