Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [105]
“But I—”
“Yes, but the more you practice the sooner you’ll be free of the walker.”
Mrs. Emerson closed her mouth and nodded.
Matthew and his mother and Elizabeth went over Mrs. Emerson’s checkbook together. Mrs. Emerson wanted Elizabeth to pay bills and keep her records; she had had Elizabeth’s signature cleared at the bank. “But why?” Elizabeth asked her. “You can write that much. Why me?” She felt herself sinking into some kind of trap, the trap she had been afraid of when she first said no to coming back. “I’ll only be here six weeks, remember,” she said.
“Oh well,” said Matthew, “I suppose it’s tiring for her, dealing with all this.”
But Elizabeth was still watching Mrs. Emerson. “Six weeks is all the leave I have,” she said. “That’s understood. Margaret told me so.”
Mrs. Emerson merely aligned a stack of envelopes. She moved her lips, forming no words, pretending it was the stroke that kept her from speaking.
Matthew smoothed open the pages of the budget book and explained how it was kept—a page for every month, an entry for every expense, however small. Matches, stamps, cleaning fluid. Her children thought of the book as a joke. Matthew showed Elizabeth the first page, started two years ago: “This book, 69¢; envelope for this book, 2¢.” He pointed it out silently, smiling. Elizabeth barely glanced at it. “Why couldn’t you do this?” she asked him. “You’re here all the time.”
“But I won’t be after Sunday.” “Why? Where are you going?”
“Well, I have to get back to work. I can only stop by in the evenings.”
She looked up and found him watching her. His glasses had slipped down his nose again. His shoulder just brushed hers. He smelled like bread baking, and always had, but until now she had forgotten that. Caught off guard, she smiled back at him. Then Mrs. Emerson cleared her throat, and Elizabeth moved over to sit on the foot of the bed.
All Friday evening she worked on the bills, staying close by Mrs. Emerson in case questions arose. “Who is this Mr. Robbins? Why the two dollars? Where is this bill they say you’ve overlooked?” She decided that budget books were more revealing than diaries. Mrs. Emerson, who had been born rich, worried more about money than Elizabeth ever had. Her business correspondence was full of suspicion and penny-counting, quibbling over labor hours, threatening to take her business elsewhere, reminding everyone of contracts and estimates and guarantees. Her bills were from discount stores and cut-rate drug companies, some of them clear across the country, and to their trifling amounts interest rates and penalties had been tacked on month after month while Mrs. Emerson hesitated over paying them. Her checks were from an inconvenient bank at the other end of town—lower service charges, Matthew said. Yet Elizabeth found a seventy-dollar receipt from a health food store, and a sixty-dollar bill for a bathrobe. She whistled. Mrs. Emerson said, “What, what—”
“Your spending is all cock-eyed,” Elizabeth told her.
“I worry—”
“I would, too. What kind of bathrobe costs sixty dollars? Health food! You can live in perfect health on forty-nine cents a day, did you know that? For breakfast you have an envelope of plain gelatin in a glass of Tang, that’s protein and vitamin C, only you have to drink it fast before the gelatin sets. For lunch—”
“But stone-ground—”
“Fiddle,” said Elizabeth. “And forty-watt lightbulbs, so you’ll ruin your eyes and need to buy new glasses. I’ll have to change all the bulbs in this house, now. And five cents postage to save four cents on aspirin.”
“I worry—”
“But what for? You never used to.”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Emerson said clearly. Then she slumped against the pillow and started plucking at her sheet. Worry radiated from her in zig-zags that Elizabeth could almost see. Crotchety lines were digging in across her forehead—just what Mr. Emerson had set up all these trust funds to keep her from, never dreaming that they would be no comfort. “Oh, well,” said Elizabeth, sighing. She tapped Mrs. Emerson’s hand lightly and then went back