The Electrician Who Couldn’t Set a Clock

“Dad, this clock is five minutes slow again.”

I was standing on the familiar, creaky wooden stool in my father’s kitchen, reaching awkwardly over the humming refrigerator while he leaned against the laminate counter, pretending to study a crumpled grocery receipt.

“Must be getting old,” he murmured.

I laughed, brushing a speck of dust off the cheap plastic clock face. “The clock or you?”

He smiled without looking up from the paper. “Both, probably.”

My father, Roscoe Tillman, had spent forty-three years as a highly sought-after electrician in our small Ohio town. He was a man with rough, calloused hands who could wire an entire house in his sleep, diagnose a dead circuit merely by the sound of the hum, and repair absolutely anything with a standard screwdriver and an endless well of patience.

But somehow, in the quiet, echoing years after my mother died, he could no longer manage the simple, two-button plastic clock hanging above his kitchen doorway.

At least, that was the story I believed.

Sometimes, the things that appear broken are working exactly as intended.

A Toolbox Full of Excuses

Every Thursday after finishing a long day at the office, I dutifully stopped by his house loaded down with groceries. I brought the staples:

• Milk and fresh bread for his mornings.
• Canned soup for easy, warm lunches.
• Rich coffee to keep his ancient percolator running.
• Whatever random necessity I assumed a 76-year-old widower might neglect to buy for himself.

And almost every Thursday, without fail, there was a tiny, nagging maintenance issue waiting for me.

“The clock’s slow.”
“The smoke detector in the hall chirped.”
“This cabinet hinge feels a little loose to me.”
“Can you take a look at the porch light?”

It happened so often that I actually started keeping a yellow-handled screwdriver in the bottom of my purse. At first, I thought it was sweet—a quirky role reversal. But as the months dragged on, a heavy, sinking worry began to take root in my chest.

Dad had always been the one who fixed things. Growing up, I don’t recall a repairman ever crossing our threshold. If our toaster broke, Dad had it completely disassembled on the kitchen table by breakfast. When the dryer stopped heating, he was elbows-deep in lint and wiring before Mom had even finished sighing about the wet towels. When my first beat-up sedan refused to start, he drove twenty minutes through pouring rain and had me back on the road long before a tow truck could have been dispatched.

So, when this master tinkerer suddenly began asking me how to reset a dollar-store clock, red flags went up. I started watching him like a hawk. Was he repeating his stories? Was he forgetting his doctor’s appointments? Leaving the stovetop burners glowing red? I was so paranoid that I confidentially asked our family doctor if it was time to intervene.

“Just keep an eye on changes,” the doctor advised gently.

So I did. And the more I watched, the more every little thing terrified me.

My weekly visits had transformed into a checklist of chores and hidden worries.

Caught Red-Handed

Then came a random Tuesday afternoon. I had managed to escape work a few hours early. With a fresh bag of groceries already in my back seat, I decided to swing by and surprise Dad.

His familiar battered truck was parked crookedly in the driveway. The front door was unlocked, just like it always was. I stepped inside quietly, shutting the door without a sound, and heard the distinct scrape of the wooden kitchen stool against the linoleum.

“Dad?” I called out.

Silence.

I walked cautiously toward the kitchen archway and stopped dead in my tracks.

There he was. Standing firmly on the stool. Holding the infamous plastic clock in both hands. His reading glasses were pushed up onto his forehead. With swift, practiced precision, he pressed the button on the back exactly twice, adjusted the digital time, and hung it perfectly straight on its nail. Then he climbed down without a single hesitation. No confusion. No physical struggle. Absolutely nothing was wrong with him.

“Thought that thing was way too complicated for you,” I said, crossing my arms.

He spun around so fast I almost felt a pang of guilt for startling him. For several agonizing seconds, neither of us breathed a word. Then, his expression shifted. It wasn’t a dramatic change; he just looked thoroughly, undeniably caught. Like a small child with his fist jammed deep into the cookie jar.

He glanced at the clock, then at me, and finally at the heavy grocery bags sagging in my hands.

“I can explain,” he mumbled.

I set the bags down on the counter with a soft thud. “You’ve been pretending you can’t set a clock, Dad?”

He refused to meet my eyes, looking instead out the kitchen window. Outside, Mom’s old prize rose bushes had grown wild and unruly along the fence line because neither of us possessed the heart to prune away her memory.

Finally, Dad rubbed the back of his neck. “Your mother always used to say I was a terrible liar.”

“She was entirely right.”

That earned a fleeting half-smile before his face fell into a solemn line. He pulled out one of the wooden kitchen chairs and sat down heavily.

“You’re always so busy,” he started.

I felt a sudden, uncomfortable shift in the pit of my stomach. “Dad…”

“No, I know you are. Work is crazy. The kids are growing. Your house needs taking care of. It’s everything.” He folded his weathered hands neatly on the table. “You bring the groceries in, drop them on the counter, ask me if I need anything, and then you’re halfway back out the door before I can even think of something worth saying.”

I stood there, speechless. Because he was absolutely right.

Without realizing it, my Thursday visits had degraded into a hollow chore I was secretly proud of checking off my list. Buy groceries. Drop them off. Inspect Dad. Drive home. I genuinely believed I was being the ultimate good daughter simply because his refrigerator shelves were fully stocked.

