Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [104]
“Andrew? I didn’t even know he was here.”
“He’s going back on Sunday.”
Nobody pretended to find it odd that he should be eating in the kitchen.
That night, from the army cot that had been set up for her on the sunporch, she heard Andrew cruising the house in the dark. He slammed the refrigerator door, creaked across floorboards, scraped back a dining room chair. He carried some kind of radio with him that poured out music from the fifties—late-night, slow-dance, crooning songs swelling and fading as he passed through rooms, like a bell on a cat’s collar. In the morning when she went upstairs his door was tightly shut, sealed-looking. When she returned from the library with a stack of historical romances for Mrs. Emerson she found florists’ roses by the bed—nothing any of the others would have thought of buying—and the smell of an unfamiliar aftershave in the air. He ate his lunch in the kitchen. That weighty, surreptitious clinking cast a gloom over the dining room, but no one mentioned it. “We seem to be missing the butter,” Elizabeth said, and Mary rose at once, letting a fork clatter to her plate, as if she feared that Elizabeth would go out to the kitchen herself. “Sit still, I’ll get it,” she said. But Elizabeth hadn’t even thought of going. She avoided Andrew as much as he did her. Otherwise, even in a house so large, they would have had to bump into each other sometime. She kept an ear tuned for the sound of his approach, and circled rooms where he might be. Why should she bother him, she asked herself, if he didn’t want her around? But she knew there was more to it than that: she didn’t want him around, either. He had passed judgment on her. Once or twice, during the afternoon, she caught glimpses of him as he crossed the living room—a flash of his faded blue shirt, a color she associated with institutions—and she averted her face and hunched lower in her chair beside Mrs. Emerson. She should have gone right out to him, of course. “Look here,” she should have said. “Here I am. Elizabeth. You know I’m in the house with you. I feel so silly pretending I’m not. Why are you doing this? Or why not just go back to New York, if you can’t bear to see me?” But she already knew why. He had summed her up. He was afraid to leave his family in her hands. He alone, of all the Emersons, knew that she was the kind of person who went through life causing clatter and spills and permanent damage.
A man from an orthopedic supply house delivered an aluminum walker. It sat by Mrs. Emerson’s bed most of Friday afternoon, but she made no move to use it. “Try, just try it,” Mary said. Mrs. Emerson only sent it slit-eyed glances full of distrust. She felt strongly enough about it to frame a very complicated sentence about walkers reminding her of fat old ladies in side-laced shoes, which made Elizabeth laugh. “You’re right, come to think of it,” she said. Mary frowned at her. When they were alone she said, “Elizabeth, I hope you’ll encourage Mother a little. The doctor says she’ll be back to normal in no time if she’ll just take things step by step.” “Oh, she’ll be all right,” Elizabeth said. And she was. With no one watching, with Elizabeth’s back deliberately turned, Mrs. Emerson looked at the walker more closely and finally reached out to test its weight with one hand. Within a few hours, she had allowed herself to be lifted to a standing position. She clomped around the sunporch, leaning heavily on the walker and puffing. Elizabeth read a magazine. “I think—” Mrs. Emerson said.
“You should probably get some rest,” Elizabeth said. She had figured out by now how to carry on their conversations. As soon as she got the gist of a sentence she interrupted, which sounded rude but spared Mrs. Emerson the humiliation of long delays or having words supplied for her. It seemed to work. Mrs. Emerson released the walker, and Elizabeth closed her magazine, helped Mrs. Emerson back to bed, and took her slippers off. “Before supper