The Name on the Watch
Part One: The Dream
My husband, Aaron, and I have been together for eight years, and from the very beginning we dreamed of having a big family. We talked about it on our second date, sitting in a booth at a diner outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, splitting a slice of cherry pie. He wanted four kids at least, maybe five. I laughed and said he’d better be ready to change a lot of diapers, and he said he’d change every single one.
But there was one thing Aaron wanted more than anything, and he never pretended otherwise. He wanted a son. Even before we got married, he talked about it constantly, in a way that was sweet at first and then, slowly, became something I didn’t know how to name.
“I just can’t picture it,” he told me once, the night he proposed, as we sat on the dock at his family’s cabin on Lake Michigan. “Only daughters. I mean, I’d love them, obviously. But I need a boy, Meredith. Somebody to carry on the Bowman name.”
I remember the way he said need. Not want. Need. I remember thinking it was an odd word for a man who had everything else he wanted sitting right beside him on that dock. But I was twenty-six and in love, and I put it down to tradition and family pride and moved on.
My name is Meredith Bowman. I’m thirty-four years old, and I’m a pharmacist at a hospital in Grand Rapids. Aaron is thirty-six. He sells commercial roofing for a company his grandfather started in 1961, the company his father ran for thirty years and that now has the name Bowman & Sons Roofing painted on the side of every truck.
Bowman & Sons. I didn’t notice the significance of that sign the first time I saw it. I noticed it a lot later.
We got married in June, eight years ago, at a little Lutheran church in Holland, Michigan, with tulips in every window. Not long after, I found out I was pregnant. I took the test on a Saturday morning in our tiny apartment, and when I came out of the bathroom holding it, Aaron dropped his coffee mug on the kitchen floor.
He was over the moon. He picked me up and spun me around the kitchen in my bare feet with the coffee spreading across the linoleum. That afternoon he went to Target and came home with a tiny Detroit Lions onesie and a little foam football. “For when he’s old enough,” he said, and he set them on the dresser in the spare room like a promise.
Part Two: Four Daughters
We had a girl.
We found out at the twenty-week ultrasound. The technician moved the wand across my belly and smiled and said, “Looks like a little girl.” I looked over at Aaron. He was smiling too, but his smile had gone stiff at the corners, like a photograph held a second too long.
He loved her, of course. When Hazel was born, seven pounds, two ounces, with a full head of dark hair, he held her against his chest in the delivery room and cried. He walked the halls with her at three in the morning and sang her old Bob Seger songs off-key. But a week after we brought her home, I found the Lions onesie and the little foam football in a box on the top shelf of the closet, and I knew he’d been hoping for something else.
“Don’t worry,” he told me that night, rocking Hazel in the glider. “We’ll give her a little brother someday.”
So we had another baby, two years later. Another girl. We named her Iris.
I watched Aaron’s face at the ultrasound that time, and I saw the disappointment cross it like a cloud moving over a field. It was there for only a second before he covered it with a smile and squeezed my hand and said, “Two princesses. Lucky me.” But I’d seen it.
Then came our third daughter, Clara, and eventually our fourth, Maisie. Four girls in seven years. Our little house in Kentwood filled up with pink sneakers and hair ties and the sound of four voices shouting over each other at the dinner table. Every spare surface held a drawing or a Barbie or a half-finished craft project, and I loved every chaotic inch of it.
I adored every one of them, and Aaron was a loving father. I want to be very clear about that. He coached Hazel’s soccer team. He learned to French braid from YouTube videos, badly at first and then pretty well. He read bedtime stories in four different voices. On Saturday mornings he made pancakes shaped like Mickey Mouse, and he let all four girls pile into our bed to watch cartoons.
But whenever we found out we were expecting another girl, I saw that familiar disappointment on his face. It never stayed long. It was always there.
After four pregnancies, I was honestly exhausted. My back hurt all the time. My body didn’t feel like my own. I was working three twelve-hour shifts a week at the hospital pharmacy and coming home to four children under eight, and some nights I fell asleep at the kitchen table with my head on a pile of unfolded laundry.
After Maisie was born, I told Aaron I thought we were done. We were sitting on the back porch after the girls were asleep, watching the fireflies over the lawn. I said I was tired. I said four was a lot, and four was enough. I said we had a beautiful family.
He was quiet for a long time. “I know,” he said finally. “I know we do.” Then he said, “But what if the next one is a boy?”
I didn’t answer. I just looked out at the fireflies, and I wondered, for the first time, whether he would ever be satisfied with the family we already had.
Part Three: Bowman & Sons
To understand Aaron, you have to understand his father.
