Walt Szabo unlocked the front door of Szabo & Son at eight-thirty on the second Saturday of October, the way he had unlocked it for forty-nine years, with the key turned twice to the left and a little lift of the knob, because the door had settled in 1987 and never forgiven anyone for it.
The bell over the frame rang its one cracked note. Inside, the shop held its breath and then let it out in ticking. Forty-two clocks on the east wall, give or take the ones that were sulking. A row of regulators along the back, their pendulums swinging out of step like old men walking to church. Under the glass of the counter, trays of wristwatches waiting for their owners, each with a paper tag tied on with red thread, each tag in Walt's slanted hand: Mainspring, crystal, $85. Ready Thursday. Clean & oil, Mrs. Doyle, DO NOT let her pay more than $60, she will try.
He hung his coat on the hook behind the curtain, put the kettle on the hot plate, and tied on the brown canvas apron that had been his father's before it was his. The stitching said SZABO in faded yellow thread. His father had stitched it himself, badly, in 1959, when the shop was three years old and the son in the name was seven and could just about reach the counter.
Thirty-sixth Street was waking up outside. The Avenue, everybody in Hampden called it, as if there were no other avenue in Baltimore. A boy on a scooter went by with a dog trotting behind him, the leash tied to the handlebar. Bernice Hollis was rolling the sidewalk rack out of Hollis Hardware across the street, and when she saw Walt in the window she lifted one hand in a salute that was half wave and half accusation, which was how Bernice did most things.
Walt lifted a hand back. Then he did what he had done every morning for nineteen days. He went to the front window, knelt with a small grunt, and looked at the watch.
It sat on a square of gray velvet in the center of the display, between a Seth Thomas mantel clock with a cracked bell and a tray of men's Timexes he sold for twenty dollars apiece to boys who needed to look serious at job interviews. It was not a large watch. Thirty-four millimeters, steel case, a dial the color of weak tea that had been engraved, by hand, on a rose engine in the back room, into a pattern of fine overlapping waves. If you tilted it, the waves moved. If you held it in the sun on the right afternoon, they looked like the harbor at six o'clock with the wind coming up the Patapsco.
Beside it, propped against a small brass easel, was a white card. Walt had written it in ink, four times, before he got one he could stand.
Made by hand in this shop, 1979. Movement, case and dial by W. Szabo. It has been worn every day for forty years and it would like to be worn again. $4,800.
He had argued with the watch for three years before he wrote it.
"You're going to wear a hole in that velvet," said a voice behind him.
Walt didn't turn. "It's my velvet."
Marco Dellapina came in without knocking because Marco never knocked. He ran Charm City Vinyl two doors down, was fifty-eight years old and dressed every day of his life like a sixteen-year-old who had just discovered the Clash. He carried two coffees from the bakery and set one on the counter by Walt's elbow.
"Still there," Marco said.
"Still there."
"You could take it out of the window, you know. Nobody's making you."