Nestled in the innermost corner of a humble workshop on Brunswick street sat the young Italian hunched over on an aged workbench, littered with a menagerie of gears and screws. Messy, prematurely grayed hair obstructed his view of quivering hands meticulously assembling his latest handicraft. The perennial clock beside him, a remnant of his father’s career, mocked him with every tick. Unsolicited memories of fighter jets and the firing of artillery inundated his thoughts, haunting him, killing him inside. He vividly remembered the face of the young, innocent German, no older than eight, as if he had seen it mere hours ago. Surely there was no way 11 years had gone by.

“Don’t do it, Vince. Don’t do it. He’s just’a kid.” God, how he wished he’d listened.
* * *

Vincent stared at the white linoleum floors, tears welled up in his brown, wrinkled eyes, lacking any words to say. After all, what does one say to a dying man? He couldn’t bring himself to look at the portly, bald figure whose once-rosy cheeks had faded to a pale white, whose bustling laugh which had once been able to shake the room and the hearts of everyone in it had become a hacking cough, and all within a few weeks’ time.

“Is all’a part’a life, my son,” He mumbled, barely mustering enough force to make the words escape his dry lips. “I know it’s the Lord’s time for me, an’ when your time comes, you’ll know too.” With that, his eyelids fluttered, and a moment later the heart monitor’s steady, comforting beat was replaced by an ominous yet tranquil drone. Vince didn’t cry. Hell, a decade ago he’d witnessed guys in his regiment go down, twelve bullets through their body, and never once did he shed a tear. The war had turned the man into a monster who now sat silently in a hard metal chair beside his deceased father’s hospital bed. The cross around his old man’s neck reminded him he should probably be saying a prayer, but Vince was never one for praying and besides, what is there to pray about when your Pop is dead, anyways? He stayed there for hours, watching the lifeless body. His scarce white hair, creased, pale face, thick mustache. The hospital bracelet around his wrist read Adessi, Giovanni, and right above it he wore his treasured watch, gold plated with fine leather straps. Vince turned his head abruptly at the knock on the door; the nurse, an obnoxiously jubilant young woman in a long white skirt, subtly reminded him that visitor hours were over and surely he would want to head home and be with family at a time like this.

“Family,” he thought. “Hell, what family?” As he shut the door behind him, he considered what an awful coincidence it was that the watch he had crafted for Pop as a 60th birthday present, just a few years earlier, had stopped ticking at 3:49, the precise moment the man was declared dead.

Vince resented how unceremoniously the Earth kept spinning after he left the hospital. The man had given this country the best 40 years of his life, yet it seemed like everyone in Newark carried on with no more than a brief sigh at the obituary in the paper, save for a few elderly customers who stopped by the shop to pay their respects. The cremation was held the following week, though there befell an unexpected snowstorm which left a foot of snow covering the streets of Jersey. Vince and his son Marcos were the only ones who attended the cremation. He’d sent letters to the family back in Italy, but as he’d suspected, they hardly remembered old Giovanni, and certainly none of them could afford a passage to America. Marcos was fifteen, and he hadn’t known much about Granpa except for that he was nearly as crazy as his father, who he only visited two weekends a month. He had no interest in watching an old dead guy be burned, but his mother dropped him off, not out of pity for Vince, but rather because she felt sorry for the old watchmaker, leaving this earth without anyone to mourn him. After the service, Vince reminisced with Marcos about Pop and worried about what would become of the business without him. While waiting for Marcos’ mother to arrive and pick him up, he asked the boy yet again whether he was interested in carrying on the family business someday, to which he responded with a fabricated smile and a “Maybe, Dad.”.

Vince drove himself home through the harrowing blizzard with a silver urn in the backseat of his ‘53 Chevy. He climbed the rickety metal staircase in the back room of the workshop to the cramped studio apartment overheard. Carefully, he placed the urn on the top shelf of the bookcase in the living room and splayed his coat onto an armchair. Tomorrow is another day, he thought, and another day, another dollar.

Over time, the Giovanni & Vincent Adessi Watch Company became simply Adessi Watch Co.. Work was slow, but then again, it had been that way since the war.
“An’ besides,” Pop’s words echoed through Vince’s mind, “This ain’ Italy. These Americans just don’ buy handmade watches like they used’ta.” There was still the occasional customer, however. The miserly Jew, for instance, who had purchased a watch from his pal Giovanni before Vince was even born, forty-odd years ago, but still bought it in for repairs every now and then, or the fat cats who would commission delicate, silver gifts for their wives. The watchmaker’s days became weary and monotonous. Within the tiny, windowless back room of the shop he would, ironically, lose track of time, often laboring over a timepiece well into the night. The only solace in his life came every other weekend, when Marcos would come to the shop. Vince would teach him all about the gears and coils in his handiwork and the best kinds of leather to assemble watch bands with, and for a moment he could swear he saw a sliver of interest in his son’s eyes. Vince still held onto the hope that he would someday take his place as the owner of Adessi Watch Co.. After all, there had to be a reason Marcos seldom took off the engraved watch that he’d helped his father and Granpa craft on his fifteenth birthday.
* * *

A year had passed since Giovanni’s death, and still there never passed a day that he didn’t cross Vince’s mind. It had become torturous for him to inhabit Pop’s workshop, sit in the same worn leather chair the man had sat in, use the same tools he’d brought over from Venice. Yet he kept laboring away for the sake of continuing the man’s legacy. One evening at closing time, he searched for the key to the shop in the cluttered drawer beneath the cash register. As he rustled around scraps of paper and spare screws, he caught a glimpse of a small, wrinkled paper that seemed to have his father’s handwriting on it. Intrigued, he unfolded it, revealing a letter written by Giovanni, three weeks before his passing.

Its words shook Vince, bewildered him, paralyzed him. He couldn’t believe it - no, he didn’t want to believe it. He tried to dismiss the note as simply the product of his father’s elderly, incapacitated mind, a fabricated lie to help him cope with his imminent death, but in reality he knew every word was true.

These past forty years making watches, I knew that they were unique. I knew there must have been some reason I devoted my life to this, wasting away my own time to help others keep track of theirs. I now realize what makes them special. Part of me wishes I didn’t have to tell you, but we have a gift, Vincent. Adessi watches do not simply display the time, but rather, they control it, in a way. Each watch is a ticking time bomb. Eventually, the watch stops, and regardless of whether or not its being worn at the time, the Universe makes it so that the owner’s life stops as well. However, you can not allow this to inhibit you from continuing the business. I know I’ll be gone soon. I’m leaving it up to you to find the reason behind all this. Don’t fear the watches’ power; embrace it.

Vince wanted nothing more than to tear off his watch, dismantle it, throw its components into the ocean. He regretted every sale he’d ever made. There was no telling how many deaths he’d been indirectly responsible for, and how many hundreds of Jersey citizens were still awaiting their impending demise. He was seconds away from speeding to his ex-wife’s house and ripping Marcos’ watch off his wrist, though he knew it would be futile. Suddenly, he was hit with a memory of last winter. How stupid he was to think that the stopped watch was just a coincidence. 3:49. He’d never forget those numbers. He was the one who had constructed that watch. He had killed his father. He resented the fact that he could practically control time, but he couldn't go back five minutes and toss the letter aside, erase the knowledge from his memory. Pop’s words echoed through Vince’s mind.

“Is all’a part’a life, my son.”