The Hours Between Us

The first time Mara pushed open Theo Navarre’s door, the hallway sighed—old wood, beeswax, a trace of lemon from furniture polish that had seeped into the boards years before. On the entry table stood a forest of ticking: carriage clocks with filigree hands, brass pendulums that swung like breaths. She stood there a moment to find her own rhythm among them. A rim of light stood at the edge of the parlor where the curtains failed to meet.

“You knock like a woman who trusts doorways,” he called from inside, voice papery and amused. He was eighty-two, with hair the color of bleached rope and a cardigan buttoned at the wrong button. His hands, when she crossed and took them, were nicked along the knuckles and stained a permanent gray-blue from decades of oil and brass. His fingers moved as if they were always calibrating something, even when they lay quiet in hers.

She found the kitchen brighter than the rest of the house. Clean cups on the rack, a kettle dented at the lip, a pot of rosemary sulking on the sill. “Tea at nine, pills after,” he said, watching. He watched her move, not with suspicion but with a craftsman’s attention, like measuring tolerances.

“People’s hands,” he said, “tell me how they will hold a life.” She let that pass, though the words warmed something behind her sternum. The agency had a laminated checklist in her bag, but it was this small choreography that started the day: the angle at which he liked his toast, the careful unhurried pull of his razor as she steadied his jaw with two fingers, the way he leaned his head against the towel afterwards and sighed as if it were a confession. “You can learn to wind a spring by the tremor in your wrist,” he murmured, and Mara felt, for the first time in months, that she had arrived at work rather than at a place where time was consumed. As winter lengthened, she learned the house by its noises.

A longcase clock in the hall that drank in the afternoon light and exhaled a slow chime every half hour. A small tin alarm in the bedroom that refused to run right unless you scolded it. On good days, Theo set up at the parlor table with a magnifying loupe, his right eye a planet behind glass. On worse days, he hovered at the threshold of a doorway until Mara laid a hand on his back and said, “Come, and sit.” They built a ritual around the hours, because rituals are a way to make ordinary things into vows.

Three o’clock became the Ballroom—two steps and a pivot between stove and sink, his palm in hers, the kettle’s whistle their orchestra. She started bringing him poems, not because he had been a poet, but because he had the kind of listening that made words feel taken seriously. He would recite, halting and true, lines he remembered from his wife’s favorite book, then break off to ask if Mara had eaten lunch. One evening after the rain began late and went on as if it might never stop, the power went out.

The house swallowed itself, the clocks hushed as their weights wound down. Theo, unaided by the tick, seemed to sway slightly, like a mast finding the wind. Mara lit a candle she found in a drawer marked Christmas and put it on a plate. In that light the house was a different place—edges softened, dust turning into a galaxy.

“Can’t abide the dark,” Theo said, and his hand sought hers across the table. “Not since the old flat burned. We made it out, but the hallway was a tunnel of smoke, and the stair gave under my foot. I keep thinking if there had been one more light—” His thumb traced the notch of her wrist where a watch might have lived.

She hadn’t worn one for years. “I’ll be your light,” she said, the words arriving before she could weigh them. He laughed softly, then sobered, his eyes on their woven fingers. “You are,” he said, as if reporting a fact, and in the candled quiet the confession hung between them like a pendulum that had found its center.

The agency called two weeks later to say his hours would be cut. It was a Tuesday, lamb stew on the stove, Theo measuring salt with his fingertips. “We’ll make do,” he said, and then added, catching the look she tried to hide, “You have your rent, too, Mara. I am not a man who refuses generosity when I can give it.

Stay as much as you wish.” He folded a handkerchief with a precision that made the corners agree. “People like us,” he said, only half smiling, “we always think we can fix things by turning one more screw.” She wanted to say she was not his “people,” that she was twenty-nine and had moved through a sequence of rooms where nothing belonged to her, that she had quit school the year her mother left because it felt indecent to measure pulses for a living when she couldn’t bear the thought of her own. Instead, she slid a little closer on the bench and bumped his shoulder lightly, just enough to let him feel she was there. The pot on the stove burbled.

