“You can’t make the whole world right, but you can make the next ten minutes better for somebody.”
Mom’s eyes filled.
“He told you that too?”
“All the time.”
She reached for her pencil.
“That stubborn man.”
I smiled.
“I know.”
“I miss him,” she whispered.
“Me too.”
I went to bed close to midnight.
But sleep wouldn’t come.
I stared at the stain on my ceiling, remembering how that woman had reacted to the picture.
It hadn’t looked like ordinary curiosity.
It looked like recognition.
But how could she possibly have known him?
Dad had been dead for twenty-two years.
She appeared to be in her mid-thirties.
She would have been a teenager when he died.
And she wasn’t from Millbrook.
I would have recognized her.
Maybe she’d simply been exhausted.
Maybe I’d imagined the entire thing.
Eventually, my thoughts drifted to
the night Dad died.
The telephone ringing at two in the morning.
My mother’s voice changing when she answered.
The horrible silence afterward.
I remembered the funeral.
The truck drivers who traveled from several states to pay their respects.
Grown men standing quietly at the back of the church, tears rolling down their faces.
Then I remembered the watch.
After the accident, the police returned Dad’s belongings in a clear plastic bag.
His wallet.
Wedding ring.
Keys.
Some sunflower seeds.
A crumpled diner receipt.
But his watch was missing.
Mom called the authorities repeatedly.
She contacted the hospital.
The towing company.
Anyone who might know where it had gone.
Nobody had seen it.
We assumed it had been thrown from the vehicle during the accident and buried somewhere along Route 9.
That spring, after the snow melted, Mom took me to the roadside.
We searched the ditch for hours.
We
never found it.
She rarely talked about the watch afterward.
But I knew how much it hurt her.
She had saved so carefully to buy it.
And she’d engraved a message on the back.
Dad had worn it every day.
Then, suddenly, it was gone.
I finally fell asleep imagining that watch buried beneath damp leaves, somewhere beside the road where we’d lost him.
The next morning, I arrived at work four minutes late.
I’d barely entered through the employee door when Lori hurried toward me.
Lori never hurried.
So the sight of her practically rushing across the store immediately worried me.
