The Clockmaker's Apprentice

I took the job at Brandt Clock Repair because it was the only place on Hollis Street that didn't make you talk to people. That's what I thought, anyway. I was seventeen and I'd already been fired from a frozen yogurt place for "attitude," which, okay, fair.

The sign in the window said APPRENTICE WANTED. STEADY HANDS. NO PHONE. Mrs. Brandt was about eighty and maybe five feet tall, with glasses on a chain and a magnifier strapped to her head like a miner's lamp. She looked at my hands for a long time. Didn't ask about school or experience or anything. Just held my wrists and watched my fingers.

"You bite your nails," she said.

"Sometimes."

"Stop. You'll need them." And that was the interview.

For the first month I didn't touch a single clock. I swept. I sorted screws into little glass jars by size, which is worse than it sounds, because some of those screws are smaller than a grain of rice and if you sneeze, that's it, they're gone forever. I learned the names of things. Escapement, mainspring, balance wheel. I learned that you never, ever blow on a movement to clean it, because your breath has water in it. She told me that the way other people tell you not to touch a hot stove.

What I couldn't figure out was the pricing.

There was no price list. When someone came in with a clock, Mrs. Brandt would take it, set it on the felt, and before she even opened the back she'd say the same thing every time.

"Who does it belong to?"

And people would tell her. That was the weird part. They'd just tell her. A grandfather clock that came over on a boat from Norway. A mantel clock somebody's parents got as a wedding present and fought over in the divorce. A cuckoo clock, which she hated, I could tell, but she listened anyway. Then she'd open it up, look inside, and say a number.

The numbers made no sense. A guy brought in a gold carriage clock, really nice, probably worth more than my mom's car, and she charged him four hundred dollars for a cleaning. The next day an old lady brought in a cheap brass alarm clock with a dent in it, needed almost the same work, and Mrs. Brandt charged her twenty.

After the old lady left I said, "That's not fair."

She didn't look up. "To who?"

"To the gold clock guy."

"The gold clock guy has three more like it at home and doesn't know what time any of them say." She tightened something with a screwdriver the size of a toothpick. "The alarm clock woke her husband up for forty-one years. He worked at the rail yard. He's been dead since spring and she still winds it every night."

"So you just charge based on how sad the story is?"

She finally looked at me, over the glasses. "No. I charge based on what it's worth."

I didn't get it. I told my friend Danny about it and he said she sounded like a scammer, a nice one, but still. I kind of agreed.

In February Mrs. Brandt slipped on the ice outside the post office and broke her hip.

Her nephew called the shop and told me she'd be in the hospital for at least two weeks, then rehab, and could I just put a sign on the door. I said sure. Then I hung up and looked at the shelf of clocks waiting to be picked up, and the shelf of clocks waiting to be fixed, and the little cards she tied to each one with string. Every card had a name, a phone number, and one line in her tiny slanted handwriting.

"Mother's. Stopped the week she died. Wants it running for the memorial."

"Bought with first paycheck, 1974."

"Daughter thinks it's ugly. He does not care."

I didn't put the sign up.

I want to be honest, I was not good at it. I could do the simple stuff by then, cleaning, oiling, swapping a broken mainspring if it was a common size. Anything harder I'd call her at the hospital, and she'd talk me through it from her bed while some nurse told her to hang up and rest, and she'd say, "I am resting, I'm lying down," and keep going.

I broke a balance staff on a German wall clock and had to order a new one and pay for it out of my own money. I lost one of the rice screws for real. I sneezed. She was right.

But mostly I got the clocks done, and people came in and picked them up, and then the pricing problem landed on me.

The first few, I just guessed. I'd look up what other shops charged and say a number. People paid. It felt normal. Fine.

Then a man came in around closing on a Thursday with a plastic kitchen clock. White, round, the kind you can buy at the grocery store for eight bucks. The second hand had come off and was rattling around inside behind the plastic cover.

"I know it's nothing," he said, before I said anything. "I know I could buy a new one."

I almost told him that. I almost said, honestly, man, just buy a new one, it's cheaper. And then I heard myself say, "Who does it belong to?"

He kind of laughed. Then he stood there for a second.

"My son learned to tell time on it," he said. "He's in the Navy now. We used to sit at the table and I'd move the hands with my finger and he'd yell out the time. He was terrible at it. He kept saying 'big hand on the four' like that was an answer." He rubbed his face. "He's coming home in March. I just want it working when he walks in, I guess. Stupid."

It took me eleven minutes. I popped the cover off, put the second hand back on its post, pressed it down, checked it went all the way round without catching. That was it.

When he asked how much, I said, "Nothing."

He tried to argue. I told him the boss would kill me if I charged for eleven minutes, which was a lie, I had no idea what she'd do. He left a ten on the counter anyway when I wasn't looking.

I wrote him a card. His name, his number. "Son learned to tell time on it. Home in March."

Mrs. Brandt came back in April with a walker that she clearly hated and immediately parked in the corner like it was a misbehaving dog. The first thing she did was go through the ledger, every card, every price. She read for about twenty minutes without saying a word. I stood there feeling like I was about to get fired again.

She got to the kitchen clock card and stopped. Tapped it.

"Ten dollars," she said.

"He left it. I told him it was free."

"Hm." She kept looking at it. Then she took her pen out and wrote something small at the bottom of the card, under my line, and handed it back to me.

It said: "Correct."

Then she put her magnifier on, pulled the next clock over on the felt, and said, without looking up, "Who does it belong to?" And it took me a second to realize she wasn't asking me about the clock. She was waiting for me to go get the card and read it to her.

So I did.

If you like stories about small shops and the people in them, you might enjoy The Lighthouse Keeper's Last Letter or What My Grandmother Knew About Bread. There's plenty more short fiction from new writers on VocalsMedia.