“Are you ready for tomorrow?”
Jenna shrugged. “I don’t think I will ever be ready.”
“I was just thinking the same about myself,” I said. “I once read a poem about the pain of a father sending his daughter to another village to be married. It was written four thousand years ago in China. Maybe things never really change.”
Jenna bowed her head.
“I just remind myself that this is what I’ve always hoped for you. All I have ever wanted for you is to be happy.”
She leaned over and hugged me.
“I have something I need to give you.” I brought the box from my pocket and set it in her hands. Her eyes shone with delight as she opened the case.
“It’s beautiful.” She lifted the delicate timepiece from the case, dangling it admiringly from one end. “Thank you.”
“It’s not from me,” I said. “But it is from someone who loved you very much.” Jenna looked at me quizzically.
“It’s from MaryAnne.”
My words sounded strange even to me—a name on a grave near the stone angel we visited every Christmas, now resurrected in a single act of giving.
“MaryAnne,” she repeated. She looked up into my eyes. “I don’t really remember her,” Jenna said sadly. “Not really. I remember her once holding me in a chair and reading to me. How good I felt around her.”
“Then you remember her, Jenna. She loved you as if you were her own. In some ways, you were.”
Jenna looked back down at the timepiece.
“Nineteen years ago, MaryAnne asked me to give this to you the night before your wedding. It was her most prized possession.”
Jenna shook her head in astonishment. “She wanted me to have it?”
I nodded. “MaryAnne was a good giver of gifts,” I said.
She draped the gold watch back in its case, set it on her nightstand, then sighed. “So are you, Dad.”
I smiled.
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
She turned away and I noticed that her chin quivered as she struggled to speak. As she turned back, her tear-filled eyes met mine. “So, how do you thank someone for a life?”
I wiped a tear from my cheek as I stared back into my daughter’s beautiful eyes. Then, in that bittersweet moment, I understood MaryAnne’s words of the gift. The great gift. The meaning of the timepiece.
“You give it back, Jenna. You give it back.” I took my girl in my arms and held her tightly to my chest. My heart, bathed in fond memory, ached in the sweet pain of separation. This is what it meant to be a father—had always meant. To know that one day I would turn around and my little girl would be gone. Finally, reluctantly, I released her and leaned back, looking down into her angelic face. It was time. Time for the cycle to begin anew.
“It’s late, sweetheart. You have a big day tomorrow.” I leaned over and kissed her tenderly on the cheek. “Good-bye, honey.”
It was good-bye. To an era. A time never to be returned to. Her eyes shone with sadness and love. “Good-bye, Daddy.”
The silence of the snow-shrouded evening enveloped the moment and time seemed to stand still for just a moment. For just us.
I took a deep breath, rose from the side of her bed, and with one last embrace walked from her room. I descended the stairway with a new lightness of understanding. I understood what MaryAnne had meant by the gift. The gift Jenna had given me had been life. That the very breath I had once given to her had come back to me in an infinite return of joy and life and meaning.
In the dimly lit entrance below, the grandfather’s clock struck once for the hour, and I paused momentarily at the base of the stairway to look into its time-faded face as, perhaps, MaryAnne and David had done so many years before.
This relic will outlive us all, I thought, just as it had outlived generations before us. For within its cotillion of levers and cogs and gears, there was still time. Time to outlive all things human. Yet, in my heart, something told me otherwise. For perhaps there was some quality about love that sprang eternal—that a love like MaryAnne’s, and like mine, could last forever.
Not could. Would. This was the message of the timepiece. To let go of this world and aspire to something far nobler in a realm that regards no boundaries of time.
I glanced back upstairs as the light switched off in my little girl’s room and I smiled. Twenty years after MaryAnne’s death, she had bestowed upon me one last gift of understanding. I wondered if, in some unseen realm, MaryAnne was watching and was pleased that I had learned her lesson. That some things, like a parent’s love, do last forever in a time and place where all broken hearts will forever be made whole. And if, in the silent vastness of a mysterious universe, or in the quietness of men’s hearts, there is such a place as heaven, then it couldn’t be anything more than that.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Paul Evans is the bestselling author of The Christmas Box. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with his wife, Keri, and their three daughters, Jenna, Allyson, and Abigail. He is currently working on his next novel.
Also by Richard Paul Evans
THE CHRISTMAS BOX
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1996 by Richard Paul Evans
All rights reserved,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Evans, Richard Paul.
Timepiece / Richard Paul Evans.
p. cm
I. Title
PS3555.V259T56 1996
813’.54—dc20 96-6971 CIP
ISBN: 0-7432-3645-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-3077-3 (ebook)
Richard Paul Evans, Timepiece
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