“My dear Otto,” I read, and the old ribbon shook between my fingers, “if you are standing in front of the shop with this letter, then our boy has tried something foolish. Please do not be too hard on him. He was always a boy who thought that quiet people had nothing to say.” Thirty people on the sidewalk stood still. The photographer from the Eagle Gazette had lowered his camera. Kurt stood at the door of my shop with the giant scissors in one hand and his own new key in the other, trying it again and again in the deadbolt, which turned, and the door, which would not open.
“The front door has two locks,” I told the crowd, as kindly as I could. “One is a deadbolt, the kind a locksmith can change in ten minutes on a Tuesday. The other is a brass mortise lock my father put in during 1952, and Greta had a second one installed behind it in 2016, with a key that nobody but Mrs. Hartman and I would ever hold.” I stepped past my son, set the brass key into the old lock, and turned. It gave with a soft sound like a clock striking one. The door swung open, and the shop breathed out its familiar smell of brass polish and oil.
Greta wrote that in 2016 she had put the building and the business into a family trust. “Otto, you are the trustee as long as you live,” I read. “After that, the shop passes to Kurt, but only if he has stood at the bench for a full year with his own hands, learning what you know.” I looked up. Kurt had turned the color of old plaster. Behind him, Tammy stared at the sidewalk, and Mrs. Hartman said quietly, “That provision is binding, Kurt. A judge in Fairfield County reviewed it in 2017.” A woman in the crowd murmured, “Well, I never.”
A brass key on a faded ribbon and a letter from a late wife stopped a ribbon cutting and brought a son back to the bench.
“Kurt,” I read on, “this part is for you, my darling, and I hope your father reads it gently. You were the best apprentice he ever had. At eight years old you could set a pendulum by ear. At nineteen you left the bench because you were afraid of being a small man in a small town. You are not small. You were never small. You only believed the loud ones, the ones who sell things, because they seemed so sure.” My own voice caught. I could hear the room ticking behind me, a hundred tiny hearts. “Come home to the bench, my love. Your father will not say it, but he has been waiting thirty years.”
Kurt put the scissors on the ground. He did not speak for what felt like a minute. Then he walked to me, an ordinary man in a rented suit with a ribbon cutter in his pocket, and he said, in a very small voice, “Dad, I am so sorry. I did not think you were using it.” I did not answer right away. I looked at his hands, which were exactly the hands of his mother. Then I put my arm around his shoulders, in front of thirty neighbors and a photographer, and I said, “I was using it, son. I was just waiting for you.”
We went inside. Mrs. Hartman closed the door behind us, and the three of us sat at my old bench among the cuckoo clocks and the pocket watches, and Kurt cried, quietly, the way his mother used to. He admitted he had borrowed against his insurance commissions and had hoped the shop might bring in cash. He admitted that he had not known how to ask me for help. I told him we would pay the locksmith. I told him that the mugs could be donated to the senior center. I told him that the sign, Kurt Timepieces, would be going into the dumpster behind the building, and he laughed so hard that he cried again.
The agreement we signed was short. Kurt would take Saturdays and two weeknights at the bench. He would learn to cut a gear, regulate an escapement, and clean a movement by hand, and in a year, if he still wanted to, he would become my partner. The new sign came in October, painted by a woman from the art museum, in gold letters on dark green. BRANDT CLOCK AND WATCH. Under it, smaller, she had added, Est. 1977, Otto and Kurt. When it went up, the whole sidewalk applauded.
Tammy was the one who surprised me. She came inside last, carrying the box of free mugs, and set it down on the counter. “Otto,” she said, “I told him it was wrong. I told him twice. He said you were tired and that the shop was a dying thing.” She looked around at the walls of clocks, every one of them running, every one of them showing a slightly different time. “It does not look dying to me.” She picked up a cloth, and without being asked she began to dust the cuckoo clocks one by one. She has done it every Saturday since.
The first week was rough. Kurt dropped a mainspring and cursed. He lost a tiny screw in the carpet and spent forty minutes on his knees with a magnet. His fingers had forgotten the work, and his eyes had forgotten the loupe. But by Thanksgiving he could hear a faulty escapement from across the room, and one gray November afternoon he held up a pocket watch from 1863 and said, with wonder, “Dad, it is ticking.” I kept my face straight and said, “Of course it is. You are good at this.”
In the spring, the courthouse tower clock stopped, as it does every few years, and the county called us. I climbed the ladder to the tower with my son behind me, in the cold dark of the bell room, among the great iron wheels. Together we found the worn tooth on the escape wheel, filed it true, and set the pendulum. When the clock struck noon, three hundred feet above Main Street, Kurt put his hand on my shoulder and we stood in the sound. Greta would have loved it. I like to think that she heard.