My mother’s watch was on a table at the flea market.
We buried her eleven years ago. I picked out the dress.
The man selling it said a woman brings him one EVERY SPRING.
I’ve had the same booth at the Rogers market since I was twenty-two, six rows down from Ray Dolan, who sells estate jewelry off a folding table with a coffee can for change.
Mom died in April of 2015. Dad handled the casket and the flowers and told me I didn’t need to see her that way, and I let him decide, because I was nineteen and couldn’t keep water down.
“Megan, sit down before you fall down,” Ray said.
It was a Timex with a cracked crystal. DLK scratched inside the band with a nail, because my grandfather did that to everything he ever gave her.
I told Ray it looked like my mother’s.
He said he’d bought it that morning in a lot with two rings and a class ring from Massillon.
Then he flipped open the spiral notebook he keeps for taxes, to prove he’d paid fair. Every person who sells to Ray signs the page.
I read the line twice.
The letters leaned left. She wrote her Ds like triangles.
I went home and pulled the funeral folder out of Dad’s file cabinet while he was at his shop, and the invoice from Barnett’s listed a graveside service, sixty chairs, no viewing.
Nobody saw her. Not my aunt, not her sister in Akron. I called them both from the driveway.
Then I checked the notebook photos I’d taken on my phone and went back through Ray’s older pages.
2019. 2021. Last April.
Same name. Same triangles.
THE WOMAN WHO SELLS HIM MY MOTHER’S JEWELRY HAS BEEN SIGNING MY MOTHER’S NAME FOR ELEVEN YEARS.
I put the watch in my apron pocket with the price stickers and drove to my father’s shop with the radio off.
He was under a truck. I set the watch on the tool cart where he’d see it.
He came out from under there slow. He didn’t pick it up. He didn’t ask what it was.
“Megan,” he said. “Who else have you told?”
What a Person Sounds Like When They Already Know the Answer
Not what is that or where did you find this.
Who else have you told.
I stood in the bay of his shop with grease smell and the radio going low on a country station and I watched my father look at that watch the way you look at something you thought you’d never see again, and I understood that the surprise wasn’t the watch. The surprise was me standing there holding it.
“Nobody yet,” I said.
He wiped his hands on a rag. Took a long time doing it. Then he sat down on the bumper of the truck he’d been under, which was a ’98 Silverado with a cracked exhaust manifold, because I notice things when I’m trying not to fall apart.
He told me she didn’t die in April.
She left in April. March 31st, technically. He drove her to the bus station in Canton himself. She had a bag and he didn’t ask where she was going and she didn’t say, and they both understood that was the agreement.
The funeral, he said, was for me.
He said that like it was a kindness.
What Barnett’s Will Do for Three Thousand Dollars
I know Glen Barnett. His son Derek went to my high school. Glen’s been running that funeral home since his own father handed it over, and he’s a deacon at the Methodist church on Fifth, and apparently he will fabricate a complete graveside service for a woman who isn’t dead if her husband asks him to and pays cash.
Sixty chairs that nobody sat in.
I have the invoice. I’ve had it for years. I used to look at it sometimes when I missed her, because it had her full name printed at the top. Donna Lynn Kowalski. And the date. And the itemized list: casket rental for graveside display, flower arrangement, clergy coordination, sixty chairs, tent.
She was never in that casket. It was empty or it had somebody else’s weight in it, sandbags or whatever Glen uses when a grieving nineteen-year-old might notice if it lifted too easy.
I sat down on a metal stool. My father was still on the bumper.
“Why,” I said. Not a question, exactly. More like a sound.
He said she’d been sick. Not her body. Her mind. That she’d been going away from us for two years before she actually went, and she wanted to go clean, no forwarding address, no phone calls on birthdays, no Megan showing up at whatever door she landed behind. He said she’d asked him to make it final. To close the door for her.
“She asked you to tell me she was dead.”
He said yes.
I picked up the watch off the tool cart and put it back in my apron pocket and walked out.
What She’s Been Doing With Her Saturdays
I went back to Ray’s booth the next morning when the market opened at seven. He was setting up, coffee in a thermos, price tags on a ring tray.
I asked him to describe the woman.
