Mina displayed an old wall clock in the window of her secondhand shop. It ran five minutes slow and chimed an unpredictable number of times. Two customers wanted it for entirely different reasons.
The first, a retired teacher named Elsie, said it resembled the clock from her childhood kitchen. Mina promised to hold it until Saturday. The second, a restaurant owner named Ravi, came in Friday evening and said his father had owned that exact clock. He pointed to a small burn mark beneath the twelve.
Mina checked her inventory. She had bought it from a house clearance and had no record of the previous owner. She told Ravi it was reserved. He offered twice the price. Mina refused. He offered to leave his telephone number in case Elsie changed her mind.
On Saturday Elsie arrived with a tape measure. The clock was too large for the space above her kitchen door. She considered moving the shelf, then decided that forty years of family photographs shouldn’t be displaced for nostalgia. Mina called Ravi.
He arrived so quickly that Elsie was still in the shop. He recognized the clock immediately and described how his father used to wind it every Sunday. Elsie asked whether he had grown up on Orchard Road. Ravi had. His father ran the little café opposite her school.
“I knew that clock,” Elsie said. “I thought it was in our kitchen because I saw it every afternoon.”
She had stopped at the café after lessons for a bun and tea. Ravi remembered her. She used to mark exercise books at the corner table and tell him to wipe the counter properly. He had thought she was terrifying.
Mina offered to sell the clock to Ravi. Elsie offered to pay for half of it if he would let her visit sometimes. Ravi said she could visit without paying. Then the clock chimed seven times. It was eleven fifteen.
Mina tested the hands, apologized for the faulty mechanism, and offered a discount. Ravi refused. His father had kept the clock precisely because it never agreed with the time. Customers who were late for lunch could blame it. Customers who stayed too long could say it hadn’t yet struck the hour.
Before the clock left the shop, Mina insisted on cleaning it. Ravi asked her not to polish away the burn mark. His father had made it by setting a hot baking tray too close while trying to fix the chime. Elsie remembered the day: the café had smelled of cinnamon, and the clock had struck thirteen at noon. Ravi had never heard that version. His father had always blamed an electrician. The three of them agreed that the mark was part of the history, and Mina cleaned around it.
A week later Ravi hung it in the new restaurant. Elsie visited with two former pupils and showed them the burn mark. Ravi served buns on the house. The clock chimed three times during their lunch. Nobody knew why.
Mina dropped in to see whether it worked in its new place. Ravi showed her a note he’d put beside it: “This clock may be wrong. The buns aren’t.” Elsie corrected his punctuation with a pen. Ravi said some things really did take him back to childhood.
When the bill arrived, Elsie asked the actual time. Ravi pointed to the clock. She laughed and reached for her phone.
“You still don’t trust my clock?”
“I trust it,” she said. “I just don’t want to miss the bus because it thinks lunch is starting again.”