because behind the face of that clock, where the works should have been, was the whole reason he wound it.
The pendulum door in the back opened onto an empty cavity, the gears long gone, and packed into that space, wrapped in a handkerchief, was a small bundle. A photograph, black and white, two young people on courthouse steps, laughing. A marriage certificate, folded soft. And a scrap of paper in my father-in-laws careful hand.
The certificate said they were married at three forty in the afternoon, on a Tuesday, sixty years before. Three forty. The exact time that clock had been stopped at for as long as anybody knew.
He had not been keeping a broken clock. He had been keeping a minute. The minute a quiet steelworker married the girl who became my mother-in-law, he stopped a clock at three forty and never let it move again, and every Sunday for thirty years he wound the empty works of it, a private thing, a wordless way of saying the same thing over and over.
The scrap of paper said it plain, the only place he ever wrote it down.
Three forty on a Tuesday, the minute my whole life started. I stopped the clock here so I would never lose the exact of it. I wind it every week to promise her again. She does not need to hear it. I need to say it.
I sat down in his chair and I could not talk. My mother-in-law was standing in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel in her hands, the woman who told me she let that man wind that clock for forty years and never asked what for, who wound it herself the morning of her fathers funeral and the morning their son shipped out.
I called her over and I put the certificate and the photograph in her hands, and I told her the time on it, three forty, the same as the clock, and I watched sixty years land on her all at once. He never once said it out loud, in all their marriage. He said it every Sunday with a clock key instead, and she had wound it too, on the hardest mornings of her life, reaching for the same comfort without ever knowing what she was reaching for.
She sat down on the floor right there in Ashtabula with her husbands wedding certificate in her lap and she wound the clock one more time, on purpose now, knowing at last exactly what she was promising and to whom.
We did not put the works back in. That clock does not need to tell the hours. It only ever kept one minute, three forty on a Tuesday, and it is keeping it still, up on the mantel, stopped forever at the start of the best thing either of them ever did. My mother-in-law winds it every Sunday now. She says she is answering him. After sixty years, she finally knows what he was saying.