My Ex-Husband’s Lawyer Demanded The $14,000 Grandfather Clock He “Left Behind” Nine Years Ago. The Divorce Decree Settled It, Then His Grandfather’s Handwriting Inside The Case Settled Him

The letter came on a Tuesday, in a heavy cream envelope with a law firm’s name embossed in the corner, and I knew before I opened it that it had something to do with Rick.

Nobody else I know pays for paper that thick.

I read it standing at the kitchen counter with my coat still on. Then I walked into the front hall and stood in front of the clock for a long time, listening to it tick, the way you stand next to an old dog when someone has said something unkind about it.

“Dear Ms. Ruggles,” the letter said. “This firm represents Richard A. Ruggles. It has come to our client’s attention that a Ruggles family heirloom, specifically a walnut tall case clock manufactured circa 1911, remains in your possession at the former marital residence. Our client left this item behind temporarily at the time of the parties’ separation, with the understanding that it would be returned. A recent appraisal values the clock at approximately $14,000. We request that you make the clock available for retrieval within fourteen days of the date of this letter. Should you fail to do so, our client is prepared to pursue all available remedies.”

It was signed Neville Prescott, Attorney at Law.

Left behind temporarily. I said it out loud to the empty hall. Nine years. That’s a long temporarily.

The Clock in the Front Hall

My name is Paula Ruggles. I’m sixty-three. I kept the name after the divorce because our son had it.

The clock stands six feet, eight inches tall in the front hall of the house on Linden Avenue where I raised that son. It’s dark walnut with a brass face and a moon dial at the top that turns once a month, a painted moon with a sleepy, slightly smug expression that my grandson Miles calls “Mr. Moon.” It has three brass weights the size of soup cans and a pendulum as long as my arm. It needs winding every eight days, and it runs four minutes fast no matter what anybody does.

It belonged to Rick’s grandfather, Osborne Ruggles, who bought it secondhand in 1946 with his first paycheck after the war. Osborne was a tool and die maker. He had enormous hands with flat, square fingertips, and he could fix anything, and he talked to that clock the way some men talk to horses.

When I married Rick in 1992, Osborne was eighty-one and living alone in a brick bungalow on Pruitt Street. Rick’s parents were both gone by then. So on Sundays, after church, we’d drive over with a casserole and a sack of oranges, and Rick would watch whatever game was on, and Osborne would take me by the elbow into his front room and teach me to wind the clock.

“Slow,” he’d say. “Like you’re pulling a bucket out of a well. Never force it. It’ll tell you when it’s had enough.”

You turn the crank in each of the three winding holes until the weight rises near the top. You don’t let it slam. You set the minute hand forward, never backward.

By 1995 Osborne’s hands had gotten bad. The arthritis bent his fingers like tree roots, and he couldn’t grip the crank. So every Sunday for three years, I wound that clock for him while he sat in his recliner and told me whether I was doing it right. Mostly he said I was. Sometimes he said, “Slower, girl,” and I slowed down.

Rick never wound it. Not once. He didn’t like the chiming. He said it made him feel like he was being timed.

“Take the Ugly Thing”

Osborne passed in the spring of 1998, at eighty-seven. The clock came to us, to the house on Linden.

It went into the front hall. I wound it every Sunday. Our son Nathan grew up falling asleep to its chimes.

The marriage ended in 2017, after twenty-five years. By the end Rick had already met Mireille, and there wasn’t a lot of fight left in either of us.

We did it through mediation, in a conference room with bad coffee and a mediator who wore reading glasses on a beaded chain. We went through the house room by room on a long yellow list. The good dishes. The truck. His tools, my sewing machine.

Then the mediator said, “Item forty-one. Tall case clock, front hall.”

Rick laughed. He actually laughed. He leaned back in that rolling chair and waved his hand and said, “God, take the ugly thing. I’ve hated that clock since I was six. It sounds like a church bell in a closet.”

The mediator looked at me over her glasses. “Ms. Ruggles?”

“I’ll take it,” I said.

She wrote it down. Our lawyers wrote it down. It went into the final decree, and I signed, and Rick signed, and then he moved into a condo across town with Mireille and a white leather sectional, and I stayed in the house on Linden with the clock.

That was nine years ago.

What Changed

I called my lawyer, Robin Maddox, the next morning. Robin is a small woman with very short gray hair who handled my divorce and later my mother’s estate.

“Read it to me,” she said.

I read it to her.

She was quiet for a second. Then she said, “Do you still have your copy of the decree?”

“In the cedar chest.”

“Get it. Look at Schedule B. I’ll pull mine too.”

I knelt on the bedroom carpet with the cedar chest open and found the folder with the blue cover, right where I’d left it in 2017, under a stack of Nathan’s report cards. Schedule B was the list of personal property. Item seven, under “To Wife,” typed plain as day:

“Ruggles family tall case clock (walnut, moon dial), presently located in front hall of marital residence.”

