My Father Left My Brother The House And The Business And Left Me His Broken Pocket Watch. The Old Jeweler I Took It To For Repair Opened The Back, Went Quiet, And Locked The Shop Door

The lawyer’s office was on the fourth floor of an old bank building on South Main Street in Akron, and it smelled like radiator heat and lemon furniture polish. There were three chairs in front of the desk. My brother Danny took the one in the middle.

Mr. Kolb read the will in a flat, kind voice, the way you’d read the side of a cereal box to a child. He had known our father for forty years. He did not look up much.

“‘To my son, Daniel Joseph Marchetti, I leave my residence at 1186 Wilbeth Road, together with its contents, and my entire ownership interest in Marchetti Plumbing Supply, Incorporated.'”

Danny’s wife, Trish, put her hand on his knee and squeezed.

“‘To my daughter, Ellen Marie Marchetti, I leave my pocket watch.'”

Mr. Kolb turned the page over to see if there was more. There wasn’t. He set it down.

For a second nobody said anything. The radiator knocked.

Then Danny laughed. Not a big laugh. A short one, through his nose, the kind you do at a commercial.

“The watch,” he said. “The broken one?”

“It’s the only one he had,” Mr. Kolb said quietly.

“Well.” Danny leaned back in his chair and looked at me. “I hope you like knowing what time it is, El. Oh, wait. You won’t.”

Trish laughed too, then caught herself, then patted my arm like I was a dog at the vet.

I was fifty-eight years old. I had spent the last seven of them sleeping in my childhood bedroom down the hall from my father so I could hear him if he fell. And I sat in that lawyer’s office with my purse on my lap and my coat still buttoned and I did not say one word, because I knew if I opened my mouth, I would never be able to close it again.

Seven Years

Dad had his first stroke in March of 2019. He was seventy-nine. It took the strength out of his right hand and some of the words out of his mouth, and it took the business out of his hands entirely, though Danny had been running the day-to-day for fifteen years by then anyway.

I was a school secretary at Firestone Park Elementary. I was divorced, my son was grown and in Columbus, and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Cuyahoga Falls with a cat named Pickles. When the hospital social worker asked who would be able to help him at home, Danny looked at his shoes.

“I’ve got the business,” he said. “And Trish’s mother is right here in Bath. We’re stretched.”

So I gave up the apartment. I took early retirement in 2020. Pickles and I moved into my old room on Wilbeth Road, with the same flowered wallpaper Mom had put up in 1977.

I did the pills and the appointments and the therapy. I learned how to get a grown man out of a bathtub. After the second stroke in 2022, I learned how to change him, and how to talk while I did it so neither of us had to think about it. I learned that he liked the Indians game on the radio, not the TV, and that if I left it on low he’d sleep through the night.

Danny came on Sundays at first. Then every other Sunday. Then for twenty minutes at Christmas, standing in his coat by the door with his keys in his hand.

“How’s he doing?” he’d ask me in the hallway, never in the room.

“Go in and ask him.”

“I don’t want to wake him up.”

He was never asleep. Dad would hear Danny’s truck in the driveway and turn his face to the door and wait. And Danny would talk to me in the hall and leave.

Dad died on the second of October, in his own bed, at four in the morning, with the radio on low. I was holding his left hand. He’d been trying to say something for most of that last night and I never could make it out.

Sixty Days

Danny walked me out of Mr. Kolb’s office to the elevator. Trish went ahead to get the car.

“Look,” he said, pushing the button. “I’m not going to throw you out on the street. Take sixty days. Trish wants to list it by spring.”

“List it.”

“El, it’s a sixty-year-old house with a stair lift and a hospital bed in the dining room. Nobody’s going to live in it. It’s worth more as a lot.”

The elevator came. We got in. He looked at himself in the brass panel and fixed his collar.

“And don’t take it personal about the watch. You know how he was. He probably forgot he wrote it.”

“He didn’t forget anything, Danny.”

“He forgot my kids’ names the last two years.”

“Because you never brought them.”

