out of beat

The bell over the door was a real bell on a real spring, and it rang twice — once when she came in, and once when the door swung back and clipped her heel.

“Sorry,” she said.

“It does that to everyone.” He didn’t look up. He had a loupe screwed into his eye and he was doing something to something with a screwdriver the width of a hair. “Give it a minute.”

She gave it a minute. The shop smelled like oil and old paper. Behind him a wall of clocks ran at slightly different speeds, so the ticking never agreed with itself — a soft uneven rain of it, no two drops landing together.

“They’re not synchronized,” she said.

“No.” He set the screwdriver down and the loupe came out of his eye on a little stalk. “People expect that. They come in wanting them all to say tock at once. But they’re each keeping their own time. Lining them up would be a lie about what they are.” He held out his hand. “Let’s see it.”

She took the watch out of her bag. She’d wrapped it in a sock, which embarrassed her now, and she unwrapped it on the counter and slid it across. A man’s watch, steel, the crystal scratched to a fog, the strap cracked where it folded.

He picked it up the way you pick up a baby bird. Turned it over. Pressed the back, and it didn’t give, and he reached for a tool without looking and the back came off with a small sigh.

He was quiet for a while.

“Whose was it.”

“My grandfather’s. It stopped at the — well. It stopped.”

“At the funeral,” he said, not unkindly, finishing the thing she hadn’t. “They do that. Not magic. It was nearly run down already and nobody thought to wind it, and a watch that stops on the right day gets a reputation.” He angled the loupe back in. “Somebody’s been in here before me. See that.” Not a question. She leaned in and saw nothing, a tiny brass landscape. “Bridge screw, wrong one. Somebody fixed it once with what they had in a drawer. Did a bad job and a kind one.”

“Can you fix it?”

“I can do a lot of things.” He set it down. “What I can’t do is make it keep time. Not real time. The movement’s worn — here, and here — the pivots have gone oval where they want to be round, fifty years of turning. I could re-pivot it, re-bush the holes, new balance staff, the mainspring’s tired so that too, the crystal — and you’d have spent eight hundred pounds on a watch worth thirty, and it still wouldn’t be right, because right isn’t one part. It’s everything agreeing at once.”

“Oh,” she said.

“For two hundred I’ll put a new movement in his case. Runs to the second. Looks just like it. Nobody’d know.”

“His case but not his —“

“Not his anything, really. The case.”

She looked at the wall of clocks disagreeing with each other. “What’s the third option.”

He smiled at that — the first time. “There’s always a third one with you lot.” He picked the watch up again. “I clean it. Free it up, oil it, give it a spring. It’ll run. But it’ll run out of beat.”

“Which means.”

“A watch goes tick, tock. Two sounds, and they should sit even, spaced like a good heartbeat. Tick. Tock. That’s in beat. When the escapement’s worn the two halves stop being even. It goes tick-tock . . . tick-tock — limping, favoring one side. Gains a little, loses a little. You’d set it against the radio every few days. It won’t be right.” He put it down between them, the back still off, the small wheel inside it dead and waiting. “It’ll be running.”

“How long would it run.”

“Years, probably. Limping along, until the next thing wears through. Then it stops, and somebody decides whether to bother.” He shrugged. “So. The accurate one that isn’t his. Or his, out of beat.”

She didn’t take long.

“Out of beat,” she said.

“Course,” he said, and screwed the loupe back into his eye. “Come back Thursday.”

The bell rang once on her way out and then again behind her, and somewhere in the wall a clock said tock all by itself, a half-second after the rest, keeping its own time, and nobody in the shop thought a thing of it.