And at the bottom of every page, two sets of initials. His and mine.

I called Robin back.

“Item seven,” I said.

“Item seven,” she said. “I’m looking at it. Paula, this isn’t a close call. It’s not even a call. The decree awarded the clock to you, he initialed the page, and he waited nine years without a peep. I’ll send Mr. Prescott a copy with a polite note and that’ll be the end of it.”

“Why now, though?” I asked. “Why does he want it now?”

I found out a little of it from Nathan. My son is thirty-one now, an electrician, married, with a seven-year-old named Miles. He came over that Sunday, and I showed him the letter.

He read it and rubbed his face with both hands.

“Mireille’s got a new friend who’s an antiques dealer,” he said finally. “She came to Dad’s birthday dinner in March. They got to talking about family stuff and Dad mentioned the clock and showed her an old picture on his phone. She told him a clock like that could be worth fourteen, fifteen thousand. Mireille’s been on him about it since. She wants it for the new house. Their new house has a two-story foyer.”

“A two-story foyer,” I said.

Ollie

Robin sent the decree to Neville Prescott with a polite two-paragraph letter.

But the whole business had me looking at the clock differently, and that week I noticed it was running slow for the first time in its life. Not four minutes fast. Six minutes slow. And the quarter chime on the half hour had developed a little hitch, a stutter between the second and third notes, like a person catching their breath.

So I called Ollie Pappas.

Ollie has serviced that clock since Osborne’s time. He’s seventy-four, a retired watchmaker with a shop in the back of his garage that smells like oil and pipe tobacco. He came that Thursday, lugging a canvas tool bag and a folded drop cloth.

He lifted off the hood. He unhooked the pendulum and the three weights and laid them gently on the drop cloth. Then he took out a little flashlight and leaned his whole head and shoulders into the case.

He was in there a long time.

“Paula,” he said, his voice muffled. “Did you know there’s something back here?”

“What kind of something?”

“An envelope. Tucked behind the seatboard. That’s the shelf the movement sits on. Somebody slid it in there on purpose. You’d never see it unless you took the weights off.”

He backed out holding a yellowed envelope, folded once, the kind with a little metal clasp. Across the front, in shaky pencil, it said: “For Paula. Open when you need to.”

I knew the handwriting. I’d seen it on twenty years of birthday cards.

The Letter Behind the Seatboard

I didn’t open it right away. I sat on the bottom step holding it while Ollie oiled the movement.

When he was finished, the clock chimed the quarter hour, clean as a bell, no stutter. Ollie listened with his head cocked and nodded once.

Then he said, “There’s something else. You’ve seen the inside of the case door?”

“I don’t open the case door. I wind it through the face.”

He swung open the long narrow door on the front of the case, the one with the glass that shows the pendulum. On the bare walnut on the inside, lined up along the edge, were pencil marks.

Short horizontal lines, each with a name and an age, in two different hands.

The lowest ones were in Osborne’s square, heavy printing. “Ricky, 5.” “Ricky, 6.” “Ricky, 7.” All the way up to “Ricky, 12,” at about the height of my shoulder.

Then, in my handwriting, starting low again: “Nathan, 3.” “Nathan, 4.” All the way to “Nathan, 14,” when he got too embarrassed to let me do it anymore.

And then, recent, in my handwriting again: “Miles, 4.” “Miles, 5.” “Miles, 6.” “Miles, 7.”

I’d forgotten I started that. I’d forgotten that I’d seen the old marks when Nathan was a toddler and decided, without telling anyone, to keep going.

Ollie closed the door very gently. He didn’t charge me for the visit, which he has never done before or since.

That night I opened the envelope at the kitchen table.

It was a single sheet of lined paper, written in pencil, dated October 1997. Six months before he died.

“Paula,” it said. “My hands are no good anymore and I can’t wind her. You’ve done it every Sunday for two years and you never once complained. Ricky doesn’t like the chime. He never did, even little. I don’t hold it against him. A clock isn’t for everybody.

“When I’m gone she will go to Ricky because that’s how it works. But I want it known that I am giving her to you. To you, Paula, not to him, not to anybody else. If there’s ever a question about it, show them this. She belongs to whoever keeps winding her.

“If Ricky ever wants her, let him come wind her first. He’ll understand then. Or he won’t. Either way it’ll be up to you.

“Thank you for the Sundays. Osborne R.”

I sat at the table until the clock chimed midnight. Then I went to bed and didn’t sleep.

The Truck

Neville Prescott didn’t call Robin back. Instead, eleven days later, at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, a white rental box truck pulled up at the curb in front of my house, followed by Rick’s silver SUV.

I was in my robe watering the ferns on the porch.

