I was standing in Kevin Marsh’s kitchen holding a beer I hadn’t touched when I saw her across the room – my ex-wife, Donna – and the man beside her was wearing MY FATHER’S WATCH.

Not one like it. The same one. The scratch on the bezel where my dad dropped it on a boat dock in 1994. I’d know it anywhere.

We’d been divorced four years and I still thought about that watch every single day, because Donna told me it was GONE – stolen out of our car the summer before we split.

The Summer She Said It Was Stolen

I remember the week she said it happened. August, three years into our marriage. I’d left the watch in the center console – stupid, I know – and when I got back to the car after a concert, the window was smashed and the watch was gone.

Donna was with me. She saw the broken glass. She held me while I stood on that sidewalk and cried like a kid, because that watch was all I had left of my dad.

I filed a police report. The officer’s name was Tran – I still have the case number in my phone.

A few months after the theft, things between Donna and me started going quiet. Not fighting-quiet. Disappearing-quiet. She worked late. She was tired. I told myself it was grief – her mom had just gotten sick.

The divorce papers came eight months later. She said she’d fallen out of love. I believed her.

What My Dad’s Watch Actually Was

My father died in March of 2001. Pancreatic cancer. Six weeks from diagnosis to gone, which is how that particular cancer works, and which is still, twenty-plus years later, something I have not fully processed.

He wasn’t a watch guy. That’s what makes it strange. He wore it exactly three times that I know of – my parents’ anniversary dinner, my high school graduation, and the day he drove me to college and stood in a parking lot in Carbondale, Illinois, and shook my hand because he didn’t know how to hug. The watch was a Seiko. Nothing special. He bought it at a department store sometime in the late eighties. After he died, my mother pressed it into my hand and said, “He’d want you to have this.”

I wore it every day for two years. Then I started being paranoid about losing it, so I kept it in the console. Carried it with me without wearing it. Stupid, like I said.

The scratch on the bezel happened in ’94 when he was cleaning his boat – a fourteen-foot aluminum thing he kept on a lake near Peoria. The watch slipped off his wrist and skipped across the dock and he swore, which he almost never did, and picked it up and checked the face and said, “Good. Still runs.” That was my dad in one sentence.

I know that scratch the way I know my own handwriting.

Kevin’s Living Room, 9:47 PM

The man with the watch laughed at something, and his sleeve pulled back another inch.

I went completely still.

He was maybe forty-five. Good-looking in a generic way, the kind of guy who coaches youth soccer and drives a Tahoe. He was laughing at something Kevin’s wife had said. He had a nice laugh. His hand was on Donna’s back.

Donna looked up and our eyes met across Kevin’s living room. Something moved across her face. Not guilt. Panic.

I crossed the room before I decided to. “Where did you get that?”

The man looked down at his wrist. Then at Donna. Then back at me.

Donna put her hand on his arm. “Greg, don’t.”

He looked at me anyway and said, “She gave it to me. Said it belonged to her father.”

The beer was still in my hand. I set it on the nearest surface without looking.

“Her father’s alive,” I said. “He lives in Scottsdale. He plays golf three times a week.”

Greg looked at Donna.

Donna’s mouth was doing something – opening and closing slightly, like she was running through options and discarding them. I’d watched her do that exact thing during arguments, during hard conversations, in the car when she was lost and didn’t want to admit it. I knew that look. I knew every version of that look.

She said, “Can we not do this here.”

Not a question. A direction.

“Donna.” My voice came out flat and strange. “That’s my father’s watch.”

What Happened Next, Which I’m Still Not Sure I Believe

Kevin appeared at my elbow, which was both useful and terrible. He’s a good guy, Kevin. We’ve been friends since we were nineteen. He read the room in about four seconds and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, let’s step outside.”

“I’m not – I’m fine,” I said, which was not true.

Greg unclasped the watch. Just like that. No argument, no posturing. He held it out to me and said, “I didn’t know. I swear to God I didn’t know.”

And I believed him. That was the thing. He had the face of a man who’d just realized he was standing in the middle of something much older and much worse than he’d understood, and he wanted out of it cleanly. I couldn’t blame him. I’d have done the same.

I took the watch.

The metal was warm from his wrist. I turned it over. The scratch was there, right where it always was, a thin diagonal line across the lower left of the bezel.

Donna hadn’t moved. She was holding her wine glass with both hands, and she was looking at a spot somewhere around my collarbone, not at my face.

“How long have you had it,” I said.

She didn’t answer.

“Donna. How long.”

“Since before the concert,” she said. Quiet. Almost inaudible.

I had to replay that twice before I understood what she meant.

The Part That Took Me a While to Work Out

She’d taken it before the concert. Before the broken window. Before the police report and Officer Tran and the case number I still have in my phone.

She’d smashed the window herself, or she’d had someone do it, and she’d stood on that sidewalk and held me while I cried, and she’d already had the watch.

I don’t know why. I’ve spent a lot of time on that question since Kevin’s party and I still don’t have a clean answer. The therapist I started seeing in January – a guy named Paul, very straightforward, no nonsense – says the why is less important than I think it is. That the brain wants a reason because reasons make things manageable. He’s probably right. I hate that he’s probably right.

What I think, when I let myself think about it: she was already leaving. Not in her mind yet, maybe, but in some other part of her. And she wanted something of mine that she could keep. Or she wanted to hurt me in a way I couldn’t trace back to her. Or she was just doing a thing and didn’t think hard enough about what it meant.

I don’t know. I really don’t.

What I know is that she kept it for four years. Through the divorce, through whatever happened between the divorce and Greg, she kept it. And then she gave it to a man and told him it had belonged to her father.

Greg

I felt sorry for Greg, which surprised me.

He called me three days after the party. Got my number from Kevin. He said he was sorry, that if he’d known he never would have accepted it, that he hoped I understood he had no part in any of it.

I told him I knew that. I told him it wasn’t his problem.

He said, “She told me a whole story about her dad. About him giving it to her before he passed.” He paused. “I thought it was one of the reasons she trusted me. That she’d share something like that.”

I didn’t say anything to that.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. And then, “She does that. Tells you a version of things. I’m starting to understand that now.”

We talked for maybe fifteen minutes. I’ll probably never speak to him again. But I think he’s going to be okay.

The Watch, Now

It’s on my wrist as I’m writing this.

I wore it to my nephew’s birthday party last weekend. My sister saw it and stopped mid-sentence and just stared. She said, “Is that Dad’s?” I said yeah. She said, “Where did you find it?” I said it’s a long story.

She grabbed my wrist and looked at the scratch and her eyes went wet and she laughed, which is the Kowalski family response to most things that are too big to handle any other way.

My dad would have hated all of this. The drama, the party confrontation, me writing about it somewhere on the internet. He was a private man. He fixed his own gutters and didn’t talk about his feelings and thought most problems could be solved by sleeping on them.

But he also drove four hours to Carbondale to help me move into a dorm room, and he shook my hand in that parking lot, and he wore this watch to my graduation. And when it slipped off his wrist on that dock in 1994, the first thing he checked was whether it still ran.

It does. Still runs.

—

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For more tales of shocking encounters, check out My Ex Walked In With His New Girlfriend Wearing My Dead Mother’s Earrings or read about the chilling discovery in I Opened the Envelope. Then I Looked Out My Front Window.. You might also be intrigued by the mysterious patient in My Patient in Bed Four Pulled Out a Badge and Asked Me to Name the Other Victims.