Chapter 4 — The Watch Repair Shop That Doesn't Sell Time

Tùng appeared when Minh had just closed the secret compartment. He was tall, thin, with short hair, holding two cups of coffee and the look on his face of someone who had been driving for too long. His shirt was still wrinkled at the back, showing that he had just left the driver's seat without having time to stand up straight and rest. Lan introduced her younger brother with a nod. Tùng looked at Minh, then looked at the silver watch lying on the cloth, his eyes paused for a while as if trying to determine the price of an item he had never seen before.

Tùng placed two coffee cups on the edge of the table, careful to stay away from the tiny utensils lined up in a row. He'd had that habit since he was a child—always watching his hands near anything breakable, as if some carelessness had taught him to be wary of his own clumsiness. Lan remembers when she was a child, her younger brother once dropped his mother's vase and hid the broken piece under the cupboard for half a year, just so he wouldn't have to see her disappointed expression.

“What are you going to do with that?”

“Fix it.”

“No. I plan to reopen the matter about my father.”

Lan did not deny it. Tùng put the coffee cup down so hard that the plastic lid popped off. "I can't stand it again. The doctor told me not to get excited."

“Mom is losing her memory, not her right to know.”

"What's the point of knowing? Let me listen to a story and then go back to the city? The one who stays to take care of my mother is you."

Minh stepped back behind the counter, leaving the two sisters standing facing each other. Family arguments usually don't require a third person, but a room full of clocks makes the silence too audible. He pretended to be busy with an alarm clock that no one hired to fix, just to have a reason to bow his head and not have to witness the eyes of the two sisters gradually tightening like an over-stretched mainspring.

Lan holds Mr. Sáu's notebook. "Father didn't leave like we were told. He went with a girl named Hà Ly."

Tùng frowned, put down the coffee cup again, this time more slowly. “Who did you hear?”

“Miss Mai is at the station.”

“She is old, misremembering is normal.”

“She has the train ticket and the repair desk key.”

Tùng looked at the key, his face lost color. “Do you know that?”

"Not yet."

“So keep it that way.”

Lan laughed dryly. “You know about it too?”

"I know my mother once received a letter. I know she burned it. I don't know why."

“Why have you never asked?”

"Because at that time I was fifteen years old, I kept standing at the door waiting for my father. I saw my mother hiding her trembling hands under the table every day. Asking more would only make the house explode."

Lan looked at her younger brother. Tùng was only ten years old at that time, but in her memories, he was always the child hiding behind his mother. She never thought he might have seen more than her.

She tried to remember those evenings that year, when she was busy writing a diary about her own anger, Tùng sat quietly in the corner of the kitchen, watching her mother hide her shaking hands under the dining table. Perhaps each child in a broken family chooses a different way to survive: Lan chooses to scream with questions that no one answers, and Tùng chooses to silently observe and remember everything without speaking, as a way to keep himself safe in a disoriented home.

Minh brought two cups of coffee closer. “Waiting for others to tell the story for you is also a way to preserve the past, but not the only way.”

Tùng turned to him. “Who are you to advise?”

“A man waited twelve years to open his father's watch.”

The words made Tùng silent. Lan looked at Minh, seeing him reveal part of his story for the first time. Mr. Sáu's pocket watch was in the drawer near his hand, the back cover still had scratches.

“You lost your father too?” Lan asked.

“No. I lost the chance to talk to him.”

Minh told very little. His father was a railway electrician who died in an accident while Minh was learning the trade. Mr. Sáu's pocket watch stopped at 4:42 p.m. on the day Minh received the news. Mr. Sáu said to let it sleep, because there are times when people should not be woken up when they still don't know what they want to hear.

He remembered that afternoon so clearly that he didn't even had to try: the smell of engine oil in the workshop, the sound of the radio broadcasting the weather report, and Mr. Sáu's hand on his shoulder, heavy and firm like an unspoken promise. Minh was twenty years old at the time, had just been learning the trade for six months, and was still clumsy when holding a screwdriver. He cried in the back room, not because of the immediate pain, but because he realized he would never have the chance to ask his father the final question he had been cherishing: whether he was proud of his son's career choice. That question, like a pocket watch, was locked one afternoon and had never been opened since.