Rick got out of the SUV. Mireille stayed in the passenger seat with her sunglasses on. A man I’d never seen got out of the other side, tall and narrow, in a camel overcoat and polished brown shoes, carrying a leather folder. Two young guys in matching navy T-shirts climbed out of the truck cab and started unfolding a moving dolly.

I set down the watering can.

“Paula,” Rick said, coming up the walk with his hands in his jacket pockets. He’d put on weight. His hair had gone fully white, which I hadn’t seen. “This is Neville Prescott.”

“We’ve corresponded,” I said.

Mr. Prescott smiled the way lawyers smile at funerals. “Ms. Ruggles. We sent notice two weeks ago. My client has arranged for professional movers to retrieve the clock today, at his own expense, so that this matter can be resolved amicably and without the need for court.”

“My lawyer sent you a copy of the decree,” I said.

“We received a document,” he said. “We dispute its interpretation. My client was under considerable emotional duress during that mediation, and his remark about the clock was clearly made in frustration. It was never his intention to permanently relinquish a family heirloom.”

Behind him, the movers had the dolly on the sidewalk and were looking at each other.

“He initialed the page,” I said.

“Paula,” Rick said. “Come on. It’s my grandfather’s clock.”

“It is your grandfather’s clock,” I said. “That’s true.”

“So let’s not make this ugly. Let the guys come in. They’ll be careful. I’ll even pay to have it serviced before it goes.”

“It was serviced Thursday before last.”

Mr. Prescott opened his folder. “If you refuse to allow access today, my client will have no choice but to…”

“I didn’t say I was refusing,” I said. “I said he initialed the page. Those are two different things.”

I looked at Rick. Really looked at him, for the first time in a long while. He looked tired. He looked like someone who’d been arguing in the car on the way over.

“Come inside, Rick,” I said. “Just you. Your lawyer can wait on the porch. There’s something I want you to see first.”

Mr. Prescott started to object. Rick held up a hand without looking at him.

“Five minutes, Neville.”

Ricky, 5

I led him into the front hall. The clock was ticking. Mr. Moon was about a quarter of the way into his monthly turn, half his face showing over the painted hills.

Rick stood in front of it with his arms crossed and looked at it the way you look at an old teacher you never liked.

“Still four minutes fast,” he said. “Grandpa used to say it was eager.”

I reached past him and turned the little brass key and opened the long case door. The pendulum swung slow and gold behind it.

“Look down,” I said. “On the left edge.”

He bent. He frowned. He squinted. Then he got down on one knee on my hall rug, sixty-six years old, with his bad knee, and put his face close to the wood.

“Ricky, 5,” he read. His voice was very quiet. “Ricky, 6.”

His finger touched the line. Moved up. Ricky, 7. Ricky, 8. All the way to 12.

“I don’t remember this,” he said. “I don’t remember him doing this.”

“I don’t think you were supposed to remember it. I think he did it for himself.”

His finger kept moving up the wood and found my handwriting. Nathan, 3. Nathan, 4. He stopped at Nathan, 9, and his shoulders came up, and he didn’t say anything for a while.

Then he found the Miles marks.

“You did Miles too.”

“Every birthday.”

He sat down on the hall rug. Just sat down, with his back against the staircase spindles, the way Nathan used to sit when he was little and waiting for the clock to strike so he could count the chimes.

I went into the kitchen and got the envelope out of the drawer and brought it back and handed it to him.

He knew the handwriting too. I saw it hit him before he read a word.

The Sundays

He read it twice. The second time he held it with both hands.

When he got to “She belongs to whoever keeps winding her,” he made a sound I hadn’t heard from him since his mother’s funeral. Then he folded the paper back along its old crease, very carefully, and held it against his knee.

“I never wound it,” he said.

“I know.”

“Not once. I used to go out to the car when he made you do it.”

“He didn’t make me. I liked it.”

“I know you did.” He laughed, wet and short. “That was the worst part. He liked that you liked it. I was jealous of a clock, Paula. A grown man. I was jealous that my grandfather had something with my wife that he didn’t have with me.”

The clock chimed the quarter hour. We both waited for it to finish without meaning to.

“It wasn’t really Mireille,” he said finally. “I mean, it was. She wants it for the foyer, and the dealer said fourteen grand, and Mireille likes things that are worth fourteen grand. But that’s not why I called Neville.”

“Why, then?”

He looked at the letter. “Last winter I was trying to tell Miles a story about Grandpa. The one about him fixing the church furnace with a paperclip on Christmas Eve. And I couldn’t remember his voice. I could remember what he said, but I couldn’t hear him saying it. It just went. Like a radio station you drive out of.” He swallowed. “And I thought, if I had the clock, I’d hear him. I’d hear something.”

I sat down on the stairs behind him, a step up.

“You hear it every time you come to pick up Miles,” I said. “It chimes while you’re standing on my porch.”

