"Eva is making me," Walt said, and got up off his knee, and dusted the knee, and looked at Marco in a way that closed the subject.
Marco, who had known Eva Szabo for thirty years and who had carried one corner of her coffin down the steps of St. Thomas Aquinas three autumns ago, nodded and drank his coffee.
* * *
The young woman came in at ten past eleven.
Walt had seen her before. Not inside. Outside, three times in the past two weeks, standing on the sidewalk with her hands in the pockets of a green canvas jacket, looking at the window the way people look at the window of a bakery when they're on a diet. Dark hair pulled back. Early thirties. A lanyard folded into one pocket, the plastic badge just showing, the kind of badge you get from working somewhere with metal detectors at the front door.
This time she came in. The bell made its cracked note and she flinched a little at it, then laughed at herself.
"Sorry," she said. "I've been working up to this."
"Most people do," Walt said. "Clocks make them nervous. All that counting."
She smiled, and some of the stiffness went out of her shoulders. She looked at the wall of clocks, then at the counter, then back toward the window, and her eyes went straight to the gray velvet and stayed there.
"Can I see it?"
Walt took it out of the window himself. He laid the watch on a fresh square of chamois on the counter and turned the lamp so it shone at a low angle across the dial, and he watched her face as the waves moved.
She didn't say anything for a long moment. Then: "You actually made this."
"I actually did."
"Like, the whole thing?"
"The case I turned on a lathe in the back. The dial I cut on a rose engine my father bought from a man in Philadelphia who was going out of business in 1964. It still works if you talk to it nicely." He reached under the counter and lifted out a loupe and handed it to her. "The movement started as a Swiss ébauche. A blank, you'd say. Unfinished parts. I remade the escapement, cut a new balance cock, finished every plate by hand. Look at the edge of the bridge there. See the bevel? That's polished with a piece of gentian root and diamond paste. Took me four nights."
She bent over the loupe. He liked that she held it right without being told, up against her eye, bringing the watch to it instead of the other way around.