The elevator doors opened on the lobby, and he walked out ahead of me without answering, and that was the last thing we said to each other for nine days.

The Watch

It was an old gold railroad watch, open-faced, with big black numbers and a little second hand down at the six. It had been my grandfather’s. Nonno Sal was a brakeman on the Erie line out of Kent, and the railroad required them to carry a watch that kept time to the second, and he bought this one in 1931 and paid it off at fifty cents a week.

Dad carried it every day of his working life in the little pocket of his work pants. He’d take it out at the counter of the supply house and check it against the clock on the wall and grunt, like the clock had done something wrong.

It stopped in the spring of 2021. I remember because he was so upset about it. He wouldn’t let me take it to get fixed.

“Leave it,” he said, with the words he had left. “I’ll. Handle it.”

He kept it on his nightstand after that, next to his glasses and the radio. Stopped at 3:12. Every so often I’d catch him picking it up and holding it in his good hand without winding it, just looking at the face, and I’d go back out of the room and let him.

The night after the will reading, I sat on the edge of his empty bed and picked it up.

It was heavier than I remembered. 3:12.

I’m not a sentimental woman. I’m a school secretary. I file things. But I sat there and I thought, I have spent seven years keeping things running in this house, and every single one of them stopped anyway. And I decided I wanted one thing in my life to start back up.

So the next morning I looked for a watch repair shop. There aren’t many anymore. There was one in Cuyahoga Falls, on Front Street, that had a four-point-nine on Google and a review that said Old man in the back who knows what he’s doing. Doesn’t talk much.

Benes Jewelers

The shop was narrow, between a vape store and a place that sold vacuum cleaner parts. BENES JEWELERS — WATCH REPAIR — EST. 1978 in gold letters on the glass. A bell over the door.

Inside it was all glass cases and old carpet and the sound of maybe forty clocks ticking on the walls, none of them quite together. A man in his eighties was sitting at a bench in the back under a gooseneck lamp with a loupe screwed into one eye. He was small and thin with white hair combed straight back and a white mustache, in a gray cardigan with leather buttons.

He took the loupe out and stood up slowly.

“Good morning,” he said. A soft accent, Eastern European, worn almost smooth. “How can I help?”

“It’s my father’s watch. It stopped a few years ago. I’d like to get it running again, if it can be done.”

I set it on the glass. He looked at it. He looked for a long time, and then he looked at me, and something moved behind his face.

“May I ask your father’s name?”

“Joseph Marchetti. He passed a few weeks ago.”

He put his hand flat on the glass case, the way you’d steady yourself on a train.

“I am very sorry,” he said. “Please. Wait one moment.”

He took the watch to his bench. He fitted a little knife into the seam of the case back and twisted it, gently, and the back came off with a click I could hear from across the room.

He looked inside. And then he went completely still. He didn’t move for so long that the clocks on the wall seemed louder.

Then he set the watch down on a square of green felt, very carefully. He came around the counter, past me, to the front door. He turned the sign in the window from OPEN to CLOSED.

And he locked the door.

“Mr. Benes?” I said. My heart was going. “What’s wrong?”

He turned around. His eyes were wet.

“Nothing is wrong, Ellen,” he said. “Your father told me you would come. I am sorry it took so long. He told me also to lock the door.”

I had not told him my name.

1971

He made me a cup of tea in the back on a hot plate, in a cup with a chip in it. He sat down across from me on a stool. And he told me a story about my father I had never heard.

His name was Tomas Beneš. He was born in 1945 in a town called Jablonec in what was then Czechoslovakia, a town where for two hundred years people had made glass jewelry and buttons and beads. His father was a watchmaker. After the Soviet tanks came in 1968, his family got out, first to Austria, then to a refugee camp, waiting.

“For two years we wait,” he said. *“You need a sponsor to come to America. Someone to say, I will give this man a job. I will be responsible. Nobody wants to be responsible for a Czech boy with no English and a box of watchmaker tools.”

