Part 3 — Stopped At Three
The clock had stopped at twelve minutes past three, and the deputy wrote it down in his little notebook. I watched Teresa read the time off the brass face with her hand on her chest. Then she said, in a very small voice, that her birth certificate says she was born at 3:12 in the morning on a Tuesday.
The deputy from Grant County was a patient man, and he did not push. He read the first letter in the bundle, then another, and then handed them to me with a sort of apology. They were all written by Mr. Abernathy, the surveyor, and every one began with the same words. My dearest Marisol. Marisol is our mother.
The story came out in the following week, a piece at a time, from the letters and from our mother herself. In the winter of 1986, Marisol had worked as a bookkeeper for Abernathy Surveying. She was twenty-eight and unhappily married. He was thirty-eight and gentle, and they had a short affair. In March of 1987 she gave birth to a daughter at the local hospital, and her husband raised the baby as his own.
Teresa was Abernathys daughter. Our mother never told anyone, not even him, afterward. She ended it when she knew she was expecting and tried to forget it. But he had known, or guessed, from the day he saw a baby with his own dark brow at the church picnic. He wrote letters for thirty-seven years and never sent one, because he thought a stamp would break her marriage.
The hospital bracelet in the panel was Teresas, taken home by the nurse as a keepsake and given to Abernathy by Marisols old friend. He stopped the clock at the moment of her birth and kept it that way, in the study where he worked, winding it once a year on her birthday without ever letting the pendulum swing.
He loved my sister every single day of her life without once knowing her name.
The deputy closed the file. No crime, he told us, had been committed. A lonely man had preserved his memories in a clock. The nephew, who had only wanted to sell the house, was astonished. A lawyer in Las Cruces confirmed that Abernathys will left a modest account to a daughter, Teresa Marisol, born March 1987, to be located by the executor.
Our mother is eighty-one and lives in a small house in Deming. We drove down on Sunday, the three of us, with the bundle of letters on the back seat. Marisol read the first one standing at her kitchen window, and I watched her shoulders shake. Then she turned, took Teresas face in both hands, and said, Forgive me. I was afraid for so many years.
Teresa did. She is gentle by nature, and she said the real surprise was not who her father was, but that someone had loved her on purpose for thirty-seven years. They sat on the porch swing for hours with the letters between them. I went home and poured a double batch of piñon candles, because I did not know what else to do with my hands.
We set the clock going again that fall, after a clockmaker restored the movement. Teresa pushed the pendulum herself, and it began to swing, slowly and evenly. It stands in my front room now, with the little painted moon rolling across the top. At twelve minutes past three, every afternoon, I light a candle beneath it.
