At 6:48 on a Tuesday morning in September, Gene Dvorak stood at the kitchen window of the house on Birch Lane in Ashby, Wisconsin, with his hands folded behind his back, the way a man stands in a church he doesn’t belong to.
The kitchen was quiet. The coffeemaker was off. The oven was cold. Nobody had cracked an egg or sliced a loaf of bread. There was nothing on the stove, and there would not be anything on the stove until long after seven. The only sounds were the tick of the wall clock over the door and the faint hum of the refrigerator, and somewhere outside, a robin working at the birdbath in the gray light.
I had come up from the guest room at 6:40 because I could not sleep. I stood in the doorway in my socks and watched him wait.
“Morning, Renée,” he said without turning around.
“Morning, Gene.”
On the windowsill above the sink sat the timer. It was about the size of a coffee mug, made of polished brass gone warm and soft with age, with a round white dial marked in black numerals and a silver bell perched on top like a small hat. Lorraine’s grandmother had brought it from a boarding house in Duluth in 1921, the family said, and it had kept time in four different kitchens since. The paint on the dial’s edge was chipped in two places, where it had been knocked against the same stone sink for decades.
Lorraine sat at the table with her back to the window. Her coffee cup was in front of her, full, and steam was no longer rising from it. She had come home from the rehabilitation center in Eau Claire eight days earlier, and she still moved carefully, her right arm resting in her lap, her right hand curled loosely against her thigh. The left hand was the one she used now. It lay on the table beside the cup, steady and slow, and it did not move.
She was watching the clock over the door.
At 6:50, Gene crossed the kitchen in three steps, lifted the timer from the sill, and turned the key in its base until it clicked three times. He set the dial to ten. He placed the timer back on the windowsill, exactly where it had been, and then he stepped back and folded his hands behind him again.
Nobody said anything.
The clock ticked. The robin flew away from the birdbath. Somewhere upstairs, a floorboard creaked, and I heard the bathroom tap run for half a second and stop.
At 6:58, Lorraine’s left hand closed slowly around her coffee cup, lifted it, and drank.
At 7:00 exactly, the bell rang.
It was not loud, not sharp, not the sound of an alarm. It was a bright, clean double note, the kind of bell you hear across a railway platform. It rang for about four seconds and died away into the room, and then the kitchen was quiet again.
Gene turned from the window, looked at his wife, and nodded once, the way a man nods at a stranger who has done him a small favor.
Lorraine set down her cup.
“Same time tomorrow,” she said.
Then she reached for the newspaper with her good hand and began to read the obituaries.
Part 2
I first heard about the timer in the spring of 2007, during my first dinner at the Dvorak house. I was twenty-five, dating their son Paul for four months, and I had brought a bottle of cheap red wine and a nervous laugh. Lorraine had made pot roast. Gene had carved it. Paul’s sister Carol had talked the whole meal about her dental practice, and Paul’s little brother had talked about baseball, and nobody had talked about the clock.
It was after dinner, while I was drying dishes beside the sink, that Carol leaned over and whispered, “Watch the windowsill at seven tomorrow morning.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.” She grinned. “Everybody does, eventually.”
I did not see it that night. I saw it the next morning, when I came down at 6:45 in a borrowed sweatshirt and found Lorraine standing at the windowsill with the brass timer in her hand, winding the key with a sharp, deliberate click. She did not look at me. She set it on the sill and went back to the stove, where she was making eggs for nobody.
At seven, it rang.
I stood there with my mouth open, waiting for someone to explain. Nobody did. Lorraine ate her eggs. Gene read the sports page. Carol rolled her eyes at me across the table.
It was years before I learned the rest. The timer belonged to Lorraine’s grandmother, Anna Dahl, who had kept a boarding house on Superior Street. The timer had been her tool for timing bread and laundry and the boiling of eggs for twenty-two boarders. Lorraine had inherited it in 1974, when Anna died, and she had kept it on her own windowsill ever since, through two marriages and four children and more kitchens than anyone bothered to count.
The rest of the family had counted, though. The Dvorak women kept a running joke about the timer, and the Dvorak men pretended not to notice it. Carol had a spreadsheet on her laptop titled THE BELL, with columns for date, location, and the time the timer rang. She had logged it in her own kitchen, her mother’s kitchen, and two places she called “anomalies,” a hotel in Duluth and a rest stop outside Rhinelander.
In 2008, Paul and I drove to a conference in Duluth, and Lorraine came along because she did not like to be left at home. We stayed at a hotel on Lake Avenue, room 412, on the fourth floor, with a view of the parking lot and a sliver of gray water beyond it. Lorraine unpacked a small paper bag from her suitcase, and out came the brass timer, wrapped in a tea towel.
“You brought that?” Paul said.
“I bring it everywhere,” Lorraine said.
