The Man Who Bought My Late Husband’s Watch at the Estate Sale Came Back Nine Months Later

Part 2: What Was Inside the Watch

I let him into my kitchen.

I don’t know why. Kelly would have killed me. You do not let strange men into your house at almost seven at night, even in Millersburg where nothing happens, even when they’re holding your dead husband’s handwriting.

But he had kind eyes. And he was crying a little, and men don’t cry easily on strangers’ porches unless something is very true.

I pointed at the kitchen table. He sat. I stayed standing on the other side of the counter because I wasn’t ready to be at eye level with him yet.

“Coffee?” I said.

“Please.”

I made coffee I wasn’t going to drink. My hands needed something to do.

He set the folded paper on the table between us but he didn’t push it toward me yet. He put both hands flat on either side of it, like he was steadying it. Or himself.

“My wife’s name was Elena,” he said.

I noticed the tense before I noticed the name.

“She passed in February of last year. Six months before I came to your sale.”

I didn’t say I’m sorry. Widows don’t say I’m sorry to widowers. We do a different thing, we nod, we let the sentence sit.

He nodded back like he understood.

“She had a stroke,” he said. “She was thirty-nine. We had a daughter, Nora. She’s four now.”

The car seat. My brain filed it, weirdly calm.

“I was, I wasn’t doing well last August,” he said. “I was driving around a lot. I don’t know if you do that. Just driving. So you don’t have to be in the house.”

“I do that,” I said.

“I saw your sign on Cherry Street. I don’t even collect anything. I don’t wear watches. I just needed somewhere to be that wasn’t my kitchen.”

He looked up at me.

“And then I picked up your husband’s watch and I saw the engraving on the back. For our anniversary. Love always, R. And I thought, someone in this driveway had a person. And that person is gone. And she is standing right here trying to sell what’s left of him for ninety dollars.”

His voice cracked on the ninety dollars.

“I couldn’t leave it there. I couldn’t let someone else buy it who wouldn’t know. That sounds crazy. I know that sounds crazy.”

“It doesn’t,” I said. Because it didn’t.

The coffee maker beeped. I ignored it.

“I wore it a few times,” he said. “Not out. Just in the house. It felt, I don’t know. It felt like keeping company. Then the crown got loose in November and I took it to Hoffman’s on Main.”

“I know Hoffman’s.”

“Mr. Hoffman opened it up and called me the next day and said, ‘Marcus, there’s a note folded up behind the movement. Do you want me to leave it there?’ And I said no, take it out, that isn’t mine.”

He finally slid the paper across the table.

“I read it. I’m not going to lie to you and say I didn’t. I read it because I thought maybe it was mine to read, since I’d bought the watch. That was wrong. I knew it was wrong the second I finished it.”

I looked at the paper. I didn’t touch it yet.

“Why did you wait four months, Marcus?”

He put his face in his hands.

“Because,” he said, into his hands, “because of what it says. And because once I gave it to you, I knew I couldn’t ever come back. And I, I liked knowing you existed. I liked knowing there was another person in this town who understood what my mornings feel like. I didn’t want to give that up.”

He looked up.

“That’s the truth. That’s the ugly truth. I sat on a note that belongs to you because I was lonely and I liked pretending I was your friend.”

Nobody had said anything that honest to me in almost two years.

I sat down across from him. I unfolded the paper.

Daniel’s handwriting. Blue ballpoint. The kind of tight, cramped letters he used when he was writing something he didn’t want anybody to see. I know that handwriting because I’ve seen it on grocery lists and Post-its stuck to the microwave for eighteen years.

Rach,

If you’re reading this you found the watch or somebody did and I owe you the truth I was too much of a coward to say out loud.

I have been sick for a while. Dr. Patel says probably six months. I haven’t told you because you would spend six months watching me die and I want six months of you looking at me like I’m still your husband.

Forgive me. Or don’t. I understand either way.

The other thing. The account at Farmers & Merchants under my mother’s maiden name. Foster. It’s not what you think. I didn’t hide it from you to keep it. I hid it because I wanted you to find it after and know you’d be all right. Forty-one thousand dollars, Rach. For the house. For whatever comes next.

I love you more than I ever figured out how to say.

Take the watch off before you cry on it.

Daniel

I read it twice.

The kitchen had gone very quiet, the kind of quiet where you can hear the refrigerator hum and your own pulse in your ears.

Daniel had died of a heart attack. Not cancer. Not something a Dr. Patel would have been counting down. A heart attack in the driveway on a Tuesday morning in September, no warning, no six months, no goodbye.

I looked up at Marcus.

“Daniel didn’t die of anything Dr. Patel could have predicted.”

“I know,” Marcus said quietly. “I looked.”

“You looked?”

“I googled the obituary. I’m sorry. I wanted to know if the timing matched what he wrote.”

“It doesn’t.”

“No. It doesn’t.”

I put the paper down on the kitchen table between us like it was something that might jump.

“So he was going to leave me,” I said.

Marcus didn’t answer.

“He wrote a goodbye letter and hid it in a watch and he was going to leave me and something killed him first. That’s what this is.”

Marcus said, very carefully, “Rachel. I don’t think that’s what this is.”

I looked at him.

“I’ve read that letter maybe a hundred times in four months,” he said. “I’ve read it in my kitchen at two in the morning. I don’t think it’s a goodbye letter to leave you. I think it’s a goodbye letter to die on you.”

“Then why lie about the reason?”

“Because he was going to.”

“Going to what?”

Marcus took a breath.

“I asked Mr. Hoffman when he thought that note was placed in the watch. Based on the wear on the paper, the way it was folded to fit. He said probably a couple of years old. Maybe more.”

“Daniel died last September.”

“I know.”

“He wrote that letter years before he died?”

“I think so.”

“That doesn’t make any sense, Marcus.”

Marcus reached into his shirt pocket. He set something on the table next to the letter.

It was Daniel’s watch.

“I’m giving it back,” he said. “I should have done that first. I don’t know why I didn’t. I think I wanted an excuse to still be here.”

I stared at the watch.

“There’s one more thing,” he said. “And I really am sorry. But I think you should know.”

“What.”

“When Mr. Hoffman opened the watch, there wasn’t just the letter.”

He reached into his pocket again.

He set a small, folded photograph on the table.

“He gave me this too. I didn’t know what to do with it. I’ve been carrying it around for four months, Rachel. I’m going to leave it here and I’m going to leave your house. I don’t think I should be the one who’s with you when you look at it.”

He stood up.

“My number is on the back of the letter if you ever want to talk. Or not. I understand not.”

He walked to the door.

I said, “Marcus.”

He stopped.

“Thank you for not throwing it away.”

He nodded without turning around and he let himself out.

I sat at my kitchen table with my hand on the folded photograph and I did not open it for a very long time.