Gerald Bowman is sixty-eight years old, and he is the kind of man who fills a room without saying a word. He’s tall and heavy-shouldered, with a gray crew cut and hands like baseball mitts from forty years of roofing. He ran Bowman & Sons for three decades before he retired and handed it to Aaron. He’s not cruel, exactly. He’s just never once in his life said anything he didn’t think was true, and he doesn’t see why he should start now.
The first time I met him was at a Fourth of July barbecue at the cabin. He shook my hand, looked me up and down, and said, “Pharmacist. Good. Steady work.” Then he turned to Aaron and said, “She looks like she’d give you strong boys.”
I laughed, because I thought he was joking. He wasn’t.
When Hazel was born, Gerald came to the hospital with a bouquet of carnations from the gift shop. He held her for about thirty seconds, said, “Pretty little thing,” and handed her back. Then he patted Aaron on the shoulder and said, “Next one, son.”
When Iris was born, he didn’t come to the hospital. He sent a card. When Clara was born, he called on the phone, and I heard him through the speaker say, “Three girls. Your grandfather’s turning over in his grave.” Aaron laughed it off, but his ears turned red, the way they always do when something hurts him and he doesn’t want anyone to see.
When Maisie was born, Gerald came to the house a week later. He stood in our living room with four little girls tumbling around his feet, and he looked at Aaron for a long time. “Well,” he said. “Guess the business dies with you.”
Aaron didn’t say anything. He just went out to the garage, and I heard him in there for an hour, banging on something with a hammer.
There’s something in the Bowman family called the watch. It’s a gold pocket watch, a Hamilton railroad model from 1928, with a hunter case engraved with an elaborate letter B on the front. It belonged to Aaron’s great-grandfather, who worked on the Pere Marquette Railway. It passed to his son, then to Gerald, and when Aaron turned twenty-one, Gerald gave it to him in a little ceremony at the cabin. Inside the case, engraved in tiny script, there are four names: Thomas. Walter. Gerald. Aaron.
There’s room under Aaron’s name for one more.
“For your boy,” Gerald said, when he handed it over. “First son of the first son. Since 1928.”
Aaron keeps the watch in a velvet box in the top drawer of his dresser. Sometimes, late at night, I’d find him sitting on the edge of the bed with it open in his palm, running his thumb over the empty space under his name.
Part Four: Number Five
Then I found out I was pregnant again.
It wasn’t planned. Maisie was eighteen months old, and I’d been meaning to make an appointment to talk about birth control and kept putting it off. I took the test in the bathroom at work on my lunch break because I felt sick for three days straight. I sat on the closed lid of the toilet in a staff restroom and stared at those two pink lines and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did a little of both.
Our fifth baby.
I told Aaron that night after the girls were in bed. He was at the kitchen sink washing the dinner dishes, and I came up behind him and put the test on the counter next to the dish rack.
He looked at it. He turned off the water. He turned around, and his face was doing something I hadn’t seen it do in years. It was lit up from the inside, like a jack-o’-lantern.
“Mer,” he said. “Mer, this is it.”
“Aaron,” I said carefully, “we don’t know what it is yet.”
“I can feel it,” he said. He put both hands on my belly, still flat, and he grinned. “This time it’s finally my son.”
He said it every day after that. I can feel it. This time, it’s my son. He said it at breakfast. He said it at his mother’s birthday dinner. He said it to his crews at work, and they started calling the baby “Junior” when they called the house. He went back to the top shelf of the closet and took down the box with the Lions onesie and the foam football and washed the onesie and laid it on the dresser in the spare room again.
I tried to tell him not to get his hopes up. I tried to tell him I loved him, and that I’d love another girl just as much, and that I wanted him to love her too, if it was a her. He nodded and said of course, of course. But he never stopped saying it.
This time, it’s my son.
Our girls heard it too. That was the part I didn’t think about enough, not until later.
One afternoon in my second trimester, I was folding laundry in the living room when Hazel came and sat next to me on the couch. She was seven then, our oldest, serious and quiet like her dad, with dark hair she wanted to grow down to her waist. She picked at a loose thread on the couch cushion for a while. Then she said, “Mama, why does Daddy want a boy so much?”
I stopped folding. “What makes you ask that, sweetheart?”
She shrugged. “He says it all the time. He says, I finally get my son.” She pulled at the thread. “Didn’t he want us?”
I set down the laundry and pulled her into my lap, even though she was getting too big for it. “Of course he did,” I said. “Daddy loves you more than anything. You know that.”
Hazel nodded slowly against my shoulder. But she didn’t look convinced, and I didn’t know how to convince her, because some part of me wasn’t sure I was telling her the whole truth.