She set it on the nightstand. She wound it at 6:50 the next morning, while Paul slept and the hotel’s air conditioner rattled in the window, and at seven, it rang in room 412 with a sound that carried into the hallway. The housekeeper, a young woman with a cart full of towels, stopped outside the door, looked in, and said, “Oh, it’s a bell,” as if she had been told a secret.
That was when Paul asked his mother what she was timing.
We were sitting on the edge of the hotel bed. Lorraine was buttoning her blouse. She looked at her son for a long moment, then smiled, very slightly.
“Nothing yet,” she said.
Paul laughed uneasily, and Lorraine turned away to the mirror and began to fix her hair.
I did not understand that answer for almost a decade. But I remember how she said it. Not like a joke, and not like a puzzle to be solved, but like a promise she intended to keep.
Part 3
The timer rang at the hospital too.
In the spring of 2014, when our son Owen was born at Lakeview Medical Center, Lorraine drove up from Ashby in her blue Buick the morning after and walked straight past the visitor’s desk to the maternity floor, carrying a casserole dish in one hand and the brass timer wrapped in a dish towel under her arm. I was in bed, half asleep, with Owen against my chest. Paul had gone to get coffee.
“Mom,” I said, “what are you doing?”
“Let me see that baby,” she said, and then she looked at the clock on the wall and went very still.
It was 6:50. She set the timer on the windowsill beside my bed, looked at it for a moment, and then picked it up again.
“I need a sink,” she said. “And a clock I trust.”
She carried the timer down the hall in both hands, the way she had carried a casserole into a dozen church basements, and set it on the counter at the nurses’ station. The head nurse, a woman named Bernadette Okafor with reading glasses on a beaded chain, looked up from her chart. Lorraine wound the key, three clicks, and set the dial to ten.
Then she stood there with her coffee, waiting.
At seven, the bell rang across the station, and Bernadette laughed out loud, a short surprised sound.
“Well,” she said. “That’s a first for the second floor.”
Lorraine did not laugh. She picked up the timer, tucked it under her arm, and walked back down the hall to my room. She set it on the windowsill again and sat down in the chair beside me, and she held Owen with both arms, and did not say a word.
In March of this year, on a Thursday morning, Lorraine wound the timer at 6:50, as she had done every morning for half a century. She set it on the windowsill above the sink and sat down at the table with her coffee, her good hand around the cup. Gene was in the shower upstairs. I was on the phone with the nursing home about my own mother’s medication.
At 6:55, Lorraine’s cup slipped from her hand and shattered on the tile.
Gene found her slumped against the table at 7:01, with her right side gone slack and her left hand still reaching for the timer, which had not yet rung.
It did not ring until the ambulance had left the driveway, with Gene in the back holding his wife’s hand and the siren screaming out of Ashby toward the hospital in Eau Claire. Then, from the windowsill, the bell rang into an empty kitchen.
Part 4
The intensive care unit at Eau Claire General kept its lights low and its voices lower, and the air hummed with the soft mechanical breathing of machines. Lorraine lay in bed four, with an IV taped to her left hand and a line running into her neck. The stroke had hit the right side of her brain. She could not move her right arm or speak clearly, but her eyes were open, and when I came in on Friday afternoon, they followed me to the chair by the window.
Gene was in the other chair. He had not changed his shirt since the ambulance.
I did not see the timer at first. Then I saw it, on the windowsill beside the bed, next to a plastic cup of ice chips and a folded get-well card from the church.
It was not ticking. It was not ringing. It was simply sitting there, polished and brass in the fluorescent light, with its silver bell perched on top.
“Gene,” I said quietly. “What time is it?”
He looked at the clock on the wall above the door. It said 6:58.
“Nothing yet,” he said.
Then he got up, walked to the windowsill, and took the timer in both hands. He turned the key three times, with the same sharp click I had heard a hundred times, and set the dial to ten. He put it back on the sill, exactly where it had been, and then he stood beside his wife’s bed with his hands folded behind his back.
At 6:59, a nurse named Denise came in to check the IV, saw the timer, and froze with the bag in her hand.
At 7:00, the bell rang.
It rang clean and bright across the silent unit, a double note that carried past the nurses’ station and down the corridor toward the elevators. A man in the next bed opened his eyes. Denise set the IV bag on the tray and put her hand to her chest.
Gene did not move. He looked at his wife, and his face broke open, very slowly, the way ice goes on a river in March.
Lorraine’s left hand moved.
It was slow, and clumsy, and it took her nearly a minute. Her fingers fumbled for the plastic clipboard on the bedside table, the one the nurses used for her chart, and she pulled it toward her across the blanket. A pen had been clipped to the top. She worked her fingers around it, and then she began to write, very slowly, in a shaking left-handed scrawl.
I could not read it from the chair. Gene could. He bent over the clipboard and read the words aloud, in a voice I had never heard him use before.
“Whoever’s in the kitchen winds it,” he read. “Nobody explains it to guests. The bell is attendance, not cooking.”
