The Time Keepers

Chapter 13

CHAPTER 13 Long Island, 1979

G RACE HANDED THE DINNER PLATES TO THE GIRLS TO SET the table.

“How was everyone’s day?” Tom asked as he stepped into the busy kitchen.

“I went up to the motherhouse today. It looks like they have their hands full up there,” Grace said as she arranged the chicken cutlets on a plate. “But it was good to see B?o.”

“Maybe we can we adopt him?” Molly asked. It was just like Molly to be concerned and want to strategize about ways to help a stranger. Although the youngest, she was the child who always took the lead in school with food drives, toy campaigns for needy families, or fundraisers for St. Jude. Katie scraped her dish noisily into the waste bin. “It doesn’t work like that, stupid. They have agencies that care for kids like that.”

“He has his aunt,” Grace reminded the children. “He doesn’t need to be adopted.” She was still trying to sort through her thoughts from the afternoon.

“But he can’t be happy at that place,” Molly insisted. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have run away.”

“It could be that he’s struggling in a new place. You can understand that, can’t you, honey?” She thought about her own experience in Bellegrove and Jack who lived above the store. Fitting in when others perceived you as an outsider was never easy.

Grace felt Tom’s warm hand suddenly on top of her own. “You’re not eating,” he said gently.

“I’m not hungry. I think I’m going to turn in early tonight. Are you heading back out to the store?”

“I was, but I can stay here if you’re not feeling well.”

“No, go on,” she said. “Please remind Jack he has a rain check for dinner.”

“I will,” he said and then kissed her on her head.

When Tom arrived at the store that evening, he found Jack in the back room repairing a 1960s Breguet chronograph watch. Hunched over the long wooden table, his hair longer than typical for a grown man, he held the open timepiece in one hand and a metal tweezer in the other. Hendrix, his black Labrador, slept comfortably at Jack’s feet, his slow and steady breathing adding yet another layer of calm to the room.

Jack only worked in the evenings, when the store was shuttered closed and no one could see him. He slept during the day upstairs in the apartment Tom rented out to him at a reduced rate and came down after the shop was closed and then worked into the night. The arrangement had benefited them both.

He had learned the trade quickly from Tom. First just simple work, like replacing quartz batteries, and then onto more complicated repairs like replacing worn out pinions and stripping gears. After a few years, he could do just about everything Tom could do. His presence had made life at the shop infinitely easier for Tom, who enjoyed being out in the front and chatting with customers, many of whom he had known for most of his life.

Now all Tom had to do was leave the various watches that needed repair tagged and placed in a small cardboard box on the workstation, and Jack would have them all finished by the morning. If Tom wanted to catch Jack and speak to him in person, he knew he had to stop by the store after hours.

They had met five years before, when Tom was visiting his father at the Veterans Affairs home. It was a chance meeting, the kind that can only happen on a bench in a place where the wounded outnumber the healed, in a meditative garden where the flowers were planted by retired veterans who had found peace through gardening and nurturing delicate blooms.

Tom had brought Harry to live at the VA home only a couple months before and was still struggling to deal with his father’s physical and mental decline, particularly after losing his mother to cancer two years earlier. After Harry had suffered more than a dozen episodes of becoming disoriented and unable to recognize Tom, he and Grace felt they had little choice but to make sure he received supervised care. And although they struggled to believe a man in his early sixties could be suffering from dementia, the doctors at the VA attributed the premature memory issues to head trauma they found in Harry’s medical records. The nursing home where they brought Harry sat behind the larger veterans hospital. A cultivated garden stretched between the two structures, its leafy green trees and shrubbery shielded from the street view.

There were no statues in the meditative garden, though from afar, certain figures seemed cut from stone. On a warm day, one could often see men in wheelchairs positioned by their nurses or loved ones in places where they could enjoy a little sun. Men with solemn faces. Some with a missing leg, others with a shirtsleeve pinned behind their back, and a few with eyes hidden by thick, dark glasses.

