The Watch in the Toolbox

My uncle Pete didn't leave me much. That's not me being bitter, it's just true. He left my mom the house and my cousin the truck and he left me a toolbox, which honestly was kind of a joke between us, because I can't fix anything. I once tried to put up a shelf and ended up paying a guy to fix the wall. So when Mom dropped the toolbox off, I didn't even open it for like two weeks. It sat in the hallway and I kept tripping over it. Finally on a Sunday I had nothing going on, which is most Sundays, and I figured I'd at least sort it out and maybe sell the good stuff. It was mostly what you'd expect. Wrenches. A level with the bubble gone cloudy. A coffee can full of screws that didn't match anything. But at the bottom, under a rag, there was a watch. It wasn't a nice watch. I want to be honest about that because in movies it would have been gold and glowing or whatever. This one was just an old steel wristwatch, scratched up, with a leather band gone hard and cracked. It had stopped. The hands sat at 6:14 and didn't move when I shook it. There was a little paper tag tied to it with string, and Pete's handwriting, which I knew because he wrote like he was angry at the pen. The tag said: WIND BACKWARDS ONLY. And then under that, smaller: I MEAN IT MARCUS. Which, okay. Creepy. But also very Pete. He liked a bit. He once wrapped a single AA battery for my birthday and made me act surprised. So I did the thing the tag said not to do. Obviously. Who reads "wind backwards only" and doesn't immediately wind it forwards? I pinched the little crown on the side and I turned it forward, toward the future, like a normal person winding a normal watch. Nothing happened. The hands moved, 6:14 to 6:15, and then they stuck again, and I felt stupid for the small jump my heart had done. Then I turned it backward. Just to undo it, really. Just to put it back to 6:14 where Pete had left it. And the light changed. That's the only way I can describe it. I was sitting on my hallway floor at like four in the afternoon with the watch in my hand, and when I turned the crown backward one click, the light in the hallway slid. The window light went from that flat late-afternoon color back to the brighter, higher color it has around two o'clock. And the coffee can of screws, which I had just tipped out onto the floor, was back in the toolbox. Sealed. Like I hadn't touched it. I sat there for a long time. I'm not going to pretend I was brave about it. I think I said "okay" out loud about nine times. Then I looked at my phone and the phone said 2:09 PM and I distinctly remembered it being almost four, because I'd thought, when I started, that I should hurry up if I wanted to get the toolbox done before dinner. I had wound the watch back one click. And the day had gone back with it. About two hours, give or take. Here is the thing I want you to understand about me before this story really gets going, because later on I do some things that probably look dumb from the outside. I was twenty-six. I worked in a call center confirming people's dentist appointments. I had not, in my entire adult life, had a single thing happen to me that I would describe as interesting. And I was sitting on my hallway floor holding a machine that could take back the last two hours of my life. So I did not think about rules. I did not think about Pete's tag, even though it was literally still tied to the watch, even though it literally said I MEAN IT MARCUS. I thought: I can fix things now. I thought: I can finally not be a person things just happen to. I was wrong about basically all of it. But that Sunday, on the floor, I just turned the crown back one more click, and watched the light slide, and grinned like an idiot at an empty hallway.