The 11:08 out of Grand Central on a Sunday night was not a train anyone took on purpose.
It was the train you took because you had stayed too long at your sister's table, because there had been one more plate of rice and djon djon pushed in front of you and one more cousin calling from Port-au-Prince on the speakerphone, because the 2 train had sat in a tunnel under Nostrand Avenue for nineteen minutes with the lights flickering and a man at the end of the car singing the same verse of a hymn over and over in a voice like a cracked bell.
It was the train for nurses off double shifts and kitchen workers with burns on their wrists. Solange Augustin had taken it most Sundays for four years, and she took the same seat every time when she could get it: the second car from the front, the three-seat side, by the window, facing forward.
Tonight she got it. She sat down with a breath that came out of her like air out of a tire, and she put her tote bag on the floor between her shoes and the box on her lap, and she held the box with both hands the way you would hold a cake.
It was not a big box. It was a white cardboard box about the size of a loaf of bread, wrapped twice around with brown paper and tied with red-and-white baker's string. Inside the brown paper there was another box, a small one, blue, with a hinged lid. Inside the blue box, on a cushion of yellowed satin, was the reason she had spent eleven dollars and twenty-five cents and two hours of her only day off going into Midtown and back before she even got to Rosemène's: a Hamilton railroad pocket watch, model 992B, twenty-one jewels, with a white enamel face and black Arabic numerals and a little second hand in its own small circle at the bottom like a moon. It was in a gold-filled case worn through to the brass at the edges by fifty years of a man's thumb. On the back of the case there was an engraving, and she knew the engraving by heart, though she had not been the one who put it there.
She did not open the box on the train. She had opened it once already, at the counter at Melamed Watch Repair, while old Mr. Melamed watched her through the loupe he never seemed to take out of his eye, and she had held the watch up to her ear like a child with a seashell and heard it going, tick tick tick tick, five ticks to the second, steady as a heart that has never had a single thing wrong with it.
"Whoever wound this," Mr. Melamed had said, "wound it every day of his life. You can see. The crown is worn down on one side from the same two fingers. Fifty years, same two fingers." He had pushed the repair ticket across the glass. "You tell him it's good for fifty more. You tell him not to drop it again."
"He didn't drop it," Solange had said. "His hand dropped it."
Mr. Melamed had looked at her through the loupe, and then he had taken the loupe out of his eye, which she had never seen him do, and he had nodded slowly, as if she had told him something he already knew about the world and was sorry to hear confirmed. "Then you tell his hand," he said.