The Watch

The man had moved into the house ten years ago, and with him had arrived a cavalcade of rusting antique cars and aluminum trailers that squatted in the driveway and bared their windowless hulls to the street.

Ezekiel had started as an antiques dealer, but now he mostly bought underpriced gold from uninformed sellers online, then rode the train to Los Angeles and had the gold melted down to sell. And, of course, he looked for houses. He kept his eye on the pre-foreclosure list, refreshing the tab each morning to see if there were any homes in his neighborhood. Not many yet—the forbearance was still in effect—but they were coming.

Then, one morning, as Ezekiel sat down in front of his laptop and refreshed that same tired list, he saw it. And it was next door.

---

The lamp in the corner cast a wan, yellow light over Favi, who was bent over the oak table in the kitchen as she worked the numbers held in the little black book.

She’d always enjoyed paying bills. There was something satisfying about proving to the officious slips in the mail that they could pay. They owned a home in Southern California, which was more than most people could say. And certainly more than the rest of her family, who crammed into studio apartments and converted garages across Los Angeles, swatting roaches off the walls and working until their spines disintegrated.

Her husband had worked his way up from busboy to server, and she’d paid her way through beauty school. And afterwards, she and her varicose veins had scored a chair in a salon, and she brought home enough to pay the mortgage.

But that was before the pandemic.

Rafael’s restaurant was shut down. Her salon was shut down. The kids’ school was shut down.

“Mama?” Her daughter stood in the doorway to the kitchen.

“Go to bed, mija.”

“Why? So I can wake up in time for internet school?” Mabel snorted.

“Bed. Go.”

Instead, Mabel walked over to the table and sat down.

“Are we broke?” she asked.

Favi sighed and shut the book.

“Not your problem. You should be thinking about college and bicycles and...I don’t know, Menudo.”

“Menudo? Mom, it’s not the 80s.”

“I don’t discuss adult things with children. None of this is for you to worry about. We’ll be fine.”

Mabel hitched her thin legs onto the chair.

“I’m fifteen. Why don’t you do hair in the backyard? People would pay so much money. You know my friend Catharine? Her roots are like three inches long right now. It’s bad.”

Favi shook her head. “Because your friend Catharine would post about it on her social medias, and the next thing I know, people are knocking on my door and taking away my license. And they threatened big fines if we do that. I’m not gonna risk it. Go to bed.”

--

His dog had died three years ago, so he had to find excuses to walk past his neighbor’s house, which he now did obsessively. He would take the trash out and stare a beat too long at their front porch. The lawn was tidy, and the driveway didn’t have so much as an oil spot. Good roof, too. He’d already hoisted himself on an old paint can to look over the fence at their backyard. Smaller lot, but if he got a good deal on it, he’d make a killing later. Rent it out, maybe.

Occasionally, he’d spy their son sprawled over the back of the sofa at the living room window, peering back at Ezekiel as he eyed their house.

“Sorry, kid,” Ezekiel would say under his breath. “Nothing personal.”

--

Mabel pulled the wheeled ice chest over the sidewalk, avoiding the cracks as best she could. She wiped sweat away from her forehead and stopped in front of the man’s house, putting her mask back on. The long driveway was bumper-to-bumper junk cars and rusting RVs.

She’d gone around the block already and had avoided his house on the first trip, but now she unlatched the chainlink gate and rolled the ice chest down the cracked walkway. The door swung open after five knocks.

“Oh, hey.”

“You want any tamales?”

Ezekiel eyed the ice chest behind Mabel. His bushy eyebrows poked over the rim of his glasses.

“What kind?”

“Chicken, beef, or combo.”

“How much?”

“Five for $10.”

He sucked his teeth, thinking. “Can you do five for $8?”

Mabel laughed. “Dude, you can’t negotiate tamales.”

“Alright, fine.” He pulled his wallet out and began reluctantly counting the singles into her palm.

“Also, we’re gonna have a yard sale this weekend. Starts at 6, if you wanna come,” she said.

“You guys, uh...you doing ok over there?”

Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“Just with the pandemic and everything. Things are tight.”

“Have people been talking?” She handed him the tamales, then slammed the lid on the chest closed. “Because we’re fine. We’re just fine.”

She turned and yanked the ice chest back down the porch steps before he had a chance to respond.

--

He saw it right away.

Even under a tangle of rosaries and plastic necklaces, he knew what it was at once and did nothing. He’d already gauged the other people; there was no danger from them. An older Black woman interested in a mixer. A white hipster couple digging through the mound of clothing. A Hispanic mother examining a plastic bin of Legos.

He feigned interest in a plaster ashtray from the 80s.

“How much for this?” He held it up to his neighbor, who was sitting at a card table on her porch. He couldn’t remember her name–Rosa or something.

“A quarter.”

He set it back down, strolled on. Casual, so casual. The trick was to show nothing.

