"It's yours," he said.
She shook her head. "Mr. Szabo, I've been thinking. After everything. It's your wife's watch. It's got her name in it. I can't—"
"It's got her name in it because she waited," Walt said. "Not so it would wait in a drawer." He took her wrist and buckled it on, last hole, a little loose. "There. She'd like you. She'd say you have stubborn eyebrows."
Nadia laughed, and her eyes filled, and she didn't wipe them.
Ray had turned to go. Walt said, "Officer."
Ray turned back.
"How's the Timex?"
Ray pulled up his left sleeve. The twenty-dollar watch was on his wrist, on its cheap black strap.
"Gains about four seconds a day," he said.
"That's very good for a terrible watch." Walt held out his hand. "Leave it with me Tuesday. I'll regulate it for you. No charge. A man who carries a box with two hands gets free regulation."
Ray Dombrowski looked at the old man's hand for a moment, and then he shook it.
* * *
Gus Brandt's seventieth birthday party was held on the first Saturday of November, after closing, in Szabo & Son, because Walt said it was the only room in Baltimore with enough clocks to make sure everybody went home on time.
They brought folding chairs from the hardware store and a sheet cake from the bakery, decorated in blue frosting with what the baker believed to be a guitar and Marco insisted was a frying pan. Rosario Ocampo came with his wife and a bottle of rum. Desmond Pryor came from the Maryland Room with a certified copy of the 1980 article, framed, and gave it to Walt, and told him it was a loan from the people of Baltimore and he wanted it back when Walt died, which Walt said was fair. Ana Ruiz came for half an hour and stood in the corner eating cake and saying nothing, which everyone agreed was a great honor. Ray came in a Ravens hoodie and brought his daughter, who was eleven and wanted to know how the cuckoo clock knew when to come out, and spent forty minutes on the stairs to the back room with Walt and a jeweler's loupe and a box of broken parts finding out.
At nine o'clock Nadia stood up and tapped a fork on her paper cup until the room quieted.