I read what the old repairman asked, and I set that flat tin down real slow, because it was not the kind of request I expected to find under a display counter.
He wrote about the trade dying, about fixing time for half a century, about the regulars who used to come in just to hear the shop tick. He wrote it kind, one tradesman to whoever came after. And then he made his ask, about one particular clock, the big regulator still hanging in the front window.
“Do not sell the window clock,” he wrote. “Not while old Walt is still living. He is the last of the regulars. His wife is gone, his children are scattered, and every single morning for thirty years he has walked by this window, set his watch by that clock, and knocked twice on the glass to say good morning to me. It is the only appointment he has. Keep that clock wound and running in the window, and leave the glass where he can knock on it, for as long as he draws breath. It costs you nothing, and it is the whole of his day.”
An old man closing his shop forever spent his last written words not on his tools or his money, but on making sure one lonely widower would still have a clock to set his watch by and a window to knock on every morning.
Twelve years buying out dead businesses, and I have never kept anything I could sell. I kept that clock.
I did not know if Walt was real until the next morning at ten past eight, when an old man in a wool cap shuffled up to the window, looked at the clock, adjusted his watch, and knocked twice on the glass, and then looked confused when the shop behind it was dark and full of boxes.
I opened the door. I told him I bought the place, and that the repairman left me strict instructions about that clock and about him. Walt teared up right there on the sidewalk.
I did not reopen the clock shop. But I kept a little corner of it, with the window and the regulator clock, wound and ticking, and I put two chairs in there. Walt knocks every morning at ten past eight, and now, most mornings, he comes in, and we have a cup of coffee under the sound of that clock, an old widower and the fellow who was supposed to sell his last friend for scrap.
The repairman fixed time for fifty years. His last repair was the biggest one. He kept a lonely man wound and running, with one clock and a single line in a tin, and handed the job to a stranger who was glad to take it.
Walt knocked this morning. The clock keeps perfect time. So, most days now, does he.