I looked up at her, and in that moment I knew I had to say something — or lose something — because the object in my hand, the thing that had felt so out of place in my trusted friend’s bag, was my late husband’s pocket watch.
The watch I thought I had lost. The watch that had stopped working the year before Harold died and had sat, silent, in my nightstand drawer, until sometime in the last few months when I noticed it was gone and told myself I had simply misplaced it, the way you misplace things when your mind is somewhere else.
It had not been misplaced. It was here, in Ruth’s bag, and for one cold, ugly second I stood in my own kitchen and thought the worst thing I have ever thought about a friend.
Then she came back into the room and saw my face and saw the watch in my hand, and instead of the guilt I was braced for, her eyes filled up, and she said, “Oh, Patricia. It was supposed to be a surprise.”
She had taken it. She admitted that freely. Months ago, she had slipped it out of my drawer on an afternoon I was napping, because she had heard me say, more than once, how much it hurt that Harold’s watch had died the same year he did — that it felt like even his watch had given up on me. Ruth had quietly carried it to three different repair shops before she found an old watchmaker two towns over who could fix a movement that old. She had been paying him off a little at a time. And she had been planning to give it back to me, running and warm, on the anniversary of Harold’s death — which was only three weeks away.
Every odd question over the past few months — the ones that had started, in my suspicion, to line up into something sinister — had been her, gathering the details. When did the watch stop. What did Harold have engraved inside it. Whether I would even want it running again, or whether that would only hurt.
Tucked into the bag beside the watch was a note she had already written for the day she meant to give it back. She let me read it. It said: “Harold’s still ticking, and so are you, and so is this friendship. Some things are worth taking apart and putting back together. — Ruth.”
I have never been so ashamed of a thought and so grateful for a friend in the same thirty seconds of my life.
I trusted her for twenty years, and then for one second I did not, and she turned out to be exactly who I had always believed she was, and more. The watch is on my wrist as I write this. It is keeping perfect time. So, it turns out, was she — all along, quietly, the way the very best people do.