Lorraine’s eyes were full of tears. She looked at him and nodded, once.
Then she wrote one more word beneath the others, and turned the clipboard around, so I could see it.
Ray.
I looked at Gene, and he sat down heavily in the chair beside the bed, and for a long time he did not speak.
When he did, his voice was rough. “Ray was my brother,” he said. “Raymond Dvorak. He worked the refinery at Calder Point, on the Gulf, the night shift. I was a year younger. We were close. He called her every morning at ten minutes to seven, from the plant phone, before the shift bell at seven. Every morning for six years, before they were married. Then they were married, and he kept calling, same time, because the bell came at seven and he couldn’t be on the line for it.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
Gene looked at his wife. Her eyes were closed now, but her left hand lay on the blanket, open.
“He used to say it before the bell,” Gene said. “Same time tomorrow. He’d say it and hang up and walk out to the line, and the bell would ring over the whole plant. She’d sit in the kitchen with the phone in her lap, every morning, listening for it.”
He was silent for a moment.
“In April of 1972, the plant had a flash fire on the north unit,” he said. “Ray was thirty-four. I was on the day shift at the gate, and I heard the alarm from the parking lot. I got to the fence at 7:04. I saw the flame go up. I saw the smoke. I didn’t see him come out.”
Lorraine’s hand moved on the blanket, very faintly.
“He’d called her at 6:50,” Gene said. “She had the phone in her lap when the siren went. She told me later she heard the bell ring at seven, from the plant, the way she always did. And then she heard nothing.”
He wiped his face with his sleeve.
“She took her grandmother’s timer back to the kitchen sill that week and set it there. She told herself she would wind it every morning at ten minutes to seven, and let it ring at seven, and it would say what he said. Still here. Ten minutes every day. She has done it for fifty-four years, Renée. Through my wedding, through the kids, through the funerals. I didn’t know, not really, until the Christmas of 2016, when she asked me to leave her alone in the pantry, and I stood in the hall and understood what she was doing.”
“And you married her,” I said.
“I married her in 1975,” Gene said. “Ray’s widow and his younger brother. People talked. We didn’t care. She needed somebody in the kitchen.”
He looked at the timer on the windowsill.
“Whoever’s in the kitchen winds it,” he said again, softly. “That’s what she meant. It’s not a clock. It’s a voice she needed somebody else to keep.”
The bell had gone quiet. Lorraine’s eyes opened, and she looked at the clock on the wall, and then at the timer, and then at her husband.
She did not speak. She only lifted her left hand from the blanket and held it toward him, palm up.
Gene took it.
Then he turned to the windowsill, reached for the timer, and began, with the same slow care he had used at the kitchen sill for decades, to wind the key again.
Part 5
The kitchen on Birch Lane smelled of coffee and rain on a cool September morning. It had been six months since the stroke, and Lorraine had come home from the rehabilitation center with a cane, a new routine, and a left hand that could now hold a pen, a coffee cup, and the handle of the back door.
She did not wind the timer anymore.
Gene did.
He was the first one up each day, and the last one to bed. He made the coffee, fried the eggs, and cut the bread, and when he was finished at 6:48, he stood at the kitchen window with his hands folded behind his back, the way he had stood on the morning I first saw him there. At 6:50 he lifted the brass timer from the sill, turned the key three times, and set the dial to ten.
Lorraine sat at the table with her left hand around her coffee and the morning paper spread in front of her. She did not look at the clock. She did not look at the timer. She only waited, the way she had waited for thirty years, with the patience of a woman who knew what the next ten minutes were for.
I came down from the upstairs bedroom at 6:55 and sat beside my mother-in-law without speaking. Our son Owen, twelve years old and too tall now for the stuffed fox he still carried, came shuffling in behind me, dragging a backpack. He sat on the chair beside Lorraine and leaned his head against her arm.
“Grandma,” he whispered, “what’s the bell for?”
Lorraine looked down at him. For a long moment she did not answer. Then she took his hand in her left one, and smiled, and said the words she had been saying for half a century.
“Nothing yet.”
At seven, the bell rang.
It was a bright, clean double note, the kind that carries across a railway platform, and it filled the kitchen and rolled out through the open window and across the wet lawn toward the road. Owen sat up straight and looked at the windowsill with wide eyes. Gene turned from the window, and nodded to his wife, and she nodded back.
Lorraine set down her cup.
“Attendance,” she said, slowly, carefully. It was the longest sentence she had spoken since March. “Not cooking.”
Then she lifted her left hand and pointed at the windowsill, where the brass timer sat in the gray light with its silver bell perched on top.
“Same time tomorrow,” she said.
Gene walked to the sill, picked up the timer, and held it for a moment in both hands. Then he set it back down, exactly where it had always been, and turned to the stove to start the eggs.
At 6:50 the next morning, he would wind it again.
Same time tomorrow.
