My Brother Took Dad’s Gold Pocket Watch Off His Nightstand The Day Of The Funeral And Said Dad “Always Promised It To The Son.” So I Asked Him To Open The Back

For fifty years my father wound his pocket watch at the kitchen table at ten past six in the morning.

He did it the same way every day. Coffee first, black, in the brown stoneware mug with the chip on the handle. Then he’d take the watch out of his shirt pocket, pop the front lid with his thumb, turn the crown with two fingers until it stopped, and hold it up to his ear. Then he’d close it, tuck it back in his pocket, and say, “Well. She’s running.” Then he’d go to work.

When he retired from the railroad shops in Altoona, he kept doing it. When my mother died in 2015, he kept doing it. When he was ninety-three and couldn’t remember whether he’d eaten lunch, he still woke up at six, poured his coffee and wound that watch.

He died in his sleep in September. The watch was on his nightstand, closed, still ticking.

My name is Monica Oberlin. Everybody has called me Mo since I was in diapers. I’m sixty-nine, a retired bookkeeper for a feed mill, and I live eleven minutes from the house I grew up in, which is why I was the one who found him, and why I was the one sitting in the funeral home office picking out a casket with a brochure in my lap.

My brother, Nolan, flew in from Tucson the night before the service.

The Blazer Pocket

After the funeral we all went back to Dad’s house. That’s how it’s done here. Casseroles on every surface, the church ladies in the kitchen, men standing in the yard not saying much. My husband Pete made a pot of coffee in the big percolator, the one Mom used for card club.

I went upstairs to get a cardigan from my old closet, and I saw Nolan in Dad’s bedroom.

He was standing at the nightstand. He picked up the watch, looked at it, and slipped it into the inside pocket of his navy blazer. Then he patted the pocket twice, the way you’d pat a dog.

“Nolan,” I said.

He turned around. He didn’t look guilty. That’s the thing I keep thinking about. He looked relieved, like he’d gotten something done.

“Somebody should keep it safe,” he said. “With all these people in the house.”

“I’ll put it in my purse.”

“Mo.” He smiled the way he smiled when he was fourteen and I was thirteen and he’d already eaten the last pudding cup. “Dad always promised it to the son. That’s Grandpa Reuben’s railroad watch. It goes to me. He told me himself.”

I want to tell you I said something clever. I didn’t. I stood in the doorway holding my old cardigan, and I said, “That’s not Grandpa’s watch.”

He laughed, kindly enough. “Okay,” he said. Then he went downstairs and ate a piece of Mrs. Quinlan’s ham loaf.

Christmas, 1974

Here is what I know, and what Nolan didn’t.

In the summer of 1974, my brother turned eighteen and enlisted in the Army. He shipped out to basic in August and then to Germany, where he stayed until 1977. He was gone for that whole stretch of our lives. He sent postcards of castles.

That fall, my father’s wristwatch got crushed in a press at the shop. It wasn’t anything special, a steel Timex Mom had bought him at the drugstore, but he’d worn it every day, and the railroad men lived by the clock. He started asking me what time it was at breakfast. He couldn’t afford a new one that year. The shops were laying men off, and he was working short weeks, and Mom was taking in ironing.

I was seventeen and waitressing at the Olympia Diner on Union Avenue after school and on Saturdays. Mostly I made tips. Coins, mainly. Men from the shops left me dimes and quarters next to their saucers.

In October I walked past Quist’s Jewelry on Eleventh Avenue and saw a pocket watch in the window. It was used, from the 1940s, gold-filled, a hunter case, which means it has a lid over the face that snaps shut. It had a plain white dial and black numbers. It cost eighty-five dollars, which in 1974 might as well have been a car.

Old Mr. Quist let me put it on layaway. Five dollars a week. I paid him every Saturday in quarters and dimes in a little paper bag, and he counted every coin in front of me, slowly, and wrote it in a book. I never missed a week.

In December I had a dollar left over after the last payment, and I asked him if he could engrave something.

“Inside the back cover,” I said. “Where nobody sees it unless he wants them to.”

“How many words?”

“Not many,” I said. “I can’t afford many.”

