Dad had always looked young for his age. When he died, he looked nowhere near his 87
years. Occasionally Caroline commented
on that, or joked about his wandering away during commercials, or other things
he hated, like large family get-togethers, and always reappearing at exactly
the right moment.
“It's just your imagination.”
He would say to her.
When she was small, Caroline thought he had no imagination at
all. Always serious, he rarely smiled,
except at Mom. After she died, he became
even more grim. Caroline looked in on
him, even tried to take him from time to time.
He would have none of it.
He'd say he was tinkering in his workshop, but it was
increasingly difficult getting him to answer the door. Once, against his orders, she used her
emergency key to enter. Couldn't find
him anywhere.
“I was in the basement,” he claimed. “You search in the half-ass way you do
everything.”
She wasn't up for arguing, so she'd let it go. But he was wrong. She'd searched well, going into his workshop
for the first time since she was eight, and he's spanked her for touching some
piece of equipment. She saw things she
didn't understand. Things that made her
wonder what the old man was really up to.
Things that showed he did have an imagination after all.
As Caroline sorted his things, she found where those missing
minutes had gone. Wrapped in a soft,
thick cloth, inside a box in his workbench, she found the small blue glass
bottle. The simple handwritten label
read, “Time”.
She boxed up shelves full of his journals to bring home. She wanted to know how he'd done it, but
mostly, she needed to know what in the world to do with it.
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