The clocks agreed on nothing but that time had a substance you could cook by. When he fell—between bed and bathroom, a hinge in his hip giving way—it was a quiet betrayal. He made no noise. She found him by the empty space at the table where his mug should have been.

The hospital smelled of antiseptic and winter. They put him in a curtained bay and tied a paper bracelet around his wrist as if to label the parts of the day he had left. When a nurse asked whether there was family to sign a consent, he nodded toward Mara, and when the nurse said, “We’ll need a legal relation,” he shrugged in the old way of men who had lived long enough to know some things did not become true by asking. His son arrived that evening, exhausted, his jacket too thin.

He considered Mara the way one considers a tool you hope is better than it looks. “He calls you his person,” the son said in the hall, and Mara felt the ladder of her spine reorganize itself. “I am,” she said, not because the law agreed, but because her hands could not argue with the way his fingers sought hers when he woke. He came home with a metal rod in his bone and a metronome in his pocket.

“It’s easier to hear than to trust,” he said, and asked her to wind the metronome and set it on the bedside table so the night would have a heartbeat again. They moved the mattress to the parlor where the light was kindest. She lifted spoons to his mouth, watched him lower his eyes to take them without embarrassment. She trimmed his beard with the concentration of someone working in a clock tower where a misstep could end the town’s hours.

“I have loved twice in one life,” he said one morning when the day had grown itself into a gentle hum. The sentence startled them both. The names arranged themselves in the air—the wife with paint on her forearms who had kissed him in a stairwell when they were young, and Mara, alive and unsanctioned, smoothing a crease in the sheet near his knee. “There are rules,” she said, the phrase catching.

He nodded, like someone adjusting a balance until the oscillations evened. “Rules about where the hands may touch,” he murmured. “But the clocks still play their music when the case stays closed.” He reached for her wrist again, and this time, she closed his fingers around her own pulse until his knuckles softened. Spring arrived like a decision the street had finally made.

The rosemary in the kitchen pushed out new needles. On the first mild day, she maneuvered him into the wheelchair, slipped a cardigan over his shoulders, and took him down the front steps one shallow rise at a time. They rode the slow sidewalks to the river. A dog barked.

That bakery he liked opened its yawning door and let out a gust of sugared air. They sat by the water and watched the bridge lift for a boat moving through. “I thought time was a machine I could learn to fix,” he said, eyes on the slow divide between one side of the river and the other. “Then I thought it was a thing that mended itself whether you wanted it or not.

Now I think—” He trailed off, his breath visible just barely above his collar. She tilted her head, waiting. “Now I think time is whatever happens between the two of us when you look at me like that.” There was no use pretending they hadn’t crossed into a new room. And yet the furniture in that room was modest: warm tea, a folded blanket, a vocabulary that fit inside of the day.

When he told her there were letters in the top drawer of his armoire, for a time that would come later, she did not argue. She taught him the names of the pigeons who nested on the neighbor’s cornice. He taught her to hear the difference between a clock that had stopped and one that had simply decided to rest. On his last birthday, the house filled with the smallest party in the city: a cake she baked from a recipe he dictated, the frosting uneven as riverlight; a paper crown she refused to put on because he looked better wearing it; the sound of rain commuting from one window to another.

He pressed something into her palm wrapped in a handkerchief. Inside lay a watchcase, plain except for the tiniest ripple in the metal where a crafter had let his hand slip and then corrected the mistake into beauty. “I started making this before the fall, not knowing what I was making it for,” he said. “There’s a thread of blue caught under the lacquer.

That will be our recklessness.” He asked her to set the time by pressing the crown until the second hand matched the flutter in her neck. She did, cheeks flushed, fully aware of the audacity of loving like this. He closed his eyes and listened as if the sound could thicken, could hold him up. In early summer, on a morning so clean with light it seemed ironed, he did not appear for breakfast.

