By the time Daniel reached the workshop, the rain had soaked through his coat and turned the cardboard box beneath his arm soft at the corners. He held it against his chest as he pushed open the door, hoping that the little brass clock inside had survived the journey better than its packaging.
Isaac looked up from his workbench. For a moment, neither man spoke. They had once spent nearly every Saturday in that room, taking apart radios that did not need fixing and drinking tea that Isaac always made too strong. Now Daniel came only when something was broken.
“It was my mother’s,” Daniel said, setting the box down. “It stopped last week.”
Isaac lifted out the clock, examined the winding key, and listened to its silent mechanism. Then he placed it beside a row of watches waiting for repair.
“I can look at it.”
Daniel had expected that answer. Isaac had always found room for one more repair, one more favour, one more person who needed him, even when the benches were full and the day was nearly over. It was one of the things Daniel admired about him, although lately he had found it difficult to say so.
Outside, water ran along the kerb in a steady brown stream. Daniel pulled off his wet coat and watched Isaac clear a space on the bench. He wanted to ask about Isaac’s wife and the new house they had been saving for, but their last conversation stood between them.
Three weeks earlier, Isaac had brought his van to help Daniel move the contents of his father’s flat. Daniel’s father had died in February, leaving behind two rooms crowded with books, old bills, chipped mugs and tools he had kept long after he could no longer use them. Daniel had underestimated the work. Isaac arrived at eight in the morning with blankets, boxes and a flask of coffee, then spent ten hours carrying furniture down three flights of stairs.
Near the end of the day, exhausted and raw from finding his father’s handwriting on every other scrap of paper, Daniel had snapped at him over a scratched table.
“You’re careless with things that belong to other people,” he had said.
Isaac set down his end of the table. The scratch was already there, a thin mark beneath the varnish that Daniel remembered from childhood. They both knew it, but Daniel was too angry to take back the accusation. Isaac finished loading the van and drove the furniture to storage. Before leaving, he put the keys in Daniel’s hand and said he would send the details of the unit in the morning.
He had done exactly that. Since then, their messages had contained addresses, opening hours and the briefest possible thanks.
At the workbench, Isaac eased the back from the clock. Daniel recognised the patient way he laid each screw on a square of cloth. He had learned that habit from Isaac when they were boys, back when taking apart a broken radio felt like an act of discovery.
“The spring might have gone,” Isaac said. “I won’t know until I’ve cleaned it.”
“I can pay you.”
“I know you can.”
Daniel looked at him, uncertain whether there was anything more to the reply. Isaac reached for a brush and began clearing dust from the mechanism.
Daniel had come prepared to apologise for the table, but seeing Isaac bent over his mother’s clock made the words harder to offer. A proper apology meant admitting what had happened that afternoon. He had watched a friend carry his father’s furniture for ten hours, then used the first sharp feeling he could find to wound him.
He pulled up a stool. “I’m sorry about the move.”
Isaac kept brushing dust into the cloth. “Which part?”
“What I said about the table. The scratch was already there.”
“I knew it was.”
Daniel waited while Isaac set down the brush.
“You could have told me you were upset,” Isaac said. “I would have understood that. I’d seen the flat, and I’d seen what it was costing you to empty it.”
“I was upset.”
“I know. I came because I knew.”
The rain struck the front window hard enough to blur the shops across the road. Daniel remembered Isaac carrying a box marked kitchen down the stairs, though it had been filled with books and was heavy enough to make him stop twice on the landing.
He remembered offering him the last of the coffee and Isaac declining because his hands were too dusty for the cup. At the time, Daniel had been counting the hours until they could leave. He had barely noticed how tired his friend was.
“My father was difficult,” Daniel said. “Everyone keeps telling me what a good man he was, and some days that makes me want to shout. Then I feel terrible, because he’s gone and there were good things too.”
Isaac nodded. He had known Daniel’s father since they were teenagers.
“You can tell me that,” he said.
“I should have told you. You were the one person there who might have understood.”