He charged me six dollars for three short lines. I owed him five for weeks after.

The Only Time

I gave it to my father on Christmas morning, 1974, in a box I’d covered with the Sunday funnies.

He opened the front lid first and looked at the dial and said, “Well, now.” Then he looked at me. And I said, “There’s more. Open the back. You need your thumbnail.”

He found the little notch, and he popped it, and he read it.

My father was a big, quiet man who once set his own broken finger on the kitchen counter with a spoon and a roll of tape. That was the only time in my life I saw him cry. He didn’t make a sound. He just closed it, and held it in both hands against his chest, and nodded at me for a long time, and Mom had to go into the kitchen.

After that, he never opened the back in front of anybody. Not once in fifty years, as far as I know. He’d pop the front to see the time and wind it. The back stayed shut. If you didn’t know there was something in there, you’d never guess. You need a thumbnail and a reason.

When people asked about it, at church or at the shop, he’d say, “Oh, it’s older than me,” and wink, and that’s all he’d ever say.

Nolan Comes Home

My brother came back from Germany in the spring of 1977 with a mustache and a German girlfriend who didn’t last. The first morning home he came down to breakfast and saw Dad at the table winding the gold watch.

“Is that Grandpa’s?” he asked.

Our grandfather, Reuben Rafferty, had been a conductor on the Pennsylvania Railroad for thirty years and carried a big railroad watch. Every boy in our family grew up hearing about Grandpa’s watch, the way other families talk about a war medal. Grandpa had died in 1968. Nolan was twelve. He’d been told for years that someday the watch would be his.

And Dad, at the kitchen table, winding the watch I’d bought him, just said, “Older than me,” and winked.

I was right there buttering toast. I didn’t think anything of it. Why would I? I was twenty. I figured Nolan was teasing.

I didn’t realize he’d believed it for forty-nine years.

The Group Text

Nolan flew back to Tucson three days after the funeral with Dad’s watch in his carry-on.

I called him the next weekend. I tried to be calm. I told him the watch wasn’t Grandpa’s. I told him I’d bought it, at seventeen, at Quist’s, on layaway, and given it to Dad for Christmas the year he was in Germany.

There was a long pause.

“Mo,” he said. “You were seventeen and making tips at the Olympia. You didn’t buy a gold watch.” He said it gently, like I was the one getting confused, like I was the one who’d turned ninety-three. “Dad told me at Thanksgiving in 1999. He held it up and said, ‘This watch is yours someday, son.’ I’m not making this up.”

“I’m not saying you’re making it up.”

“Then what are you saying?”

I didn’t know how to say it without sounding like I was calling him a liar or calling Dad one.

A week later the family group text lit up. Nolan’s son Ryder, who is thirty-eight and sells boats in Phoenix, wrote that he thought “Grandpa’s railroad watch should stay with the Rafferty name.” I’m an Oberlin now, you see. I’ve been an Oberlin for forty-four years, and I’m suddenly hearing about it in a group text. A cousin wrote, “Aw, it’s nice it’ll go down the line.” Another cousin sent a little praying-hands emoji.

I set my phone face down on the table and went and cleaned out the hall closet, which is what I do instead of crying.

Eleventh Avenue

The next morning I drove downtown, which I hadn’t done on purpose in years.

Quist’s Jewelry is a nail salon now. It has been since the nineties. Old Mr. Quist died in 1991, and his son sold the building and moved to Florida, and the window where that watch sat on a little velvet stand now has a poster of a woman with very long purple fingernails. I parked across the street and looked at it for a while anyway.

I don’t have a receipt. I want to be clear about that. Seventeen-year-old girls in 1974 did not keep receipts in a fireproof box, and if Mr. Quist’s layaway book still exists, it’s in a landfill in Florida. I didn’t have a photograph of Dad opening the present. Mom took pictures that Christmas, but they were of the tree and of my aunt asleep in the recliner with her mouth open.

What I had was what I remembered. The bag of dimes. The way Mr. Quist licked his thumb to count. The six dollars I didn’t have. And the three lines, which I could still see clear as anything with my eyes closed.