Ten Extra Minutes

Dad looked up at the perfectly set clock. “When you have to climb up there to fix it, you usually stay a little longer.”

I swallowed hard, fighting the lump forming in my throat. “What?”

“You stand on that stool, mess with the buttons, and then you come down and make us some coffee.” His rough voice softened to a whisper. “And while that old pot is brewing, you tell me what the kids are doing. Or what drama happened at work. Sometimes, I tell you something about your mother that you didn’t know.”

He offered a helpless shrug. “It gives us ten extra minutes.”

I stared at the man who had raised me. Ten minutes. That was the grand prize he had been desperately trying to steal from my frantic schedule. He didn’t want money. He didn’t want grand favors. He didn’t want the world’s attention. He just wanted ten minutes with his daughter.

Suddenly, a montage of every tiny, trivial repair from the past year flashed through my mind. The loose cabinet handle that was never really loose. The porch bulb he could have changed blindfolded in a hurricane. The drawer that magically only “stuck” on Thursday evenings.

None of those things had ever been broken. My father was just lonely. And he was far too proud to simply look me in the eye and say, “Please don’t leave me yet.”

The best conversations happen when we finally decide to stop rushing.

I looked down at the melting frozen peas, the cold chicken, and the ice cream sitting on the counter. My usual escape route.

“I should put these away before they melt,” I said quietly.

Dad nodded, resigning himself. “Sure.”

I meticulously put every single item away in its proper place. Then, I walked toward the front door. He stayed seated at the kitchen table, and I could practically feel him bracing himself to say a lonely goodbye.

Instead, I slipped my coat off my shoulders. I hung it deliberately on the brass hook right beside Mom’s old, dirt-stained gardening jacket. Then, I walked right back into the kitchen.

“Coffee?” I asked.

Dad looked up, his eyes wide. “You have time today?”

I pulled out the chair directly across from him. “I have as much time as we need.”

He didn’t say another word for a long moment. He just stood up, filled the old, stained coffeemaker with fresh water, and reached automatically into the cabinet for two mugs. One was mine from my high school days—it featured a faded yellow sunflower on the side. I hadn’t even noticed he still kept it.

We sat at that table for nearly three hours. Dad told me vivid stories I had never heard before. He talked about meeting Mom at a humid county fair. He laughed about the first cramped apartment they rented, where the radiator barely worked in the dead of winter. He told me about the terrifying night I was born, and how he had been petrified to hold me because I looked “smaller than a loaf of bread.”

We laughed until his eyes crinkled and leaked tears. Then we cried for Mom. It wasn’t the awkward, uncomfortable kind of crying that makes people rush to change the subject. It was the beautiful, necessary kind of crying that only comes when someone you love deeply has been gone just long enough that the sharp pain and the warm gratitude finally start sitting comfortably at the same table.

Right before I finally left for the evening, I looked up at the clock. It was exactly right.

The following Thursday, I didn’t bring any groceries. I didn’t bring spare batteries. I certainly didn’t bring my purse screwdriver.

I brought two fresh pastrami sandwiches from a little deli near my office. And I had taken the entire afternoon off.

Dad opened the door, eyeing the greasy paper bag in my hands. “Is that all?”

“That’s all,” I smiled.

“What needs fixing?” he asked, a twinkle returning to his eye.

“Absolutely nothing.”

He raised a skeptical eyebrow as I stepped past him into the hallway. “I thought we could just eat lunch.”

His face did that same quiet, subtle thing again. A tiny, microscopic change that most people would never notice in a million years. But daughters always notice.

He moved aside to let me in. “Well,” he sighed playfully, “I suppose I can find something wrong with the clock if I look hard enough.”

I hugged him fiercely before he could finish the sentence.

For the next few years, Thursdays became sacred. They belonged entirely to us. Sometimes we talked for hours. Sometimes we watched grainy, classic baseball games on the television. Sometimes he just sat peacefully on the porch watching the neighborhood while I read a book nearby. Sometimes we barely said anything at all.

I learned something incredibly valuable during those years—something I desperately wish I had understood much earlier: Caring for someone is not the same thing as spending time with them. You can fill a refrigerator to the brim and still leave a person starving for your company. You can make sure someone has every physical thing they need to survive, and still entirely miss the one thing they’re too afraid to ask for.

Time.

Years later, after Dad was gone and the house was sold, I took that cheap, plastic kitchen clock home with me. It hangs proudly in my own kitchen now.

Every once in a while, it loses a minute. I never replace it with a newer model. I just stand on my own stool, take it down carefully, and remember the incredible man who spent his entire life fixing broken things, but couldn’t bring himself to say out loud that his heart was lonely.

And now, whenever someone I love stops and says, “Before you go, can you help me with one little thing?”

I stay a little longer. Because sometimes, the thing that desperately needs fixing isn’t a clock, a loose cabinet, or a burnt-out porch light.

Sometimes, “Can you fix this?” is just another, quieter way of saying, “Please stay.”

Note:This work is inspired by real events and people, but it has been fictionalized for creative purposes. Names, characters, and details have been changed to protect privacy and enhance the narrative. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
All images used in this article are AI-generated and intended for illustrative purposes only.