Free The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

said.
    The lid came off easily in my hands, but I tried, for his sake, to make it look like a harder task than it was. The can was stuffed with layers of crumpled newspaper. At the bottom was a small silver box, inside of which, on a bed of stiff velvet, lay a tarnished gold pocket watch, its chain snaking around behind its face.
    “This was my father’s,” he said. “You wind that up, and it’ll tell the time. It’ll last forever. Them gears are good quality. That’s how they used to make things, good quality, you know? I’ll bet you never even seen something as well made as that.”
    I did not want the watch. I would only add it to the stack of other objects my grandfather had given me, all of them ancient and obscure: uncirculated commemorative silver dollars packed in plastic, four pairs of my grandmother’s old clip-on earrings, framed maps of our city as it was a hundred years ago. But he insisted, and I couldn’t admit to him that I had lost the one heirloom of his that I really loved. That morning I had searched the dirt for my gold nugget necklace at the bus stop, but I couldn’t find where it had flung.
    “Thanks,” I said, holding the watch in my hand. “It’s pretty.”
    “Be even prettier once you shine it up,” he said. He rubbed the face with the cuff of his sweatshirt. “You take good care of that, Julia.”
    The screen door slammed, and my mother came into the kitchen. She noticed the pocket watch in my hand. “Oh, Gene, don’t give away all your things.”
    “Let her keep it,” he said. “I can’t take it with me.”
    “You’re not going anywhere,” she said.
    He waved her off.
    “Take this too,” he whispered to me as we were leaving. He handed me a ten-dollar bill. A quick smile flashed across my grandfather’s face, a rare and precious sight. I could see the outline of his false teeth against his gums.
    “Do something fun with it,” he said.
    I squeezed his hand and nodded.
    “And Julia,” he said. “Don’t believe everything you hear, okay? You’re a smart girl. You can read between the lines.”
    We took what we always referred to as the scenic route home, back roads with less traffic. We listened to the news on the radio as we drove. Reporters from around the world were describing local reactions. From South America streamed more reports of gravity sickness. The Centers for Disease Control were investigating.
    “Jesus,” said my mother. “Tell me if you start to feel sick.”
    At that moment, I did begin to feel a little dizzy.
    “This disease seems to be affecting some people more than others,” said one official on the radio. “The name of this disease is paranoia.”
    In our own country, according to the report, clusters of born-again Christians were making their final arrangements, hoping at any moment to be summoned from their beds, leaving behind empty houses and piles of crumpled clothing where their bodies once stood.
    “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why wouldn’t your clothes come with you?”
    “I don’t know, honey,” said my mother. “You know we don’t believe in that stuff.”
    We were a different kind of Christian, the quiet, reasonable kind, a breed embarrassed by the mention of miracles.
    They were interviewing a televangelist on the radio. “The signs of the revelation have been in place for years,” he said. “We’ve known it was coming ever since the restoration of Israel.”
    As the road turned, I could see a sliver of shining ocean through a gap in the hills ahead. They had evacuated all the beachfront homes by then—no one knew what might happen to the tides.
    Outside, housing developments streaked past the window, the homes and the lots shrinking in size as we neared the coast. The land was so valuable near the ocean that some houses hung out over the edges of canyons, supported on one side by giant stilts.
    We came to a stop sign, and as my mother turned her head from right to left to check for traffic, I noticed the