That’s a hard thing to bring to a family group text. “I remember” doesn’t win against “Dad told me.”

I sat in the car until a woman came out of the nail salon and looked at me like I might be casing the place, and then I drove home.

Pete

My husband Pete is a man of very few words, most of them about the Steelers. He sat at the table that night eating leftover pot roast and watching me throw out a perfectly good umbrella.

“Mo,” he said. “You don’t have to argue with him about any of it.”

“He thinks I’m lying.”

“So don’t tell him anything,” Pete said. “Just ask him to open it.”

I stopped with the umbrella in my hand.

Nolan had never opened the back. I knew that as surely as I knew my own phone number. He’d had that watch for a month and he’d almost certainly done what Dad did, popped the front, looked at the time, wound it. He didn’t know there was a back to open. Nobody did. Dad had kept it that way for fifty years.

“He’ll say I’m making a scene,” I said.

“Don’t make a scene,” Pete said. “Ask him nice.” And he went back to his pot roast.

Estate Sale Weekend

We’d scheduled the estate sale for the third weekend in October. Nolan flew back with his wife, Pearl, to help price things and to sign the papers on the house. He brought the watch. He mentioned it twice in the parking garage at the airport. He was going to take it to a jeweler in Pittsburgh on Monday to get it appraised “for insurance, now that it’s in the family line.”

The sale itself was the hardest day of the whole fall. Strangers walked through my mother’s kitchen picking up her mixing bowls and turning them over to look at the price stickers on the bottom. A man in a camouflage jacket bought Dad’s whole workbench, vise and all, for sixty dollars and told me it was “a steal.” Nolan stood in the garage all day making change from a coffee can and saying “Good choice” to everyone. I think it was the only way he could stand it.

Saturday night after the sale closed, the four of us sat at Dad’s kitchen table eating pizza out of the box. Most of the house was empty. Somebody had bought the living room set and the good lamps. The kitchen table was staying with the house, and so were the chairs, and so was the brown mug with the chip on the handle, because I’d hidden it in a cabinet.

Nolan took out the watch and set it on the table next to his plate. He popped the front lid and looked at the time.

“Still running,” he said. “Dad would be glad.”

“Nolan,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Would you open the back for me?”

He looked at me, then at the watch. “The back?”

“The back cover. It opens.”

He turned it over in his hands. He pressed the crown. He pressed the hinge. He tried to pry it with his thumbnail and couldn’t find the notch. Pearl, without a word, handed him a butter knife off the pizza box.

“Not that,” I said. “Here.” I reached over and showed him the tiny notch near the bow, the one I’d found with my own thumbnail on Christmas morning in 1974, the same notch I’d shown Dad. “Push there. Your nail. Not too hard.”

He pushed.

Three Lines

The back cover sprang open on its hinge, and there it was, in Mr. Quist’s careful, slightly crooked capitals, a little worn now from fifty years against a cotton shirt pocket:

TO DAD

LOVE MO

1974

Nobody said anything. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere outside a dog barked twice and quit.

Nolan read it. Then he read it again. I watched him read it a third time, his lips moving a little, the way Dad’s used to when he did the crossword.

“Dad could’ve had that put on,” he finally said, very quietly. “Later. Couldn’t he.”

I wasn’t angry. I was too tired to be angry.

“He could have,” I said. “So where’s Grandpa’s watch, then?”

The Top Drawer

And that’s when Pearl spoke up.

Pearl has been married to my brother for forty-seven years. She’s from Ohio and she is the calmest person I’ve ever met. She once drove four hours through an ice storm to bring me soup when I had shingles.

“Nolan,” she said. “Honey. It’s in your top dresser drawer.”

He looked at her.

“The silver one,” she said. “With the train on the lid. In the blue box. Your dad gave it to you at our wedding.” She turned to me. “June of 1979. Right before the ceremony. In the church parking lot. I was there. I saw it.”

I’d been there too, of course. I’d been a bridesmaid. I’d been in a peach dress being sick from nerves behind the church, and I’d missed it.

Nolan just sat there. “That’s Grandpa’s?”

