The Tracks of Angels (1994)

Kelly Dwyer's novel, published by Putnam in 1994, is narrated by Laura, who takes a Greyhound from California to Boston after her father's death and rents an apartment near the birthplace of John F. Kennedy with sixty-five dollars to spare. Alongside her new life in Boston she tells the story of her parents' marriage, Catholic father and Jewish mother, of her mother's death when she was twelve, and of the years of her father's paralysis. (Open Library)

Watches

Elgin watch: Laura's few possessions in Boston include a wooden box holding her father's watch and her mother's wedding ring. Late in the novel she takes out the silver watch, brings the inner band to her nose and breathes in the faint scent of his wrist; he wore it for as long as she can remember, and she pictures his left arm, tanned from resting on the car door on the drive to work in downtown Los Angeles, and the pale band the watch left when he took it off to shower. The text in this scan prints the maker's name in lower case. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: I took my father’s silver elgin watch from my wooden box on the nightstand, brought the inner band to my nose, and breathed in the faint scent of his sweaty wrist. He had worn this watch for as long as I could remember. (Kelly Dwyer, The Tracks of Angels, scan cataloged as Thorndike Press large print, 1994, p. 295; the wooden box is first unpacked on p. 16; Internet Archive scan OCR)