She didn't make a speech either. She took off the watch, unbuckled it from her own wrist, and held it out to her father.
"Happy birthday, Dad," she said. "Mr. Szabo made it. In 1979. With his hands. You always said he was the last honest watchmaker in Baltimore."
Gus looked at the watch in her palm for a long time. Then he looked across the room at Walt.
"I was wrong," he said, in his soft, ruined voice. "There's two."
"That's what I told her," Walt said.
He came over and buckled it on Gus's wrist himself. It fit the big, knuckled wrist better than it had fit Nadia's, on the fourth hole, snug, as though it had always been meant to. Gus turned it toward the lamp at the end of the counter. The waves moved.
Then Lin brought the tweed case out from behind the curtain, and Gus opened it, and took out the Jazzmaster with its glued-up pickguard, and plugged it into a little practice amp that Marco had carried over from the record store, and sat on the customer stool in the middle of the shop and tuned it by ear without looking. And then, under forty-two clocks, give or take the ones that were sulking, he played "Moonlight in Vermont," slow and clean, his eyes closed, the watch on his wrist catching the light every time his hand moved up the neck.
Nobody talked. The regulators along the back wall swung their pendulums out of step, like old men walking to church. The cuckoo, seven minutes fast, held its peace.
* * *
On Monday morning Walt Szabo unlocked the front door at eight-thirty, twice to the left with a little lift of the knob. The bell rang its cracked note. He hung his coat behind the curtain, put the kettle on the hot plate, and tied on his father's apron.
Then he went to the front window and knelt with a small grunt.
The gray square of velvet was empty. He'd thought about putting something else there, the Seth Thomas, maybe, or a nice Hamilton he'd been restoring for a widow in Medfield. Instead he took the white card off its brass easel and turned it over, and on the blank back, in ink, with his slanted hand, on the first try, he wrote:
Apprentice wanted. Must be patient. Must not cry when they break a mainspring, or must cry quietly. Inquire within.
He propped it on the easel in the middle of the velvet. In the glass, faint and backward, the red-and-white sign across the street floated over his reflection, and beyond it Bernice was rolling out the sidewalk rack. She saw him in the window and lifted her hand, half wave and half accusation.
Walt lifted his hand back. Then he got up off his knee, and dusted the knee, and went to the back room to wind the clocks. Forty-two of them, give or take. A watch in a drawer is a dead watch. But a shop full of clocks with somebody to wind them, he thought, is just about the most alive thing there is.