Barely Breathing

The problem with Marcus was that he had the face of a man who'd never once been told no and meant it. That kind of face. The kind that walks into a room and assumes the room's been waiting.

I noticed it the first time he came into the shop. Tuesday afternoon, dead hour, the time of day when the light through the front window turns everything the color of weak tea and I'm usually arguing with the receipt printer or thinking about lunch. He pushed the door open like he owned the hinges. Not arrogant exactly. Just certain. There's a difference, and I've spent enough time behind a counter to know it.

"Hey," he said. "Do you guys fix watches?"

I looked up from the display case I was rearranging. Cheap watches, mostly. The kind tourists buy when they've forgotten their good one at home and need something that tells time and doesn't embarrass them at dinner.

"We fix watches," I said.

"Great. Because my grandfather's watch stopped and I can't find anyone who'll touch it. It's old. Like, really old. The guy at the place on Fifth said it was too delicate, which I'm pretty sure is code for I don't know what I'm doing."

He set it on the counter. A thin gold thing, the band worn soft as fabric, the crystal scratched in a way that told a story about decades of use. I picked it up. Turned it over. The back was engraved with initials I couldn't quite make out and a date: 1962.

"This is nice," I said, and I meant it.

"Yeah." He shoved his hands in his pockets. "It was his. He died in March."

The way he said it, flat and quick, like he was stepping over a puddle. I knew that move. I'd done it myself, plenty of times. You say the thing fast so it doesn't have time to sit down and get comfortable in the room.

"I'll take a look," I said. "Might be the movement. Might just need a cleaning. Can you leave it?"

"Sure. How long?"

"A week. Maybe two."

"That's it?" He looked genuinely surprised. "The other guy said it might take months. Said he'd have to send it somewhere."

"The other guy was trying to get rid of you."

He laughed. A real one, not a polite counter laugh. It started somewhere in his chest and came out crooked, like he hadn't expected it either.

"I'm Marcus," he said.

"June."

"June." He nodded, like he was filing it away. "Okay. June. I'll be back in a week."

He was back in four days.

---

I should explain something about the shop. It's my uncle's. Was my uncle's. He left it to me when he died, which sounds generous until you realize what he actually left was a lease, a filing cabinet full of receipts from 2009, and a tax situation that took me six months to untangle. I was twenty then. I'm twenty now. Barely. The birthday was in January and I spent it eating ramen at the counter because I couldn't afford to close early.

So this is my life. Small shop, east side of downtown, sandwiched between a nail salon and a place that sells nothing but olive oil. The rent's cheap because the neighborhood's still deciding what it wants to be. I fix watches and clocks and sometimes jewelry, and I'm good at it. My uncle taught me. He used to say I had the hands for it, which was his way of saying I was patient and didn't rush, and that's most of what you need when you're working with things smaller than your fingernail.

Marcus came back on Saturday. I was in the back room with the door propped open, the radio playing something old, and I didn't hear him come in.

"Knock knock."

I turned. He was standing in the doorway, hands in his pockets again. He wore a jacket that looked too warm for the weather and jeans with a hole in one knee that might have been fashionable or might have just been a hole.

"You're early," I said.

"I know. I was in the neighborhood."

Nobody's in this neighborhood. That's the whole point of this neighborhood. But I didn't say that.

"I haven't finished it yet."

"That's okay. I wanted to see the place. If that's weird, tell me it's weird and I'll leave."

It was a little weird. People drop things off and leave. They don't come back to hang out. But I was the only one in the shop and the radio was playing a song I liked and there was something about the way he stood there, not quite comfortable, not quite leaving, that made me not want him to go.

"It's not weird," I said. "Just don't touch anything."

He grinned. "What happens if I touch something?"

"Nothing. I just don't want you to."

He laughed again. Same crooked sound. He had a good laugh, the kind that made you want to say something else funny just to hear it again.

He wandered around the front of the shop while I worked. Asked questions about the clocks on the wall. The big one with the pendulum, the little cuckoo that my uncle brought back from a trip to Germany in the nineties, the electric one that doesn't work and I keep meaning to fix.

"Where'd you learn this stuff?" he asked.

"My uncle."

"He teach you everything?"

"Most of it. The rest I learned by breaking things."

"Same way I learned to cook," he said.

"You cook?"

"I try. My specialty is pasta. My other specialty is setting off the smoke alarm."

I laughed that time. I could feel it happening, the way you feel a sneeze coming, and I didn't try to stop it.

---

He came back three more times before I finished the watch.

Not for any reason. That's what he said, anyway. He was in the neighborhood. He wanted to see if I'd made progress. He was bored. The last time he brought coffee, two cups, and set mine on the counter without asking how I took it.

"Black," he said. "Right?"

"How'd you know?"

"Lucky guess."

It wasn't a lucky guess. I'd told him the first time he came in, when he'd offered to grab something from the place next door and I'd said no thanks and then, after he'd turned to go, called out that I took it black if he was still offering. He'd remembered. That was something. I didn't know what kind of something yet, but it was something.

The watch took me nine days. The movement was gummed up, the way old things get when they've been sitting in a drawer for years. I cleaned it, oiled it, replaced a tiny spring that had rusted through. When I was done, it ticked steady and quiet, the second hand sweeping smooth. I held it to my ear. There's a sound old watches make, a heartbeat almost, and I always think about all the wrists it's been on, all the years it's counted. This one had counted sixty-some years. It had been on a man's wrist when he got married, probably. When he held his kids. When he sat in a chair at the end and waited.

I didn't know if I believed in any of that. But I believed in the watch. I believed it had been somewhere.

Marcus came in on Thursday to pick it up. I'd set it on a velvet pad, cleaned and polished, the gold catching the light.

He picked it up and put it on. It fit him. Of course it did.

"Wow," he said. "It's like it never stopped."

"It stopped. I just convinced it to start again."

He looked at me for a second longer than the sentence required. "How much do I owe you?"

I told him. He paid. He didn't leave.

"So," he said, "do you ever get out of here? Like, when the sun's up?"

"I've heard rumors."

"I'm asking if you want to get dinner sometime. Not like a thing. Just dinner."

"Not like a thing," I repeated.

"Right. Just two people eating food in a restaurant. Or a diner. Or wherever. I'm not picky."

I looked at him. At the watch on his wrist, ticking away. At his face, which was trying very hard to look casual and failing in a way I found almost unbearably charming.

"I close at six," I said. "On Fridays."

"Friday it is."

He left. The bell over the door jingled. I stood there for a minute, listening to the clocks. All of them ticking, none of them in sync, a room full of small mechanical hearts beating out of time.

I had no idea what I was doing. That was the thing. I'd spent the last year keeping everything exactly the same, holding the shop together, holding myself together, not letting anything in that might disrupt the careful order of things. And here was this man with his grandfather's watch and his crooked laugh and his coffee that he remembered how I took it, and I'd said yes.

I looked down at my hands. Steady. They were always steady.

I went back to work.