Our parish in Akron, St. Paul’s on Brown Street, had a resettlement committee. One of the men on it was a thirty-one-year-old plumbing supply owner with a new business and a little girl at home, who had a grandfather who’d come from Italy with nothing.

“Your father signed the paper,” Tomas said. “Joseph Marchetti. He did not know me. He never saw my face. He signed.”

He landed at Cleveland Hopkins in April of 1971 in a borrowed suit. My father picked him up in a blue Ford pickup with MARCHETTI PLUMBING SUPPLY painted on the door. He swept floors and loaded pipe at the supply house for five years. My father paid for his night classes in watch repair at a technical school in Cleveland. And in 1978, when no bank would lend a foreigner the money for a shop, my father co-signed the lease on Front Street.

“I tried to pay him back,” Tomas said. *“Every year. He says, you fix my watch, we’re even.Forty-seven years I fix that watch for free. That is the only payment he would take.”

“I didn’t know any of this,” I said. “He never said a word.”

“No,” Tomas said. “He was not a man who said words. He was a man who signed things.”

3:12

He brought the watch over on its square of felt and set it in front of me, with the back off.

Inside the case back, pressed flat against the gold, was a piece of paper folded down to the size of a postage stamp. Thin paper, the onionskin kind. It had been tucked in so neatly that it fit against the curve of the metal like it had grown there.

“Go ahead,” Tomas said. “It is yours.”

I unfolded it with my fingernails. It took a while. It was folded six times.

It was my father’s handwriting. Not the handwriting from the end, the shaky left-handed scrawl from after the strokes. This was his real handwriting, the square block capitals he used on invoices for fifty years. Which meant he’d written it before. Before the second stroke, at least.

ELLIE —

TOMAS HAS THE KEY. FIRST NATIONAL ON MAIN, BOX 114. YOU ARE ON THE CARD.

THIS IS NOT A MISTAKE. DON’T LET DANNY SEE YOU CRY.

— DAD

I read it three times. Then I put it face down on the felt and put both my hands over my mouth.

“He came in here in May of 2021,” Tomas said gently. “With his cane. You were outside in the car. Do you remember? He said he needed to use the restroom.”

I did remember. A doctor’s appointment in Cuyahoga Falls. He’d made me pull over on Front Street. He’d been gone twenty minutes and I’d almost gone in after him.

“He wrote this at my bench. With his hand already shaking. It took him a long time. Then he asks me to put it in the case, and to stop the watch.”

“Stop it?”

“I take out one small pin from the balance. Nothing broken. I keep the pin right here.” He tapped a tiny glass vial on the bench. *“He says, Tomas, if it runs, she will leave it in a drawer. If it is broken, she will bring it to the only watchmaker left in Summit County.“

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It came out like a sob.

“That sounds like him.”

“He also says, My son will laugh at her. Lock the door so she can cry where he can’t see.“

Box 114

I went to the bank that afternoon. Tomas came with me. He put on a brown overcoat and a flat cap and locked the shop and rode in my Corolla with his hands folded on his knees, and he brought a small brass key on a ring with a cardboard tag that said 114 in my father’s block capitals.

“He gave me this the same day,” he said. “I keep it in my safe for five years. I never once open the box. I want you to know that.”

“I believe you.”

At First National, a young woman named Ashley took my driver’s license and pulled up the signature card on her computer. And there was my name. Ellen M. Marchetti, co-lessee. With my signature, dated June 2021.

I remembered that day too. Dad had taken me to the bank to straighten some things out with the checking, because I had his power of attorney by then. He’d slid papers across the desk and I’d signed where the banker pointed. I’d signed so many forms that year, for so many offices, that I never read one of them.

“Since you’re a co-lessee on the box, you have full access,” Ashley said. “It’s not part of the estate. You don’t need anything from probate.”

She took us down to the vault. She used her key and I used mine, and she slid out a long gray metal box and left us alone in a little room with a table and a chair.

I lifted the lid.

