I had to lean on the stove, because what had been hiding behind the face of that silly teapot clock for forty years was a photograph of a little boy, and a scrap of paper in a child crayon that said, TO MOMMY, and I knew that little boy, though I had only ever seen him in one or two pictures the family kept in a drawer and never talked about. It was my brother. The one who died before I was old enough to remember him.
I sat down at my own counter and my hands were shaking. My brother, Tommy, had died of a fever when he was six, years before I was born. My family almost never spoke of him. It was the great silent grief at the center of our whole house, the thing my mother carried and my father could not face. And here, behind the ugly cheerful clock that hung over the stove my whole childhood, was the reason she kept it up all those years.
Tommy gave her that clock. It was the last gift her little boy ever picked out for her.
The note explained it, in my mother own hand, folded behind the crayon one. She had written it years ago, meaning for someone to find it someday. Tommy had bought her that teapot clock with his own saved up coins, at a church sale, a few months before he got sick. He was so proud of it. And my father hated the thing, thought it was tacky, and my mother kept it hanging over her stove for forty years, through every meal, through his complaints, through his passing, because taking it down would have been taking down the last thing her son ever gave her.
She never told us why. She let my father think it was spite, and later let us all think it was just habit, or love for a silly old clock. The truth was that she looked at her lost boy gift a hundred thousand times, keeping time over every meal she made for the children she still had, and she never once let the grief of it darken our kitchen. She just kept his clock ticking, and kept us fed beneath it, and carried Tommy quietly in the one place she could see him every day.
The teapot clock hangs over my stove now, ugly and cheerful, and it means more to me than anything else I own. I fixed the movement. It keeps time again. And every meal I make beneath it, I think of the brother I never got to know, and the mother who loved him so much she kept his last gift ticking for forty years, and never asked a soul to share the weight of it. I share it now. Tommy is not forgotten. Not while that clock still ticks.