“…the name on the witness line is Gene Larkin,” Mr. Heller said, and I sat in his corner office on Riverside Avenue with the pocket watch in my open palm and felt something inside me go very quiet. Gene had been my barber for forty years. He had cut my hair every other Thursday since the Reagan administration. He had sat beside me at Margaret service. He had driven me to the doctor when my hip gave out. And his name, in his round, careful print, stood beneath a request that gave my daughter Susan the power to manage my entire investment account.
Mr. Heller was a patient man of sixty three, with a gray mustache and the habit of tapping his pen twice before he spoke. He explained that the request had been presented to his firm three months earlier, accompanied by a notarized signature that looked like mine. His compliance officer had flagged it because the handwriting on the form did not match the handwriting on my original account papers. Instead of acting, the firm had held it. Then, two weeks ago, he had received a call from a young woman at an estate sale company who had found a note inside a pocket watch with his name on it.
The note was in Margaret hand. She had written it in the spring before she passed, in blue ink on the back of a church bulletin. Walter, if you are holding this, someone has tried to take control of the money. Do not be angry yet. Call Heller. Susan loves you, and she is frightened, and frightened people do foolish things. But do not let her do this. Not for your sake, for hers. I have hidden this where only you would look, because you always wind this watch on Sundays. I will be listening for it. M.
A Hamilton railroad watch with a hidden note, an investment form with a barber name on the witness line, and a haircut after three sleepless months.
I went home that afternoon and sat on the porch for a long time. The pocket watch had been my father, a Hamilton railroad watch from 1928, with a cracked crystal and a gold chain that had worn thin at the links. Susan had put it in a cardboard box with my old shaving mug and a pile of paperbacks. She had said she was cleaning out the house to make room for me in an apartment, which I did not want. I had let her carry the box to her car. I had not even asked what was in it.
She came to dinner on Thursday, as she always did. She brought a rotisserie chicken and a bag of salad, and she kissed my cheek, and for a moment I almost lost my nerve. She was fifty one, tired, in a gray cardigan that she had worn for years. I put the pocket watch on the table next to the chicken. Then I laid Margaret note beside it. Susan read it, standing, still wearing her coat. When she reached the line about frightened people, she sat down very slowly on the kitchen chair, as if her knees had been cut.
She did not deny it. She said that her husband had lost his job in January, and they had refinanced the house twice, and she had been afraid to tell me because I had always been so careful with money. She said she had thought of it as a loan. She had only meant to move a little into her own account for a few months. She asked Gene to witness because he was the one person in Spokane she knew I would never suspect, and she had begged him, and he had cried, and he had signed. “It was the worst thing I have ever done,” she said.
I let her talk until she stopped. Then I got up and put the kettle on, because I did not know what else to do with my hands. While it heated, I said the thing that had been forming in me all week. I said that I had spent my life trying to make sure my children never needed to hide anything from me, and that clearly I had failed. I said that a father is not a bank. I said that if she had just asked, I would have helped. She put her face in her hands and said, “I know, Daddy. I know.”
We made a plan at that table, with Mr. Heller on speaker phone. I would lend Susan and her husband eighteen thousand dollars, a proper loan, written down and signed, with a modest rate and a monthly payment. They would meet with a financial counselor at the credit union. And Susan would drive me to Gene barbershop the next morning so that she could apologize to him in person. She agreed to everything. At the end of the call, Mr. Heller said, in his dry way, that it was the most civilized family emergency he had witnessed in thirty years.
Gene was sweeping the floor when we walked in. He saw Susan and he put the broom down. For a moment none of us spoke. Then he said, “Walter, I should have called you.” I said that he should have. He said he had not been able to sleep for three months. I said that I had not been sleeping either, and that perhaps we could both sleep better if he would give me a haircut. He laughed, then. A great, helpless laugh, with tears in it. He draped the cape over my shoulders and picked up his scissors, and his hands were shaking.
The watch went to a jeweler on Monroe Street who replaced the crystal and cleaned the movement. When I picked it up, it was ticking again, a quiet, even sound. On Sunday, I sat on the porch and wound it, as I had done every week for fifty years. Susan sat beside me on the glider, holding a cup of coffee. She asked if she could hear it. I held the watch to her ear, and she listened with her eyes closed, a woman of fifty one, and a girl of five, both at once. “It sounds like Mama,” she said.