The Man I Met on the Redeye to Denver Was Wearing My Dead Husband’s Watch

Part 1

The man in the aisle seat was wearing my dead husband’s watch.

I noticed it when he reached up to close the overhead bin. A Hamilton Khaki Field, brown leather strap gone dark at the edges, the twelve rubbed almost smooth from Daniel’s thumb. Daniel had a nervous habit of pressing the crystal when he was thinking.

I told myself there were a million of them. Hamilton sold thousands. The strap wear meant nothing. Lots of men press the face of their watch.

Then he sat down and I saw the scratch.

A short diagonal scar across the four, from the summer Daniel dropped it off our roof trying to fix the gutter. He’d been so proud he caught it before it hit the driveway. He’d shown me the scratch like it was a battle wound. *Look, honey. Now she’s got character.*

I couldn’t breathe.

“You okay?” the man asked. He had a soft voice, Midwestern, mid-forties, kind eyes behind wire frames. He was holding out one of those little airline napkins like I was about to cry into it.

I was, actually. But not for the reason he thought.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just, I saw your watch. My husband had one like it.”

He glanced down at his wrist. His face did something complicated. “Oh. Yeah. It’s, it was a gift.”

“From who?”

He blinked at me. It was a weird question from a stranger on a red-eye. I could hear how weird it was. But I could also see the scratch, and my hands had started to shake in my lap.

“From a guy I used to work with,” he said carefully. “Why do you ask?”

“What was his name?”

“Ma’am.”

“Please. What was his name?”

He looked at me for a long time. The plane was dark. Everyone around us was asleep or wearing headphones. Somewhere behind us a baby made a small sound and stopped.

“His name was Daniel,” he said. “Daniel Weiss.”

The overhead lights dimmed further. I felt them dim. I felt everything in my chest go very slow and very cold, the way it had gone slow and cold two years ago in the emergency room in Boulder when a doctor with a clipboard told me my husband hadn’t made it out of surgery.

Daniel Weiss. My husband. Who died on a Tuesday afternoon in April. Whose watch had been in a plastic bag with his wallet and his wedding ring when the nurse handed me his things.

Whose watch was in the top drawer of my dresser at home in Denver. I had checked it before I left for this trip. I always checked before I traveled. It was a thing I did.

“That’s not possible,” I said.

The man, whose name I didn’t know yet, set the napkin down on his tray table very slowly, like he was afraid of startling me.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding. The Daniel I knew didn’t have a wife. He, he wasn’t married.”

I laughed. It came out wrong, high and thin, and the woman across the aisle shifted in her sleep.

“We were married for eleven years,” I said. “I have pictures. I have a mortgage. I have his mother’s phone number in my phone and I call her on his birthday every year and she cries.”

“Ma’am.”

“Don’t ma’am me. What kind of a person are you? Is this a joke? Did somebody put you up to this?”

He held up both hands. The watch face caught the reading light and the scratch was right there, a little diagonal line at the four, and I wanted to reach across the armrest and grab his wrist and rip it off him.

“I’m going to show you something,” he said. “Please don’t scream.”

He pulled out his phone. He tapped through it slowly, like a man defusing something. Then he turned the screen toward me.

It was a photograph. Two men on a porch somewhere with mountains behind them. One of them had his arm around the other. Both of them were laughing at whatever the person taking the picture had just said.

The man on the left was the man sitting next to me. Younger, but him.

The man on the right was my husband.

He was wearing a wedding ring. He was wearing the watch. And on the third finger of his left hand, tucked against the other man’s shoulder, was a second gold band I had never seen before in my life.

—