He’s not good with ages, he said. Older. My height, maybe shorter. Gray in her hair but not all gray. She always comes early, before the crowds, and she sells light, two or three pieces, never a lot. She pays for a parking spot in the main lot and drives a sedan, he thought maybe silver, he’d never paid attention to the plates.
“She ever talk to you?” I asked.
He thought about it. “She said once that the pieces were her mother’s. That she didn’t have anybody to leave them to.”
I went home and called my aunt Carol, my mom’s older sister in Akron. Carol knew nothing, had known nothing, had spent eleven years thinking her sister was in the ground at Riverside Memorial. She cried on the phone and I didn’t, which felt wrong, but I’d used whatever crying I had the night before in the parking lot of Dad’s shop.
Then I called the cemetery.
There is a stone. I’ve been there. Donna Lynn Kowalski, 1963-2015. My dad and I go every April and put down tulips because those were her flower.
The woman at the records office confirmed the plot. Confirmed a burial. I asked her if she could confirm the name on the transit permit, which is the document that moves a body from a funeral home to a cemetery.
She put me on hold for four minutes.
The transit permit on file listed a Jane Doe, unclaimed, transferred from the county. Glen Barnett had bought himself a body to put in the ground so the stone wouldn’t be empty.
I don’t know whose mother is buried under my mother’s name. I’ve thought about that a lot.
What My Father Thought the End of the Story Was
He called me that night. I let it go to voicemail.
He called again the next morning. I listened to both messages before I called back.
He said he’d been waiting for this for years. Said he’d expected it sooner, actually, that he’d been surprised I never pushed on it, never asked to see her, never questioned why there was no viewing. He said he thought I’d figured it out on my own and chosen not to know.
Maybe he was right about that last part. I was nineteen and I couldn’t keep water down and my dad told me I didn’t need to see her that way and I said okay. I said okay and I went and sat in the car and I said okay to all of it, the closed casket, the graveside only, the no-viewing, all of it, because I was nineteen and he was my dad and I trusted him to tell me what was real.
He thought that was the end of the story. Woman leaves, family grieves, life goes on.
He didn’t account for the watch.
He didn’t account for her selling it to a man six rows down from her daughter’s booth every spring, same handwriting, same triangles on her Ds.
I don’t know if that’s carelessness or something else. I’ve thought about that too.
What I Did With the Watch Before I Did Anything Else
I took it to a jeweler on Market Street, guy named Phil Hatch, been there forever, fixes everything. I asked him to replace the crystal.
He did it in twenty minutes. Fourteen dollars.
I don’t know why that was the first thing I did. It just seemed wrong to leave it cracked.
I wore it home on my wrist. Timex with a white face and a brown band, DLK scratched inside. It runs a little fast, Phil said, about two minutes a day. He offered to regulate it.
I told him to leave it.
What Happens Now Is Not Simple
I’ve talked to a lawyer. Not about the cemetery, not yet. Just to understand what I’m looking at.
My mother is alive. Presumably. She’s been selling jewelry at a flea market in Rogers, Ohio, every spring for at least six years, signing her own name, and either she doesn’t know my booth is six rows away or she does know and she comes anyway.
The lawyer said the legal questions are complicated. The certificate of death was fraudulent. Glen Barnett is seventy-one years old and still running that funeral home. My father is still in his shop on Tuesdays and Thursdays fixing exhaust manifolds.
I still go to the market on Saturdays. Same booth, same tables, same setup I’ve had since I was twenty-two.
Next April I’m going to be there early.
Ray said she always comes before the crowds. He said she pays for the main lot. He said she drives something silver.
I don’t have a plan past that. I don’t know what I’ll say. I don’t know what she looks like now, whether I’d recognize her across a parking lot or whether she’d just look like somebody’s mother, gray in her hair and a bag over her shoulder, walking toward a man with a coffee can for change.
I put the watch in my apron pocket every Saturday. It runs two minutes fast.
I figure I can afford to be a little early.
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If you know someone who’s been carrying a grief that might not be the whole story, maybe pass this along. Or just tell me: would you have gone back to that market?
For more stories about unexpected discoveries and unsettling family secrets, read about my daughter in her wedding dress when the stranger knocked or when my dad’s buyers called me from his backyard and told me to come alone.
