It was a grandfather clock, built by my father’s father in the 1950s,
tall and dark-wooded and precise in the particular way of things made
by hand by someone who understood what they were doing. My grandfather
had been a cabinetmaker in Portugal before emigrating. The clock was
the last significant thing he made before his hands became too unsteady
to continue. My father had kept it his entire adult life, moving it
from apartment to apartment across three decades with a care that bordered
on the ceremonial, and he had told both of us, at various points and in
various ways, that it would go to me.
Not because I had asked for it. Because he said so.
Marcus had asked for it many times. My father had said no many times, in
the patient and slightly weary way he said no to Marcus about most things,
which had not stopped Marcus from asking and would not, apparently,
stop him from acting now that my father was no longer in a position to say no again.
I found out about the locksmith from my cousin Elena, who had heard it from Marcus’s wife,
who had mentioned it without understanding she was mentioning something I did not know.
I was sitting in my father’s apartment when Elena called,
surrounded by the specific quiet of a place whose primary resident had recently left it,
sorting through condolence cards that had arrived faster
than I had expected because my father had known more people than I had realized.
I put the phone down and sat for a moment.
Then I called my father’s attorney.
The attorney’s name was Frances Obi. She had represented my father
for twelve years and she answered my call on the second ring, which
told me she had been expecting to hear from someone in the family soon.
I explained what I had learned about the storage unit. She was quiet for a moment.
“Your father updated his will eight months ago. The clock is specifically named.
It goes to you.”— Frances Obi
“Marcus doesn’t know about the update,” I said.
“It’s possible he knows about the previous version and assumes it’s still current.”
“What was in the previous version?”
A brief pause. “The clock was not specifically named in the previous version.
It would have fallen under general personal property, which was divided equally.”
I understood then. Marcus had known about a version of the will in which the clock
was not specifically assigned to me.
He had moved before the will was read because he believed, based on information that
was eight months out of date,
that speed would give him an advantage that the document would not.
“Can you send a notice to the storage facility?” I asked.
“Already drafting it,” Frances said.
She had, it turned out, already been in contact with the storage facility that
morning — not because she had known about Marcus specifically but because she had,
in twelve years of representing my father, developed an understanding of his family
dynamics that had prompted her to act preventively. The facility had been notified
that the estate was in active probate and that no items could be removed without
written authorization from the executor, which was me.
Marcus arrived at the storage unit that afternoon with a locksmith and a rented
truck and found a facility manager waiting for him with a printed copy of the attorney’s
notice and a polite but absolute refusal to open the unit.
I know this because the facility manager called me to confirm the situation had been
resolved, which was the first I heard that it had been a situation at all.
Marcus called me that evening. He was not apologetic and I had not expected him to be,
because Marcus in the wrong had never been an apologetic person — he had always moved
through the world with the specific confidence of someone who believed that initiative
absolved intention, that acting first was its own form of being right.
He told me I was being territorial. He told me the clock had sentimental value to him
that I could not understand because I had not been as close to our grandfather as he had been.
He told me that Dad had always intended for the estate to be divided fairly and that my insistence
on the clock was selfish given everything else I was receiving.
I let him finish.
Then I said, “Dad updated his will in March. The clock is specifically named. I’ll have
Frances send you a copy of the relevant section.”
Silence.
“He updated it,” Marcus said finally.
“Yes.”
“When did he — why would he—”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He didn’t tell me he was doing it. I found out when I called Frances.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
“He always said it would be divided fairly.”— Marcus
“He divided it the way he wanted to. That’s what a will is.”
Marcus ended the call without saying goodbye, which was something he had done since we were
children whenever a conversation ended in a way he had not controlled.
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I sat for a while in the quiet of my father’s apartment. The condolence cards were still on
the table. Outside, the evening was doing what evenings do in November in Los Angeles —
cooling quickly and going a particular shade of blue that I had always liked and that my
father had always said made the city look like somewhere it was not.
I thought about the clock. About my grandfather making it with hands that would later become
too unsteady to continue. About my father moving it from apartment to apartment with ceremonial care.
About Marcus arriving at a storage unit with a locksmith and a rented truck and finding a piece of
paper waiting for him instead of an open door.
I thought about my father updating his will in March, eight months before he died, without telling
either of us. Naming the clock specifically. Making sure there was no ambiguity.
He had known. He had known what Marcus would do, or something like it, and he had made sure the
document said what he meant clearly enough that no amount of initiative could outrun it.
That was so like him that I almost laughed. My father had been a quiet man who settled things in
advance and said very little about having done so.
The will was read ten days later. Marcus attended with a lawyer of his own, which I had expected,
and which turned out to be unnecessary because there was nothing to contest — the document was clear,
recently updated, properly witnessed, and exactly what Frances had described. The clock
was mine. The rest of the estate was divided as my father had arranged, which was careful
and fair in the way he had been careful and fair about most things, and which gave Marcus no
legitimate grounds for complaint even if it gave him plenty of emotional ones.
He did not speak to me at the reading. He left with his lawyer before I did. His wife
gave me a look on the way out that I read as sympathetic, which surprised me, and which
I chose to accept at face value because I was too tired for alternative interpretations.
The clock was collected from the storage unit the following week. I hired two men who
knew what they were doing — it is a large clock and fragile in the specific ways that
old handmade things are fragile — and they moved it to my apartment with a care that
I appreciated and that I think my grandfather would have appreciated too.
It stands now in the corner of my living room near the window. It keeps excellent time.
The sound it makes on the hour is lower than I expected and more resonant, the kind of
sound that seems to come from inside the room rather than from the clock itself, as if
the room has absorbed it over the decades and learned to produce it independently.
My daughter, who is seven, has named it Gerald. I have not corrected this. Gerald seems
like a reasonable name for a clock built by a man named Manuel who made it with his hands
in the 1950s and who I never met but whose work I look at every day.
Marcus and I have spoken twice since the will was read. Both conversations were brief and
concerned practical matters — the sale of my father’s apartment, the closing of a joint
account. We were civil. We did not discuss the clock or the storage unit or the locksmith
or the rented truck. I do not know whether we will eventually discuss those things or
whether they will simply become part of the geography of our relationship, a feature that
is always there and that we navigate around without naming it.
I have been thinking about what my father knew and when he knew it. About why he updated
the will in March and named the clock specifically without telling me he had done so.
I think he understood something about Marcus that he had never said plainly — that Marcus’s
relationship with the clock was not about the clock. It was about being chosen. About being
the one our grandfather’s hands had worked toward, even though the clock was not made for
either of us and our grandfather died before either of us was old enough to be chosen for anything.
My father could not give Marcus what Marcus wanted, which was a retroactive
preference in someone else’s love. What he could do — and what he did, quietly,
in March, without fanfare — was make sure that the thing he had decided
to give me could not be taken before I knew I had it.
That is a very particular kind of love. The kind that operates in advance.
The kind that anticipates what will happen and makes arrangements accordingly,
not because it distrusts but because it understands. The kind that
does not announce itself but is simply there, in the document, with the signature,
waiting to be needed.
Gerald strikes the hour every hour. I am getting used to the sound.
Some evenings I sit near the window and listen to it and think about the hands that
made it and the hands that moved it and the document that made sure it arrived where
it was supposed to arrive.
And I think about my father, who settled things in advance and said very little about
having done so. Who knew what he knew. Who made sure the document said what he meant.
That was the inheritance, I think. Not the clock. The way of handling things.
I am trying to learn it.
�THE END.�
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