Bring them all home.
— P.
He had been six or seven the first time he read it. Sunday mornings, before church, his father would sit at the kitchen table in his undershirt with the coffee and the Daily News and the watch lying on the oilcloth by his elbow, and when Conor came down in his pajamas his father would slide it across the table to him without looking up from the paper and say, Thirty. Not more. And Conor would pick it up in both hands, heavy and warm from his father's pocket, and turn the crown, counting under his breath, one, two, three, and he would feel the spring tighten inside it, a little more resistance with every turn, and at thirty he would stop, even though he always wanted to go on and see what happened, because his father had said that if you went past thirty you could break the mainspring and then the watch would never run again, and Conor had believed that the way he believed in God. Then he would turn it over and read the back, sounding it out. Bring them all home. And one time, he must have been seven, he had asked, Who's P? and his mother at the stove had laughed and said, Me, you dope. I'm P. Peggy. And his father had looked up from the paper then, at her, and something had happened in his face that Conor had not had a word for at seven and was not sure he had a word for now.
When had he stopped winding it? He could not remember. Twelve. Thirteen. Some Sunday he had just not come down, and nobody had said anything, and the watch had gone back to being his father's.
"In August," the woman said, "his right hand let go of it at the kitchen table. It does that now. It forgets what it is holding. The watch fell on the floor. The crystal cracked and something inside broke. The balance staff, Mr. Melamed says. It stopped at forty-one seconds." She was looking at the watch, not at him. Her voice had lost some of the polish it had had a few minutes ago, the careful courtroom shine; it was lower now, and slower, and more tired. "He said, I'll fix it. He said it to the floor. Then he asked me every morning for six weeks. Every morning, with his coffee. Watch? And I said, Soon." She closed her fingers over it. "Today was soon."
The rain came down on both of them. He felt it going down the back of his collar.
"You knew," he said. His voice came out strange. He cleared his throat. "You knew who I was."
"Since you took my card," she said. "Your name is on your coat."
"Why didn't you say anything?"