Harold and I went a whole year without speaking. Not separated, not divorced, I want to be clear on that. We just quit talking. Had a falling out over the boy, over whose fault it was the boy does not call anymore, and we each decided the other was wrong, and a day of that turned into a week and a week turned into a year the way it does when two stubborn old people share a kitchen and will not be the first to bend.
But here is the thing I never told anybody. Every morning of that whole silent year, before he went out to the garage, he wound the wall clock in the front room. That old key-wind clock that was my mothers. It runs eight days on a winding but he did it every morning, so it would never once stop. He would not say good morning to me. But he wound my mothers clock. And I would hear that little grind of the key, and I would lie there and not go out, and that was us. That was the whole marriage that year, in that sound.
He passed in October, out in that garage, in his chair. After the funeral I could not make myself go out there for near a month. Then one cold morning the clock ran down, I had forgotten to wind it, and it stopped, and the quiet of it got me out to the garage to find the winding key, because he kept a spare of everything in those little drawers.
It was right there on top of the wide drawer. And it was setting on top of something, something he had been keeping where he would see it every single day out here. I picked it up and held it under the shop light. And I stood there in that cold garage, because it was a stack of letters, and they were between Harold and our boy.
All that silent year, while he would not say two words to me, my stubborn husband had been writing to our son. Patient letters, one after another, never a word of blame in them, just a father asking his boy to come home and let the family mend. And our son had written back. They had made it up between them, quiet, the two of them, months ago. And the last letter in the stack, from our boy, said he was coming home for Christmas, to surprise his mother, because Dad had told him how much she missed him.
Do not tell her yet. Let me walk in the door. I want to see Mama face. Tell her I love her. Tell her Dad fixed it. He said he would and he did.
Harold never got to see that Christmas. But he fixed the very thing we fell silent over, in secret, all while I lay in bed listening to him wind my mothers clock and thinking we were nothing but two stubborn strangers.
My son came home. He walked in the door just like he planned, and I held onto him and cried for the both of us, for him and for the stubborn old man who brought him back to me without ever saying a word about it.
I wind the clock myself now. Every morning, seven days early, so it never stops. It is the last conversation I have got with my husband, and I do not intend to let it run down again.