He said, “I had it appraised so I could insure it.” Then, when I didn’t answer, the rest came out: he’d taken it in June without asking, gotten the number — nineteen thousand dollars, more than any of us had ever guessed — and then he’d sat on that number for two months while his wedding costs ran past what he had. He hadn’t sold it. It was in a safe deposit box at his credit union, and he drove me there Monday morning and put it in my hand. But he’d thought about it. He admitted that at my table, out loud, in front of her: that he’d gotten as far as calling a dealer in Pittsburgh and asking what a private sale would look like.
She hadn’t known any of it. That’s what her face was doing when she looked at him first — not guilt, arithmetic. She’d been asking me about the watch for months because she thought the family history mattered, which it does, and she’d have been horrified to learn her wedding was being funded by it. She said one sentence at that table and then she went out to the car and sat there for an hour, and when she came back in she asked me what the wedding actually needed to be, and we cut about eleven thousand dollars out of it in ninety minutes at my kitchen counter.
They got married in October, at the church, with a lunch afterward in the parish hall, and it was the best wedding I’ve been to in twenty years. My son wore the watch. I put it on his wrist myself that morning and told him what his father told me in 1998, which is that it isn’t worth anything until the day you’d rather sell it than ask for help — and that if that day ever comes, you sell it, and you don’t apologize to a dead man about a wristwatch. He’s kept it. It’s in his safe now, not mine. He’s insured it, which was, in the end, the true part of what he said.