On top was a manila envelope with my name on it. Under that was a thick, bound document in a blue folder. It was a life insurance policy from Western Reserve Mutual, taken out in 1994, paid every single month for thirty-one years. The beneficiary was me. Only me. The face amount was three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Under that was a bank envelope full of paper savings bonds, the old kind, dozens of them, bought between 1975 and 2008. Every one was made out to Joseph Marchetti or Ellen Marchetti. My birthdays. My first communion. My high school graduation. The year I got married. The year I got divorced.

And at the very bottom, in a plastic sleeve, was my mother’s recipe card for her Easter bread, in her handwriting, with a grease stain in the corner I would have known anywhere.

I sat down in the one chair. Tomas stood behind me with his cap in his hands.

“Mr. Benes,” I said. “Is this legal? Can he do this? Danny’s going to say I tricked him.”

“Ask your lawyer,” he said. “But I think your father asked his lawyer first. Your father always asks first.”

The Letter

I read the letter in the car in the bank parking lot, with the heater running. Tomas sat beside me and looked out the window at the Akron Civic Theatre sign so I could have my privacy.

It was four pages, in his real handwriting, dated May 3, 2021.

Ellie,

If you’re reading this, then I did it right, and your brother got the house and the business, and he laughed at you about the watch. I’m sorry about that. I know my son.

I’m going to explain this once because I’m no good at it.

Danny has been running the store since 2004. He’s not as good at it as he thinks he is, but he loves it, and it is the only place he ever believed I was proud of him. If I split it, he would fight you for it, and Trish would help him, and you two would never speak again. I won’t have that. So he gets the store, and the house, and the whole will is so simple there is nothing to fight about.

This box is not in my will. Ray Kolb set it up with me so it wouldn’t have to be. It’s yours.

I bought the policy in 1994 when your mother got sick, because I promised her you would be all right. I bought you a bond every time something happened in your life and I didn’t know what to say. That’s a lot of bonds. I’m sorry I didn’t know what to say.

Here’s the other reason you didn’t get the house. You would have stayed in it. You would have stayed in your old bedroom with that wallpaper, taking care of my furniture the way you took care of me, until you were an old woman. I watched you give up your apartment and your job and your whole life for me, and I couldn’t say thank you, because my mouth doesn’t work anymore. So I’m saying it with the only things I have left.

Don’t stay. Go see Michael in Columbus. Go to the ocean. Your mother always wanted to see the ocean.

Tomas has one more thing. It’s for your brother. Make him come get it himself.

Thank you, Ellie. For every night.

— Dad

I folded it back up on its creases. I sat there with my hands on the steering wheel and cried until the windows fogged, and Tomas reached over without looking and turned the defroster up, and didn’t say a word.

Make Him Come Get It

I called Danny that night. He picked up on the fourth ring with the TV going in the background.

“If this is about the house, El, I told you, sixty days.”

“It’s not about the house. Dad left something for you with a jeweler in Cuyahoga Falls. On Front Street. The man won’t give it to me. He says you have to come get it yourself.”

A long pause. The TV went quiet.

“What jeweler?”

“Tomas Beneš. Dad sponsored him from Czechoslovakia in 1971.”

“I never heard of him.”

“Neither had I,” I said. “Turns out there’s a lot we never heard of.”

He came on Saturday morning. He parked his truck right out front, the big silver Silverado with the store’s name on the door, and sat in it for a while before he came in. The bell rang over the door. He stood there in his Carhartt jacket looking at all those clocks, and for a second he looked about ten years old.

Tomas came out from the back. He looked at my brother for a long moment.

“You have his ears,” he said.

“Everybody says that.”

“Everybody is right.” Tomas went to the door, turned the sign to CLOSED, and locked it again. Danny looked at me. I shrugged.

Tomas brought out a long white envelope and a small cardboard box, the kind a watch comes in, and set them on the glass case.

“From your father,” he said. “May 2021.”

Danny opened the box first. Inside, on a bed of cotton, was a dollar bill. An old one, soft as a handkerchief, in a little plastic sleeve, with a date written on the white border in ballpoint: 4-14-69.

