The Book of Lost Fathers (2001)

Robley Wilson's story collection, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 2001 in its Poetry and Fiction series, is, as its title says, a book of lost fathers. In "Dorothy and Her Friends", Dorothy Porter, past thirty, single and living with her mother in Boston, remembers a last summer of sailing with her father, Richard, at Mere Point in Maine before he walked out of both their lives. (Open Library)

Watches

Waltham watch: In "Dorothy and Her Friends", more than twenty years after he vanished, a letter from a Houston law firm tells Dorothy that her father is dead, and the next day a small package of his effects arrives: his Waltham wristwatch, a calfskin billfold, a white-gold wedding ring and a bundle of papers. Her mother refuses to touch any of it. Among the papers Dorothy finds a cracked snapshot from the summer of the boat, the first image of Richard Porter she has seen since childhood. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: The following day a small package arrived — her father's "effects." His Waltham wristwatch, a brown calfskin billfold, a white-gold wedding ring, a bundle of papers held by two red elastic bands. (Robley Wilson, The Book of Lost Fathers, scan cataloged as Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, p. 188, in "Dorothy and Her Friends", whose running head appears on pp. 187 and 189; the line-break hyphen in "effects" is closed up and the one in "white-gold" kept; Internet Archive scan OCR)