Isaac turned the clock over in his hands. “I missed him as well. He used to bring watches in and pretend they belonged to a neighbour because he didn’t want me refusing payment.”
Daniel laughed, surprised by the memory. His father had done the same thing with Daniel’s childhood shoes, taking them to a cobbler across town because he believed the local one was too proud to accept money from friends.
For a while they talked about him. Isaac remembered the time he had tried to repair a garden gate with a piece of wardrobe hinge. Daniel remembered how long the gate had lasted, and how pleased his father had been whenever somebody used it. Neither man tried to make him easier to remember than he had been.
Isaac worked on the clock as they spoke. Beneath the back plate he found a strand of thread caught around a wheel, perhaps left there during an earlier repair. He lifted it free with tweezers, cleaned the teeth, and wound the key. The clock gave a hesitant tick, stopped, then began again.
Daniel leaned closer. His mother had kept it on the mantelpiece for as long as he could remember. After she died, his father had wound it each Sunday morning, no matter how poorly it kept time. Hearing it now brought back the sound of her calling him downstairs for dinner.
“That was all it needed?” Daniel asked.
“It still needs cleaning properly. Leave it with me until Friday.”
Daniel reached for his coat, then stopped. “I’ve been angry with you too.”
Isaac raised an eyebrow. “I thought you might have been.”
“When I called you after Dad died, you told me what to do about the flat. You gave me the number for the solicitor, told me which papers to find, and asked whether I’d contacted the storage place. I wanted you to ask how I was.”
Isaac rested his hands on the edge of the bench. “I’m sorry. I thought the practical things would help.”
“They did help. I needed all of them.” Daniel rubbed his thumb along a seam in the coat. “I needed you to sit with me for a bit as well.”
“I should have asked.”
Daniel felt some of the strain leave his shoulders. For weeks he had been treating Isaac’s help as proof that he ought to feel grateful all the time, and treating his disappointment as something shameful.
Sitting beside him, he could see how much trouble that had caused. He could thank Isaac for the van and the solicitor’s number, apologise for the insult, and still tell him what he had needed from his friend.
Isaac reached into the cupboard beneath the bench and brought out two mugs. “The kettle’s already hot.”
They drank tea among the clocks and watches while the rain eased outside. Isaac told him that the house purchase had fallen through in August and that he and Mara were looking again, though she had grown tired of spending her evenings studying floor plans.
Daniel asked whether they needed help clearing the garage before their next viewing. Isaac said they did, and this time they put a date in their phones before either of them could forget.
On Friday, Daniel returned for the clock. Isaac had polished the brass rim and fitted a new piece of glass where the old one had a crack. Daniel protested when he saw it.
“The glass was expensive,” he said.
“It was nine pounds.”
“Then let me pay for the glass.”
Isaac wrote out a receipt with the repair and the glass listed separately. Daniel paid the full amount, and Isaac accepted it. They had spent too many years letting generosity turn into a contest over who was allowed to give.
That evening, Daniel placed the clock on the shelf in his kitchen. It kept time through dinner and continued ticking after he went to bed. On Saturday morning, before setting out to help Isaac clear the garage, he called his sister and told her about their father’s gate.
She remembered it at once. She also remembered their father coming home furious when a neighbour suggested replacing the hinge, because he had been so proud of making it work. Daniel laughed with her, then told her he had finally collected their mother’s clock.
After the call, he stood for a moment with his hand on the kitchen shelf. In the weeks after the funeral, he had wanted someone to carry more than boxes. Isaac had tried, using the tools he had at hand, and Daniel had hurt him for failing to know what he had never said aloud.
There would be other days when they misunderstood each other. Daniel knew how readily he reached for blame when grief left him tired, and Isaac would still sometimes answer an aching question with a useful phone number. They had known each other long enough to recognise those habits. Now they had said enough to make room for something better.
Daniel picked up his car keys and headed for the door. Isaac would be waiting at the garage with a list of jobs, a kettle, and more boxes than either of them had agreed to move. Daniel intended to stay until the last one was done.