“I know.” He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I hear it from the porch and I think, that’s his. That’s still his.”

The Porch

When we came back outside, Mr. Prescott was sitting on my porch swing with his folder open on his knees and his phone out. The movers were sitting on the back bumper of the truck. Mireille had gotten out of the car and was standing on the sidewalk with her arms folded.

Mr. Prescott stood up. “Are we ready to proceed?”

Rick looked at him for a long second.

“No,” he said. “We’re done. Withdraw it. Whatever you call it. Send her lawyer whatever letter you send.”

“Richard, I strongly advise you to…”

“She has the decree. I initialed it. I was there. I said take the ugly thing. I remember saying it.” Rick put his hands in his pockets. “And she has a letter from my grandfather that says it’s hers. I’m not taking my grandfather to court, Neville.”

Mireille said, “Rick, are you serious right now?”

“I’m serious.”

“Fourteen thousand dollars.”

“It’s not for sale, Mireille. It never was. It was never even mine.”

The movers folded up the dolly without being told. One of them nodded at me on the way back to the cab like we’d been through something together.

Mr. Prescott closed his folder.

“Ms. Ruggles,” he said. “Good day.”

“Mr. Prescott,” I said. “Mind the second step. It’s loose.”

Osborne’s Terms

Rick stayed on the porch after they left. Mireille waited in the SUV with the engine running.

“She’s going to be mad for a week,” he said.

“Probably.”

“Can I ask you something?” He was looking at the front door, at the little leaded window in it, where you can just barely see the clock face from the porch if the hall light’s on. “He said, if Ricky ever wants her, let him come wind her first.”

“He did say that.”

“Could I? Wind it. Sometime.” He cleared his throat. “Not today. I’d mess it up today.”

I thought about it. I thought about nine years and a white leather sectional and a mediation room with bad coffee and a thick cream envelope that said “left behind temporarily.” I thought about a man with flat square fingertips in a recliner on Pruitt Street saying, slower, girl.

“First Sunday of the month,” I said. “One o’clock. It’s due every eight days, so you’ll only get to do it once a month. I’ll do the rest.”

He nodded. “First Sunday.”

“And you’re bringing a casserole.”

“I don’t make casseroles.”

“Then you’re bringing oranges,” I said. “He’d want oranges.”

Slow, Like a Bucket From a Well

He came the first Sunday in November, at five minutes to one, in his good coat, with a mesh sack of navel oranges.

Nathan and Miles came too.

I showed Rick the crank. I showed him the three winding holes in the face, and which weight goes with which chime. I put my hand over his on the crank the way his grandfather put his hand over mine in 1995.

“Slow,” I said. “Like you’re pulling a bucket out of a well. Never force it. It’ll tell you when it’s had enough.”

His hand was shaking at first. Then it wasn’t.

He wound all three weights to the top. He didn’t let any of them slam. When it was done, he set the minute hand forward four minutes past where it should be, because I told him that’s how it likes to run, and he waited at each quarter for the chime to finish before he moved it on.

The clock chimed one o’clock.

Miles counted out loud. “One!” And then, disappointed, “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Rick said. “One o’clock’s the short one, buddy. Come back at noon sometime. Noon’s the show.”

Then Miles made us measure him again, even though it wasn’t his birthday, and Rick held the pencil and I held the book flat on top of Miles’s head, and Rick wrote “Miles, 7 and a half” on the inside of the case door in square, heavy printing that looked so much like his grandfather’s that Nathan had to go stand in the kitchen for a minute.

What I Did With the Letter

I put Osborne’s letter in a frame. Not a fancy one. A plain walnut frame from the hardware store, close enough in color to the clock that you’d think they came together. It hangs on the wall beside the case now, at about the height of Ricky, 12.

I also went to see Robin Maddox the week after Thanksgiving and changed my will. The clock goes to Nathan when I’m gone. Not to the estate, not to be sold, not to be fought over by anybody in camel coats. To Nathan, with a line Robin let me write myself: “She belongs to whoever keeps winding her.”

Rick still comes on first Sundays. He’s missed two in a year, and both times he called on Saturday to apologize like he’d missed a shift. He brings oranges every time.

Last month, after the clock struck one, he stood in front of it a while with the crank still in his hand.

“I can hear him now,” he said. “When I’m winding it. Not his voice exactly. More like how he’d breathe when he was concentrating. Like a little whistle through his nose.”

“He did do that.”

“He did do that,” Rick said, and smiled, and handed me back the crank.

The clock is still four minutes fast. Ollie says it always will be. I’ve decided that’s fine.

Eager, Osborne called it. Like it couldn’t wait to get to the next hour and see who’d be there.

Has a piece of paper ever settled an argument that a lawyer couldn’t? Tell us honestly in the comments, and share this with someone who keeps winding something nobody else wants to.

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