The Watch

I stole the watch because I could.

No. Let me start over.

I stole that watch because it needed stealing. The old man’s smugness and rage, paired with his piggy eyes, made me want to set his house on fire. He would never suspect me. Or maybe he would, but I had a whole one-act play planned for that option, which would leave him looking bad in front of everyone who knew him.

He’s a bad person. His presence has always felt rancid and evil to me. In old photographs he’s holding a tiny, bald version of me, in beribboned dresses, and I can’t remember that far back, but just a year or so later I’m beaming next to him and I can physically recall the desire to be loved, the desire for this grandfather to be like my other one—the one who, when we visited every summer, would find me every night before bed so that he could do the sign of the cross on my forehead and wish me sweet dreams. The one who got down on the floor to play with me, even though he was incredibly old—his youngest son, my father, born when he was 52.

But physics don’t work that way, and this other grandfather, the one who seemed to love no one at all, continued to make the hair stand up on the back of my neck. He made the grown-ups, his daughters, go flat and limp, and he made their husbands try to take deep breaths, finding only shallow ones instead.

I hated the way he sucked all the air out of the room, the way he seemed to circle, waiting for his chance to strike, for one of the weaker ones to make a small mistake, say something silly. He demanded respect. He demanded obedience. I saw all of this, long before I knew about what he’d done to his daughters, his teenage sister-in-law, his wife. To the woman across the street. To the girls in the factories his family owned.

So yeah, I took it. I smashed its face in with a hammer and hid it in a small box inside a larger box of pencils and stickers, and stuck the whole thing under my bed, way back in the corner. And the following Sunday, I put it under one of the pine trees in his front yard, dusting it with soil and pine needles.

Someone asked him, over the menudo we were there for every week after Mass, if he’d found the watch yet. He answered, frustrated. He said he knew one of his younger daughters had misplaced it. Careless cows, he called them. They stared silently into their bowls.

After breakfast he went out for a walk, and when he came back he was weirdly quiet. He said he was tired and was going to lie down for a bit. He had no orders for any of us, no cutting remarks disguised as jokes. He just left the room. After a bit, we could hear him snoring. He was still sleeping when we got ready to leave. I checked under the tree and the watch was gone.

He never said anything about it again.