“And, uh, for this?” He held up the watch as if it were a soiled towel.

She scrunched her forehead together.

“Twenty dollars.”

He set it back down on the table. No one moved toward the watch. The Black woman paid for the mixer and left. He walked past a lawnmower. School supplies. Old coffee mugs and cheap porcelain angels. Back to the watch.

“Could you, uh, take 15? It’s broken.”

She considered a moment, then nodded. He slipped the watch into his pocket and counted out the bills for her.

“Where’d you get it?” he asked her.

“Belonged to my grandfather,” she answered.

“Oh, so it’s old then.”

“I guess,” she shrugged. He left as casually as he’d come, but with a nearly imperceptible tremble in his step.

He’d banged open his front door and raced inside, flinging his laptop open and typing furiously into the browser, preparing the listing. His hands shook as he took pictures of the watch—a top hat Patek Philippe from 1947. Crocodile leather strap, a solid 18K rose gold crown and caseback. Matching gold hands and a sub dial at the 6 o’clock. And it wasn’t broken: it just needed to be wound. It was a beauty, and aside from the dent in the band where that woman’s grandfather had worn it, it was flawless.

Fifteen minutes later it was sold, and the $20,000 hit his account.

--

That night, after the kids had gone to bed, Favi counted the money from the yard sale, scraped the change off the dining room table into her open palm, and sighed. Fifty-three dollars was so much and so nothing, all at once. It would pay for half the electricity bill, but there was still the mortgage to worry about, and they were $400 short on that. She looked around at what else they could sell. The sofa maybe. The television certainly. Not the laptop—the kids needed it for school.

The door to the garage opened and Raphael ambled in, carrying two styrofoam containers and cursing at the entry rug that had bunched up in front of the door.

“Throw that thing out. I’m gonna break my neck one of these days. How was the day, my heart?” He bent down and kissed her mouth, and she reached up to touch his cheek.

“We made $53.” She shrugged. “Not bad. Not good, but not bad.”

“Enchiladas,” he said, holding up the containers.

“Put them in the fridge for the kids’ lunches tomorrow. And come here.”

Raphael sat opposite her, and she took his hands in hers. “We need to start thinking about what to do,” she said, gently.

“We don’t lose the house, is what we do.”

“Maybe we sell.”

He began to protest, and she stopped him. “Hear me out. The houses are selling overnight. We don’t know how long this thing is going to last, and they won’t put off foreclosure forever. Even if it ended tomorrow, we have to pay back the months we missed. And we’re still paying off Mabel’s hospital bills. We can’t do it. I’d rather leave with dignity than be kicked out—” She caught herself before her voice cracked. Cleared her throat, then continued. “We can sell and take the money to buy a place somewhere else. Oklahoma. Nebraska.”

Raphael let go of her hands. “Do you remember what it took for us to get this?”

“I remember.”

“Fifteen years of saving, Faviola. Fifteen years of double shifts. We own a home in California. How many people can say that? And you want to walk away from this--from our sweat? From our children’s inheritance?”

“You think this is me? You think I want this?”

Raphael folded his arms and looked away. She could feel him shaking his right leg under the table, and he only did that when he was either near tears or near exploding.

“We stay,” he said finally.

She shook her head once. There was no more discussing it.

--

On big sales, he liked to cash the money out and stack it in piles on his coffee table.

“Good morning, twenty thousand dollars,” he’d say, sitting at the sofa with his morning tea. It was nice having it there, brimming with possibilities.

Of course, he knew he’d use it to buy the house next door when the forbearance was lifted. But it was nice to look at in the meantime.

Two weeks after he’d sold the watch, someone knocked at the door, and when he opened it, he found Mabel, wearing her mask. No ice chest this time.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi,” she shifted her weight. “Um, I was just wondering if you needed housework done or anything?”

He shook his head. “Nope. I’m good.”

“Or like...I could wash your cars?”

Ezekiel laughed. “You see them? Not in danger of being dirty.”

“I’ll work hard.”

He shook his head again.

“Look, remember how you asked me last time if we’re doing ok? Well, we’re not. And it’s just—it would really help if I could work for you somehow or if you knew someone…”

Her eyes started to well up, and she cleared her throat. “Or something like that.”

“No. I’m sorry,” he said, softly. He watched her walk down the sidewalk, her head hanging against her chest, and her shoulders dropped in defeat.

--

Back inside, he sat back down on the sofa in front of his stacks of money. It should have been the parents going door to door, he thought. They could sell their car or something if they needed to. Or ask their family for help.

Besides, you don’t sell family heirlooms. Unless you’re really desperate, a thought replied to him, unbidden.

They’d probably make quite a bit of money on their home once it was sold. He was doing them a favor. This was just how the world works.

He thought of the little boy who watched him from inside the house. Of the way Mabel walked back home. Of how hard it was to survive.

He sighed, then stood up to get a Manila envelope.