Part Five: The Ultrasound
We found out at twenty weeks, like always. Same clinic, same dimly lit room, same technician, a cheerful woman named Patty who’d done all four of our girls’ ultrasounds and knew our whole history. She squirted the cold gel on my belly and moved the wand around and studied the screen for what felt like an hour.
Aaron was holding my hand so tight my fingers went numb. Patty smiled.
“Well,” she said, “this one’s a little boy.”
For once, Aaron had been right.
He didn’t say anything at first. He just stared at the screen, at the gray, flickering shape on it. Then he put his face down against my shoulder, right there on the exam table, and his whole body started shaking. I realized he was crying.
“A boy,” he kept saying into my shoulder. “Mer. A boy.”
Patty quietly handed him a tissue and left the room to give us a minute. I lay there with gel on my stomach and my husband crying on my shoulder, and I felt so many things at once that I couldn’t sort them out. I felt happy for him. I felt relieved. And I felt something small and sharp underneath all that, something I didn’t want to look at too closely. It felt a lot like grief on behalf of four little girls waiting at home who had never once made their father cry like that.
He called his father from the parking lot. I sat in the passenger seat while he paced beside the car with his phone pressed to his ear, and I heard him say, “Dad. It’s a boy. It’s a boy, Dad.” There was a long pause. Then Aaron’s face did something I’d never seen it do. It crumpled like a little kid’s.
“Thanks, Dad,” he said quietly. “Yeah. Thanks.”
When he got back in the car, he wiped his face on his sleeve. “He said he’s proud of me,” Aaron said. He laughed a little, not quite steadily. “He’s never said that before. Not once.”
I looked at my husband, thirty-six years old, crying in a parking lot because his father had finally said he was proud of him. And I understood, for the first time, that this had never really been about a son at all.
Part Six: Danny
That night, after the girls were asleep, I asked Aaron about it.
We were lying in bed in the dark. He was still smiling. He’d been smiling all day. He’d gone to Target again after work and come home with three more onesies and a tiny pair of Nike sneakers that our son wouldn’t be able to wear for a year.
“Aaron,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Why does it matter so much? A boy.” I turned on my side to face him in the dark. “And don’t tell me it’s the name. I know it’s not just the name.”
He was quiet for a long time. So long I thought he might have fallen asleep. Then he said, very quietly, “I had a brother.”
I went completely still. In eight years, he had never once mentioned a brother. Not to me, not to the girls, not at a single family holiday. His mother, Carol, had never mentioned one either. Neither had Gerald.
“His name was Danny,” Aaron said. “Daniel Gerald Bowman. He was born when I was seven.”
He told me the whole story there in the dark, staring at the ceiling.
His mother had a hard pregnancy with Danny. They lived out at the cabin that winter while Gerald was rebuilding the business after a bad year, and the nearest hospital was forty minutes away on icy roads. Danny was born in February, at a little community hospital in Ludington. Eight pounds even. Black hair like Gerald’s.
“Dad was so happy,” Aaron said. “I’d never seen him like that. He walked around the hospital telling every nurse, That’s my son. Bowman and Sons. Plural now.”
They brought Danny home after two days. He seemed fine at first. He ate, he slept, he cried like any newborn. But on the fifth day, Aaron noticed something.
“I was holding him on the couch,” Aaron said. “Mom was making dinner. And I looked at his face, and his lips were blue.” His voice was barely a whisper now. “Not a lot. Just a little. Like when you’ve been swimming too long in the lake. I told Mom. She said it was the cold, the cabin was drafty. She wrapped him in another blanket.”
He swallowed.
“On the eighth night,” he said, “he stopped breathing.”
They drove him to the hospital in Ludington through a snowstorm, his mother in the back seat doing CPR the way they’d learned in a church class, his father driving ninety miles an hour on icy roads. Aaron sat in the front seat. He was seven.
Danny died in the emergency room. The doctors said it was a heart defect, something congenital, something that could have been caught with the right test if anyone had known to look.
“Dad never talked about him again,” Aaron said. “Not once. He took down every picture. He packed up Danny’s crib and his clothes and drove them to the dump. Mom cried for a year, and Dad just went to work. Every day. Twelve hours a day. Like if he worked hard enough, he could fill up the hole.”
He was crying now, silently, the tears running sideways into his ears.
“Bowman and Sons,” he said. “He never changed the sign. Every truck. For thirty years. And Sons.” He laughed, a terrible little laugh. “And there was only me. Just one. And I was never enough. I’ve known that since I was seven years old.”
I put my arms around my husband in the dark and held him.
“So when you give your dad a grandson,” I said slowly, “you think it’ll fix it.”
He didn’t answer. But he didn’t have to.
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