Looking for Leo (1992)

Gloria Nagy's novel, published by Delacorte Press in 1992, follows Lindy Lampi, a wry veteran of a Beverly Hills childhood, whose little girl Tess needs a bone-marrow transplant from a compatible donor. Her last hope is Tess's father, Leo, the arrogant ex-husband who broke her heart, and to find him she turns to her childhood friend Willa Snow, who happens to be Leo's ex-wife too. The narrator's memories of their girlhood include a third friend, Lucinda Segal. (Open Library)

Watches

Bulova (unidentified model): At nine, Lucinda is fifteen pounds overweight by her doctor's reckoning, ignored at school and left at home with the Austrian woman she hates while her parents are away on a selling trip. One rainy April afternoon she sits alone at a counter over two chocolate malts, fries and a cheeseburger, signs the bill with a big tip, and looks at her fourteen-karat gold Bulova: it is past five and she is late for her piano lesson with Leroy, whom she greets with a lie about a dog. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: She looks at her fourteen-karat gold Bulova watch. It is past five and she is late for her piano lesson. (Gloria Nagy, Looking for Leo, scan cataloged as Delacorte Press, 1992, p. 34, closing up the OCR's line-break hyphen in "fourteen"; the piano teacher calls her Miss Segal on p. 35; Internet Archive scan OCR)