The woman in the suit set the photograph of that tiny unfolded paper on the dining room table, and the welcome-home party went quiet under all the Mickey ears. My mother read the first line and her hand stayed at her throat, because it was my fathers handwriting, dated 1983, and it began, to my first grandson, from a grandfather who planned ahead.
Stan explained what none of us knew. In 1983, my father took a piece of the small inheritance his own mother left him and he did something quiet with it. He bought railroad stock, Norfolk Southern, the company he gave thirty-four years of his life to. And he folded the certificate small and slid it into the back case of the watch he wound every single night, telling no one but Stan, because he wanted it to grow untouched for a grandchild not yet born.
My father hid a stock certificate inside a pocket watch in 1983 and wound that watch over it every night for the rest of his life, growing a fortune one tick at a time for a grandson he would not meet for another twenty-five years.
Forty years of dividends, reinvested, quiet, inside a gold case on a mantel. The antique dealer in Pittsburgh had opened the back to service it, found the folded paper, and being an honest man, called an estate attorney the moment he understood what he was holding. The certificate and its four decades of growth were worth a hundred and ninety thousand dollars.
And the watch itself, willed to Noah by name in front of the whole family, was never my mothers to sell. On morphine or not, my father said it clearly, and he had put it in writing years before he was ever sick. The sale was void. The dealer returned the watch without argument once he learned it had been taken from a child.
My brother Greg, who said Dad said a lot of things on morphine, did not have anything to say now. The cruise, it turned out, had been paid for out of a boys inheritance, and that sat heavy over the Disney photos on the wall.
Everything went into a trust for Noah, the stock, the dividends, the watch itself.
But Stan saved the best for my son. He knelt down by the mantel where Noah stood so still, and he read the rest of the paper. My father had written, Noah, if this is you, then you are the one. Hold the watch to your ear and listen. That sound is thirty-four years of me going to work so that you would never have to worry. It has never lost more than four seconds a week, and neither has my love for you.
Noah, who told me maybe Grandpa just meant he could hold it sometimes, took the watch, wound it the way his grandpa taught him, and held it to his ear. He said it was still the best sound he ever heard. Then he said, quiet, he did mean it, Mom. He meant it before I was even born.