“It’s got his initials in it,” Pearl said. “You showed me on our honeymoon. You haven’t wound it since the eighties because you said it was too nice to carry.”

She already had her phone out. She called Ryder, who was house-sitting for them in Tucson, and she talked him through it like a hostage negotiator. Go upstairs. Your dad’s dresser. Top left. Under the socks. Blue box.

R.R. 1921

Ryder held his phone up close so we could see.

It was a heavy silver railroad watch, the big kind conductors carried, with a little steam locomotive engraved on the lid, worn smooth in the middle from a thumb. Ryder opened the back on his first try, because young people try things, and inside, in old-fashioned script, it said R.R. 1921.

Reuben Rafferty. The year he went to work for the railroad.

Pearl said, quietly, “Your dad held it out to you and said, ‘A Rafferty man carries a Rafferty watch.’ Don’t you remember? You cried. You had to fix your boutonniere.”

My brother put his face in his hands, right there at Dad’s kitchen table.

“I remember,” he said into his palms. “Oh, God, Mo. I remember.”

What Nolan Said

He didn’t say anything else for a while. I got up and took the brown mug down out of the cabinet where I’d hidden it and made him a cup of instant coffee, black, because that was all there was in the house. He held it with both hands.

“Dad did say it to me at Thanksgiving,” he said finally. “In 1999. He held up a watch and said, ‘This is yours someday.’ I swear he did.”

“I believe you,” I said. And I did. I think Dad was holding up the gold watch, and I think he meant something, but I don’t know what. Maybe he meant he’d already given Nolan his. Maybe he meant he was proud of us. Maybe he was sixty-six and had a glass of wine and was just being sweet. I’ve stopped trying to figure out what my father meant at a Thanksgiving I wasn’t sitting close enough to hear.

“Do you know why I grabbed it?” Nolan said. “That day. Off the nightstand.”

I shook my head.

“Because you got him every day,” he said. “You were eleven minutes away. You took him to the doctor and did his taxes and found him in the morning. I was in Germany, and then I was in Arizona, and I called on Sundays. And that watch was the thing he touched every single day of his life. I wanted something he’d touched every day.” He laughed, wet. “Turns out it was you he was touching every day. Pretty much literally.”

Pearl reached over and put her hand on his back.

He Slid It Across the Table

My brother closed the back cover of the gold watch, carefully, with his thumbnail. Then he closed the front. Then he slid it across Dad’s kitchen table to me, past the pizza box, past the brown mug.

“I’m sorry, Mo,” he said. “I’m going to call Ryder back and tell him. And I’m going to say something in that group text, and it’s going to be long, and it’s going to have a lot of typos.”

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“I do,” he said. “You paid in quarters.”

He did post it. It was long. It had a lot of typos. Ryder texted me separately the next day and said, “Aunt Mo, I’m really sorry, I didn’t know,” and I told him that was all right, because he didn’t. The cousin with the praying hands sent a heart.

Ten Past Six, Again

Nolan and Pearl flew home the next Tuesday. Before he left, I asked him for one thing.

“Wind Grandpa’s watch,” I said. “It’s been sitting in a drawer since the eighties. It needs to run.”

He called me the following Sunday from his kitchen in Tucson. I could hear Pearl in the background running the dishwasher.

“I took it to a guy,” he said. “Cleaned and oiled. Ninety bucks. He said it’s got another hundred years in it.” He paused. “Mo, I’ve been winding it at ten after six. Every morning. I set an alarm.”

“Arizona’s three hours behind us right now, Nolan.”

“Is it? Well. I’m winding it at ten after six mine.”

Now every morning at ten past six my time, I sit at my own kitchen table with my coffee in Dad’s brown mug, chip and all, and I pop the front lid of a used 1940s gold watch I paid off in dimes, and I wind it until it stops, and I hold it to my ear. A few hours later my phone buzzes with a text from Tucson. It always says the same thing.

“She’s running.”

I’ve never opened the back since that night. I don’t need to. I know what it says. So does my brother now, and that was the point.

If you have a sibling you’ve been arguing with over something of Mom’s or Dad’s, maybe call them before you call a lawyer. Share this with a brother or sister you love, even the stubborn ones.

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