Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [103]
“I want—”
“I’ll lay your pillow flat and leave you alone a while.”
“No!” said Mrs. Emerson.
Elizabeth thought a minute. “Do you want to sleep?” she asked.
Mrs. Emerson nodded.
“But you’d rather I stayed here.”
“Yes.”
Elizabeth put the chess pieces in their box, tipped her chair back, and looked out the window. She kept her hands still in her lap. From her months with Mr. Cunningham she had learned to lull people to sleep by being motionless and faceless, like one of those cardboard silhouettes set up to scare burglars away. Even when Mrs. Emerson tossed among the sheets, Elizabeth didn’t look at her. If she did, more words would struggle out. She imagined that coming back would have been much harder if Mrs. Emerson could speak the way she used to. Think of what she might have felt compelled to say: rehashing Timothy, explaining those years of silence, asking personal questions. She shot Mrs. Emerson a sideways glance, trying to read in her eyes what bottled-up words might be waiting there. But all she saw were the white, papery lids. Mrs. Emerson slept, nothing but a small, worn-out old lady trying to gather up her lost strength. Her hair was growing out gray at the roots. The front of her bathrobe was spotted with tea-stains—a sight so sad and surprising that for a moment Elizabeth forgot all about those students that she was missing. She rocked forward in her chair and stood up, but she watched Mrs. Emerson a moment longer before she left the room.
Matthew was in the kitchen, eating what was probably his breakfast. He had shaved and dressed. He no longer had that uncared-for look that he had worn asleep in the armchair, but his face was older than she remembered and a piece of adhesive tape was wrapped around one earpiece of his glasses. “Can I pour you some coffee?” he asked her.
“No, thank you.”
“How’s Mother?”
“She’s asleep.”
“How does she seem to you?” he asked her.
“Oh, I don’t know. Older.” She wandered around the kitchen with her arms folded, avoiding his eyes. She didn’t feel comfortable with him anymore. She had thought it would be easy—just act cheerful, matter-of-fact—but she hadn’t counted on his watching her so steadily. “Why are you staring?” she asked him.
“I’m not staring, you are.”
“Oh,” Elizabeth said. She stopped pacing. “Well, the house seems terrible to me,” she said. “Much worse off than your mother. How did it get so rundown? Look. Look at that.” She waved to a strip of wallpaper that was curling and buckling over the stove. “And the porch rail. And the lawn. And the roof gutters have whole branches in them, I’m going to have to see to those.”
“You’re not the handyman here anymore,” Matthew said.
She thought for a moment that he had meant to hurt her feelings, but then she looked up and found him smiling. “You have your hands full as it is,” he told her.
“When she’s napping, though. Or has visitors.”
“I’ve been trying to do things during the weekends. I mow the grass, rake leaves. But it’s a full-time job, I never quite catch up.” He looked down at his plate, where an egg lay nearly untouched. “Before she got sick I’d just finished cleaning out the basement,” he said “Shoveling it out. All that junk. Remember our wine?”
“Yes.”
“I found it in the basement six months after you left. White scum on the top and the worst smell you can imagine.”
“I wondered what you’d done with it,” Elizabeth said.
A younger, shinier Matthew flashed through her mind. “When the wine has aged we’ll go on a picnic,” he had said. “I’ll bring a chicken, you bring a …” As if that picnic had actually come about, she seemed to remember the sunlight on a riverbank and the flattened grass they sat on and the feel of Matthew’s shirt, rough and warm behind her as she leaned back to drink from a stoneware jug.
“What would it have tasted like, I wonder,” Matthew said.
She knew she should never have come back here.
The first time she realized that Andrew was home was at supper. They ate in the dining room—Elizabeth, the two sisters, Matthew, and Susan. Elizabeth kept hearing clinking sounds