Duncan Petty had spent thirty-one years restoring antique clocks, which meant he understood patience better than most men his age. At fifty-eight, he lived alone above his shop in a river town that smelled of diesel and fresh bread, and he liked his routines: coffee at six, the bench by seven, the slow tick of other people’s histories filling his days. He had a habit of talking to gears. He had a flaw, too—he assumed he knew how things worked, and that assumption had cost him a marriage twenty years back.
The clock arrived on a Tuesday, wrapped in a quilt and carried by a woman named Marisol Vega, who ran the taqueria two doors down. She was forty-four, with forearms like a line cook’s and a laugh that carried through walls. She set the clock on his counter and said her grandmother brought it from Oaxaca in 1961. It hadn’t run since the flood.
“Can you fix it?” she asked.
He opened the back. The movement was gummed with old oil and rust. “Six weeks,” he said. “Maybe eight.”
She leaned in to look, close enough that he caught the scent of lime and clean sweat. Her shoulder brushed his sleeve. “I’ll bring you dinner while you work,” she said. “You look like a man who forgets to eat.”
He didn’t argue. That was the first mistake, though he wouldn’t have called it one at the time.
The dinners started as containers left on the counter—mole, posole, tamales tied in corn husks. Then she began staying to watch him work. She’d pull a stool to the bench and sit with her knees nearly touching his, asking questions about escapements and mainsprings. Her eyes were dark and steady, and she had a way of holding his gaze a beat too long, until he’d look down at his tweezers and find his hands weren’t quite steady.
“You’re afraid of me,” she said one evening, teasing.
“I’m afraid of breaking this clock,” he said, which was a lie and they both knew it.
The trouble was the age gap and the neighborhood and the way her son, home from community college, looked at Duncan like he was a stray dog circling the kitchen. The trouble was also that Duncan had spent two decades deciding he was finished with wanting things. Desire at his age felt like a rumor—something that happened to other men in other towns. But there it was, arriving uninvited, humming in his chest like a wound spring.
One night in March, a storm knocked the power out. She came over with candles and a bottle of mezcal, and they sat on the floor of the shop while rain hammered the awning. The clock was nearly finished, its brass polished to a low glow. She reached over to steady a candle and her fingers landed on his wrist. Neither of them moved. He could hear her breathing, could feel the heat coming off her arm, could see the small scar on her thumb from a kitchen burn.
“Say something,” she said softly. “You’ve been quiet for a month.”
He should have said it was a bad idea. He should have mentioned the twenty years between them, the gossip, her son. Instead he said, “I’ve been trying to talk myself out of this since November, and I’m losing.”
She smiled, slow and sure. “Good.”
He kissed her then, carefully, like handling a delicate movement, and she laughed against his mouth and pulled him closer, and the rain covered the sound of everything else.
The gossip came, as gossip does. Her son didn’t speak to her for a week. A regular at the counter told Duncan he was a lucky old fool. But Marisol brought her chair to his bench each evening, and he taught her how to oil a pivot, her fingers clumsy and warm over his.
The clock chimed on a Sunday—clear, deep, sixty-three years of silence broken. She cried a little. He pretended not to notice. Then she took his hand and led him up the stairs, and he went, and the shop below kept ticking through the night like a heart that had decided to keep going.