The first time Tom saw Jack sitting on the bench at the VA garden, he only saw his profile from the right side. Jack was a sturdy-looking man in his mid- to late twenties. He wore an olive-green army coat, jeans, and work boots. His dark curly hair was unruly and long. His head was bent over a magazine, the pages wavy and worn.

He was deep in his reading when Tom sat down next to him.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” he asked, hoping to spend a few minutes in the garden gathering his thoughts. His father had not recognized him when Tom came to visit that morning. Instead, he had called him “ Jimmy” over and over again and kept asking if the fire had been put out. This imagined fire in Harry’s head had been tormenting him for days. When Tom told him the fire had been extinguished, his paper-skinned hand, blue-veined and spotted, lifted up from beneath his bedsheets and cradled Tom’s face. He could still feel the lingering sensation of his father’s touch on his cheek.

Jack took a moment before he answered him, a beat before that flash of discovery he knew was coming. Tom would remember it always. He glanced at the worn magazine between Jack’s hands, with Bruce Springsteen on the cover.

“ Born to Run is such an incredible album.”

“Yeah.” Jack nodded. “Sure is.”

Tom began to hum a few bars of the title song, and Jack’s foot tapped on the grass as he joined in. Two strangers connected for a brief moment through a song’s lyrics.

When they finished, Jack lifted his head and turned to look at Tom.

His gaze was unexpected, shocking. Jack’s left eye was sealed shut. Half of his face was lost under a maze of angry red scars.

Tom fell silent.

He stared at Jack. His one sunken cheek appeared like a deflated balloon, a valley etched in trauma. The opposite side of his face was smooth, with one perfectly shaped brown iris, while the other eye was hardly visible. The lid was drooping, and a portion of his forehead was a dome of thick pink skin.

“I don’t mind, brother,” Jack said. “The question is, do you?”

Tom believed there were times in your life when you felt time moving in slow motion. These moments were rare, and Tom could count them on one hand, like the birth of his two girls or the death of his mother. Even the first time Grace had spoken to him at the mixer. His father had always said time couldn’t stand still, but in all of those instances, it felt to Tom like it had.

Now he felt as though he were in a painfully slow free fall. He didn’t want to look away from the man who was now facing him with so much pain sewn into his skin. But he also didn’t want the man to think he was staring at him either.

“I bought that record the week it came out,” he said, finally breaking the silence. “But you know what? ‘Born to Run’ isn’t even the best song on the album.…”

“Yeah.” Jack nodded. He looked straight ahead now. The wounded side of his face was no longer in full view. “It’s ‘Thunder Road,’” Jack said.

“Damn right.” Tom laughed.

They both started to sing the final verse of the lyrics.

Jack still had not reopened the magazine. One palm rested on the cover, five large fingers spread open like a fan. “You can sit here if you want.”

“Thanks,” Tom answered. “It’s been a long morning.” He sat down and stretched out his bum leg and massaged it.

“You here for that leg?”

Tom’s face grew warm. He always felt a wave of shame come over him whenever people thought his bad leg was from the war. “No … bad motorcycle accident. I shattered it in eight places.”

Jack’s eyes softened, and he reopened his magazine.

“Lucky you.” He said it like he meant it.

For the next few months, whenever Tom went to see his dad and if the weather was cooperative, he’d walk into the garden and see if Jack was there. He wasn’t always, but more often than not, Tom would find him there reading on the bench, just as he had seen him the first time, hunched over a magazine or a worn paperback, his army jacket covering his tall frame.

Sometimes Tom would comment on who was on the cover of the magazine; other times he found he had nothing to say except to remark a bit on the day’s temperature. But regardless, soon a familiarity emerged between them.

It struck Tom how the wounds of war could be so different between men. His father’s was internal. You would never know about his hauntings from what he had seen in Germany—unless you were his wife who slept next to him for forty years and heard his cries at night, or his son who now visited him and heard him lost in those memories, far more often than he wanted.

It would be five months before Tom eventually learned Jack’s story, when one morning Jack folded back the paperback novel he was reading and looked Tom straight in the face. Tom no longer recoiled when he saw the damaged skin or the sealed-shut eye. He saw a man finally able to unburden himself. Perhaps even more powerfully, he saw trust.