“The first dollar,” Danny said, very quietly. “From the first sale. It used to be in a frame over the register. It went missing when I redid the counter. I thought one of the guys threw it out.”

He opened the letter. It was one page. He read it standing up, and I watched his face, and I watched it fall apart in a way I hadn’t seen since he was a little boy who’d fallen off his bike on Wilbeth Road.

He set it down on the glass and leaned on both hands. I could read it upside down. I’m not proud of that.

Danny — I gave you the store because I know you need it. I want you to know I was proud of you before you ever worked there. I was proud of you the day you were born. You don’t have to earn it. You never did. — Dad

The Hallway

He didn’t say anything for a long time. Tomas went into the back and turned on the hot plate.

“I couldn’t go in the room,” Danny said finally. He was looking at the clocks, not at me. “You know that? You always thought I didn’t care. I’d get to the doorway and he’d look at me like he was waiting for me to say something, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. And he couldn’t tell me. So I’d stand in the hall and talk to you instead.”

“He was waiting for you to come in, Danny. That’s all.”

“I know that now.” He wiped his face with the heel of his hand, hard. “I laughed at you. In Kolb’s office. About the watch. I laughed because I knew you got the worse deal and I didn’t want to feel like garbage about it. And I didn’t want to say it out loud that you’d done everything and I’d done nothing.”

“You didn’t do nothing.”

“I stood in the hall for seven years, El.”

I took his hand on the glass case. He let me. He’s got Dad’s hands too, square with short thumbs.

“The store’s losing money,” he said. “Since COVID. Trish doesn’t know how bad. I was going to sell the house to cover the line of credit. That’s why the sixty days.” He laughed, wet. “He knew, didn’t he. He knew I was screwing it up.”

“He said you weren’t as good as you think you are,” I said. “But he said you love it.”

He laughed for real then, and so did I, and Tomas came out with three cups of tea on a tray and set them down and said, “Good. Now everybody has cried. Now we drink.”

After

I called Mr. Kolb on Monday. He confirmed everything. The policy and the bonds had never been part of the estate; my father had sat in his office in April of 2021 and asked him how to make sure his daughter got something nobody could argue about. There was nothing to contest, and Danny said he wouldn’t have contested it anyway. I believed him.

I didn’t take sixty days. I took thirty. Danny came every Saturday and helped me clear the house. He carried the hospital bed out of the dining room himself, with a guy from the store, and when it was gone he stood in the empty space where it had been for a while with his hands in his pockets.

He kept the house off the market until spring. He used some of the business account to pay down the line of credit, and he brought in his son Joey, who’d gotten a business degree at Kent State, to look at the books.

I moved to Columbus in January, to a little apartment in Clintonville ten minutes from my son.

In March I went to Myrtle Beach for six days by myself and stood in the ocean up to my shins in a sweatshirt, in forty-eight-degree water, and called Danny from the beach.

“How is it?” he said.

“Cold.”

“Mom would’ve loved it.”

“She’d have stayed in the car,” I said. “Dad would have made her get out.”

Ticking

Before I left Akron, I went back to Front Street one more time.

Tomas had the watch on his bench under the gooseneck lamp. He’d cleaned it and oiled it, and he took the tiny pin out of the glass vial with a pair of tweezers and fitted it back into the balance, and the whole thing woke up in his hand like it had only been asleep.

He closed the back. It made the same small click.

“Forty-seven years I fix this watch for free,” he said, and slid it across the felt to me. “Now it is your turn to bring it to me. Once a year. You understand? That is the payment.”

“I understand.”

“Good,” he said, and turned back to his bench, and didn’t watch me cry, because he was a gentleman.

The watch is on my nightstand now, in Clintonville, next to my glasses and a little radio I keep on low. The folded note lives in my jewelry box. The time on it is right.

Some nights I can’t sleep, the way I couldn’t for seven years, listening for him down the hall. On those nights I pick it up off the nightstand and hold it in my hand in the dark, the way he used to.

It’s heavier than it looks. It’s warm by the time I put it to my ear.

And it’s ticking.

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