She found him reclined with his mouth slightly open, the ceiling fan blessing the room with its slow weather. His hand lay on the coverlet, palm up, as if awaiting the next task. Her work did not stop; it shifted. She called the doctor, the son, the mortuary, the agency.

She opened the windows and washed the cups. In the hush before all those doors the day would open, she kissed his forehead, then pressed his folded fingers briefly to the inside of her wrist the way he had taught her. Later, after everyone who must enter had left and the house had no more strangers in it, she went to the armoire and took down the drawer he had built a lifetime ago with dovetail joints. There were letters—the wife’s, crisp and faded; a deed to the house; a printed note with her name in his blocky careful hand.

Inside the envelope was a map of the neighborhood sketched in pencil. Circles around places they had passed but not entered. “When you can’t hear me anymore,” he had written, “go there and listen.” At the top of the map a second envelope held a train ticket, dated open, to a town with a name she could not pronounce properly because he had always laughed when she tried. The week after, the house behaved like a stranger trying to be kind.

She slept on the parlor floor beside where the bed had been. The clocks, now wound by her, rang their hours as if they had finally agreed on something. She went to the bakery and listened to the dough knock against the wooden table three times as it fell from the baker’s hands. She sat on the bench by the river and asked the water whether it wanted anything from her.

At the hardware store, an old man pressed a thumb to the watch at her wrist and said, “He used to come every Tuesday for sandpaper. Said the fine grit was the only kind worth buying.” She bought two sheets of the fine grit and stood outside breathing in the faint scent of metal dust as if it could keep her near. At night she lay on the rug and wound the watch until its minute hand climbed into motion again. The blue thread winked under the lacquer, a risk that had set.

When she finally used the train ticket, the station smelled like oranges and rain. She held the map in one hand and the ridiculous paper crown in the other, because she had tucked it into her bag without meaning to. The seats were upholstered in a red that made the morning seem formal. The town she arrived in had a street of secondhand shops that did not pretend to be more than they were.

She found a park bench that matched the grain of the one by their river so closely she had to run her fingers along it to convince herself it was different. A boy rode by on a bicycle with playing cards clipped to the spokes so that the wheels made the sound of laughter. She did not expect the world to hand her a sign or even a gentler day, but the hours took her as if they had been waiting. She wrote a note and tucked it into the hem of her coat: “I will keep the tick.

I will be the light. I will let the rest be.” The promise felt neither grand nor small; it felt exact. In the months that followed, Mara returned to work with other elders and other kitchens and other clocks that needed coaxing into usefulness. Sometimes she wanted to close the case and hush the song; sometimes she pressed her wrist to a pulse and found Theo there, the way a tune lingers after you don’t remember the words.

Love made her a little less certain and a little more brave. She thought about school again, the kind with fluorescent lights and exam schedules, and she thought about the small hours in the houses of the living where someone needs someone to sit beside them until the fear reorganizes itself into something you can drink with breakfast. She never pretended that what they had could be repeated. It was not a model; it was a sound.

She wound the watch and set it, not to the official time, but to the beat that made her hands steady. On evenings when the light slants like honey across the floorboards and the rosemary throws its scent out like a dare, she sits at the parlor table—the same table, a different house—and lays out the map with its pencil circles. She has not been to all the places yet. That feels right.

You do not rush a clock; you let it keep the time it was built for and correct what can be corrected without breaking the tooth of a gear. Some days, in the thin space between the minute hand and the next minute, she can almost feel another palm against hers, guiding her into the Ballroom. “Two steps and a pivot,” she murmurs. The kettle agrees.

Somewhere, a boy’s wheel catches the light, and a river considers itself. The watch in her hand ticks on, immodestly present, and she decides again to stay exactly where she is until the next hour calls her to move.