Tùng took a sip of cooled coffee. “Are you keeping anything else?”

“Maybe,” Lan said. “Miss Mai told her father to write a letter: ‘Don't wait for me at the train station.’”

Tùng stood up and walked around the counter. He opened his phone and showed Lan a screenshot. It was an old message on her mother's phone, saved from an unnamed number: "Hòa has arrived. Don't tell Lan until she grows up."

The message was sent the day his father went missing. The recipient was the mother, the sender was unknown because the number had been deleted. Tùng said he found it when he backed up his phone for his mother last year.

Lan felt her hands were cold. “I never said.”

"Because I will immediately go find the sender. Mom was just hospitalized at that time. I don't want the whole family to revolve around the name of someone who has disappeared."

“We have revolved around silence for fifteen years.”

Tùng did not reply. Outside the door, a motorbike honked its horn, the sound made the silver watch vibrate on the table. The second hand moved to 16:44 and then stopped.

Minh took a soft cloth and wiped the oil off the edge of the lid. "The clock runs an extra two minutes every time it hears new information. Maybe because the mainspring is loose, maybe because the person holding it is no longer trying to keep quiet."

Tùng looked at him with annoyed eyes but did not object. He offered to take Lan to the hospital. "Mom's awake. She's calling dad's name."

On the road, Lan sat in the back seat, her watch in her pocket. She looked out the glass window and saw the familiar street lamp posts from her childhood still standing in the same position, only the paint was peeling more. There's a strange feeling in returning to a place that hasn't changed much when you're completely different; it's like wearing an old shirt that fits well in the shoulders but is tight elsewhere.

Tùng drove over the slope, slower than usual. When he reached the corner near the station, he suddenly asked: "If father really saved one person, would you forgive him for leaving your mother?"

Lan did not answer immediately. She looked at the new houses growing around the old railway tracks, trying to find in them any trace of the town she once remembered. Tùng's question hung in the car like a heavy object that no one wanted to pick up first. "Forgiveness is not a calculation. Are you asking because you want me to forgive you or because you want to be allowed to hate?"

Tùng tightened his grip on the steering wheel. "I don't know."

At the hospital, Mrs. Hạnh was sleeping. On the bedside table there is a small wooden box with an open lid, inside is a silvered blue watch strap. Lan touched it, Mrs. Hạnh immediately opened her eyes.

“Hòa told me not to wait,” she said.

Lan bowed close. “Who are you going with?”

Mrs. Hạnh looked towards the window, her alertness only lasting a few seconds before fading away. “For someone whose name is not in the book.”

“Hà Ly?”

Mrs. Hạnh frowned, then shook her head. “Not my real name.”

Tùng walked over to hold his mother's hand, his fingers shaking slightly even though he tried to stay calm. Lan realized that this was probably the first time in many years that both sisters were standing at their mother's bedside without anyone pretending everything was okay. The fluorescent light on the ceiling of the hospital room cast a pale color on Mrs. Hạnh's face, making the wrinkles around her eyes appear more clearly than ever - traces of fifteen years of waiting that no one in the house had ever called by name.

Mrs. Hạnh looked at her two children, her lips moving: "I'm sorry. I promised to tell you when you were older."

Lan holds the green rope. “We are grown up.”

Mrs. Hạnh closed her eyes. “But time does not wait for promises.”

Lan sat by the bed after Tùng went out to call the doctor on duty. She watched her mother fall asleep, her breathing steady but shallow, and thought of all the evenings she used to sit by the window waiting for someone who never returned as promised. Perhaps Mrs. Hạnh had learned to live with half-truths all these years, not because she was weak, but because she believes that hiding was the only way to keep her children from having to carry a burden she once borne alone.

Minh was not at the hospital, but at the same time the pocket watch in his drawer opened by itself. Inside the lid was a piece of paper that Mr. Sáu hid under the felt: "If Lan comes back, please take her to the third chair on the platform."