“Put that dirty cloth away.” In a shop with glass display counters and a view over the water, a woman in navy confronts a bearded older man wearing a cap and a red checked shirt. He holds a pale cloth in both hands. “It belongs to your father,” he tells her.
“Stop inventing stories.”
“He lost it at the lake.”
“Leave the premises.” The man opens the cloth slightly while she continues pointing at him. Another woman, dressed in blue, approaches from behind. The clip ends before the contents are clearly identified or the second woman explains why she has come forward.
The story continues:
The woman in blue recognized the cloth before she saw the watch inside it. “That’s the handkerchief he keeps in his fishing box.”
Her daughter turned. “Mum?”
The older man laid the bundle on the counter. “I found your father’s watch on the landing. Wrapped it in this so the face wouldn’t get scratched.”
For years, the daughter’s father had visited the same wooden landing every Sunday. Since his hands began shaking, he’d stopped wearing the watch while he baited his hook. Usually he put it in a pocket. This time he’d forgotten.
The man who found it was called George. They fished near each other often, although neither had ever learned the other’s surname. He knew the watch belonged to the fellow whose daughter ran the shop on the corner. That had seemed enough information to get it home.
The daughter looked at the watch. Its leather strap had a crooked extra hole punched in it. She’d made that hole with her father when she was twelve, after promising she could do it neatly.
“Is he still at the lake?”
“He went home worried he’d lost it in the water.”
She reached for her phone. Her father answered before the second ring. When she told him, he went quiet. Then he asked whether George was still there.
“Put him on, love. I owe him a cup of tea.”
She handed over the phone. Listening to the two men discuss who had caught what, she realized how confidently she’d spoken about a stranger whose place in her father’s life she knew nothing about.
When George finished, she apologized. “You came here to help him. I wouldn’t even look.”
He folded the handkerchief. “He’ll be glad to have this back too. Says it’s lucky.”
That Sunday she drove her father to the lake and stayed for the tea. George brought three mugs in a carrier. Her father wore the recovered watch, fastening it through the crooked hole because, he said, it fitted perfectly.
She sat between them listening to an argument about the weather that apparently began before she was born. At noon her father asked if she was bored. She shook her head. For once she had stopped long enough to meet the people who shared the parts of his life she usually only heard about on the phone.
