Everyone stood inside the little shop as I opened the front door and walked in carrying the regulator.
My grandfather started that clock in 1978 and never finished it. Eight-day movement, mahogany case, dead-beat escapement, and a dial he never got around to silvering. It sat on the high shelf over the bench my whole childhood with a dust sheet over it, and when anybody asked he’d say it wasn’t ready.
I spent five weeks on it. Cut two wheels I had to make from stock because you cannot buy them. Bushed the pivots. Silvered the dial myself with a paste my grandfather mixed in a jar he labeled in 1981 and which was still, somehow, good.
I hung it on the wall where the shop clock always was, in front of about thirty people, and set the pendulum going.
Then I said, “Ronnie, come look at the back.”
My cousin came. The backplate on a clock is where a maker signs. There’s a whole tradition to it — name, town, date, sometimes a line of nonsense for whoever opens it a hundred years later.
My grandfather engraved his in 1978. Under it, in the same hand, but with the shake he got in his last years, is a second line he added at some point without telling one living soul:
“Finished by my grandson. He is the only one who ever came on a Saturday. If you are reading this, he did it, and I knew he would.”
He engraved that into a clock he had already decided he was not going to complete.
That’s not the only thing I brought. In the drawer with his gravers there was a card from the horological guild he belonged to for fifty years, dated 2009, listing his registered apprentice. One name. Mine. He filed that when I was nineteen years old and I did not know it existed until I was forty-one.
The shop ledger my cousin closed in my face a month before — the one that supposedly showed the shop was Ronnie’s to settle — has an entry in the front from 2009 in the same week. It reads, tools and bench to the apprentice, remainder to the estate, and my grandfather’s initials beside it.
Ronnie read the backplate twice. Then he sat down on the customer stool by the counter and put his hands on his knees and didn’t say anything for the length of about forty ticks, which I know because I was counting them.
He said, “He never told me any of that.”
I said, “He wouldn’t. He’d figure the clock would say it eventually.”
The shop’s open Thursdays through Saturdays now. Ronnie’s not in it and there’s no bad blood in that; he’s got his own life and it isn’t gears. He came by in the fall with his daughter and asked if she could sit at the bench on a Saturday.
She’s eleven. She hands me the tweezers. Seventeen years I sat in that chair being nobody’s proof of anything, and it turns out that’s exactly what an apprenticeship is.