The Man Who Bought My Late Husband’s Watch at the Estate Sale Came Back Nine Months Later
Part 1
The man who paid ninety dollars for my husband’s watch came back to my house nine months later holding a folded piece of paper he said belonged to me.
I remember him from the estate sale because he was the only one who didn’t haggle. Everybody else at those things treats grief like a clearance rack. A woman tried to get me down to two dollars on Daniel’s coffee mug. Two dollars. Like she couldn’t see me standing right there.
But this man, tall, maybe mid-forties, gray already starting at his temples, he picked up the Timex off the folding table and just held it for a second. Turned it over. Read the back.
For our anniversary. Love always, R.
I’d forgotten I’d engraved that. I’d forgotten a lot of things by August.
He looked up at me and said, “Are you sure you want to sell this one?”
I said yes because if I said anything else I was going to sit down in my own driveway and not get up.
He paid the ninety dollars I’d written on the tag. Cash. He didn’t ask for a bag. He just slid the watch into his shirt pocket like it was something living and walked back to a navy-blue Honda that had a car seat in the back.
I noticed the car seat. I don’t know why I noticed the car seat.
That was August. Daniel had been gone eleven months by then and my sister Kelly had finally strong-armed me into clearing out the garage because, in her words, “You cannot live in a shrine, Rachel.”
So I sold his tools. His fishing gear. His records. The watch.
And then I did what widows do, I went back inside my empty kitchen in Millersburg, Ohio, and I cried until my face swelled up, and I called Kelly and told her she was right and also that I hated her.
Nine months passed. May came. The forsythia along the back fence went yellow and then went nothing again. I started sleeping through the night sometimes. I started laughing at things on the radio. Kelly said I looked like myself again and I didn’t have the heart to tell her I wasn’t sure who that was anymore.
Then, on a Tuesday in late May, my doorbell rang at 6:47 p.m.
I know because I was pulling a frozen lasagna out of the oven and I checked the clock, thinking it was probably a package.
It was him.
The man from the estate sale.
He was standing on my front porch in a button-down shirt and jeans, holding a folded piece of paper, and for a second I genuinely thought I was hallucinating. Grief does that. You see people who aren’t there. You see people who never were.
He said, “Mrs. Bell? Rachel Bell?”
I said yes, but I didn’t open the storm door.
He held up the paper. His hand was shaking, actually shaking, which I thought was strange because he looked like a man who did not shake easily.
“I’m sorry to come to your house,” he said. “I tried to find another way to do this. I’m, my name is Marcus Hale. I bought your husband’s watch last August.”
“I remember,” I said.
“I know how this looks.” He glanced back at his car in the street. Same navy Honda. No car seat now. “I found something. Inside the watch. Behind the back plate. I wasn’t looking for it. I was getting it serviced and the jeweler called me and he said, ‘Do you know there’s a note in here?’ And I said no. And he showed me. And I read it.”
He stopped. He was breathing like he’d run to my door.
“Mrs. Bell, I sat on this for four months. I didn’t know if I should come. I asked my sister, I asked my priest, I couldn’t, I couldn’t keep it. It belongs to you.”
He held the folded paper flatter against the storm door glass so I could see it through the mesh.
It was a piece of yellow legal-pad paper. Old. Creased along lines that had been folded and refolded a hundred times.
Daniel’s handwriting.
I hadn’t seen Daniel’s handwriting in almost two years and here it was pressed against my storm door in a stranger’s hand.
I opened the door.
I said, “What does it say?”
Marcus Hale looked at me and his eyes were wet and he said,
“I think you should read it yourself. But before you do, there’s something I have to tell you about who I am.”