Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [106]
By Saturday morning, Mrs. Emerson had grown more adept with the walker. She had turned it into an extension of herself, like her little gold pen or her tortoise-shell reading glasses—lifting it delicately, with her fingertips, setting it down almost soundlessly. “Now we can go out,” Elizabeth told her. She flung open the double doors off the sunporch and then went ahead, without looking back at Mrs. Emerson. “I think—” Mrs. Emerson said.
“Aren’t you planting any annuals this year?”
Mrs. Emerson moved out into the yard. Elizabeth heard the barely perceptible clink of screws against aluminum, but still she didn’t look around. She walked on ahead, sauntering in an aimless way so that it wouldn’t seem she was deliberately slowing down. “We could pick up some marigolds,” she called back.
“I fool so—so—”
Unseen, Mrs. Emerson’s struggle for words seemed more difficult. Elizabeth winced and held herself rigid, staring at a flowerbed.
“Gillespie. I fool so—”
“Take your time,” Elizabeth told her. “I’m not in any hurry.”
“I fool so clumsy,” Mrs. Emerson said.
“Oh, well. That’ll pass.”
She ambled toward a trellis, poking stray weeds with the toe of her moccasin. “Plantain is taking your yard over,” she said. “Something’s wrong with your grass. Don’t you ever feed it anymore?”
She turned and found Mrs. Emerson smiling at her, with the pale yellow sunlight softening her face.
While Mrs. Emerson napped, Elizabeth wound all the clocks. She nailed up a kitchen spice rack that was dangling crazily by one corner. She dragged the aluminum ladder out from under the veranda and stood on it to clean the gutters, until Matthew found her there. “I thought I told you not to do that,” he said. He held onto the ladder, steadying it, while she took swipes at damp black leaves that had rotted into solid clumps. “This isn’t your job any more,” he said. “And it isn’t safe. Will you let me take over, now?” The force he put into his words traveled through his hands and shook the rungs, so that she felt she was standing on something alive. When she descended with an armload of twigs it was he who moved the ladder to a new position and climbed it, and Elizabeth who held it steady. “You were supposed to be mowing the grass,” she called up to him.
“Never mind, I’ll get to it later.”
They were at the back of the house, above the steepest part of the lawn, and when she looked down the hill and then up at Matthew he seemed dizzyingly high. How old was this ladder, anyway? Did it have to shake so? What was that flimsy twanging sound? She leaned forward until she was braced full length along its slant, with her arms woven through the rungs and her head hanging down to study her feet. When Matthew shifted his weight, a tremor ran through the metal like a pulse.
For supper that night, Mrs. Emerson came into the dining room. They lit candles to celebrate. She sat in her old chair at the head of the table, her back beautifully straight, her right hand folded in her lap while she managed her fork with her left. If she was surprised to see Andrew’s place empty, she didn’t show it. When Matthew offered her more meat she said, “No. Ask—ask—” and waved her hand toward the kitchen. Mary went out and there were low murmurs; then she came back in. “No, thank you,” she told Matthew. She threw a quick, embarrassed look at Elizabeth, who hardly noticed. Now that she had spent the afternoon repairing things, Elizabeth was thinking like a handyman again. She was making a mental note of the knobs on the corner cupboard, both of which had come off. They were sure to be in the silver candy bowl on the top shelf. How many times had she fished them out of that bowl and fitted them back on? She knew exactly how they would feel in her hand, the chipped, rounded edges pressing into her thumb and the way the left one always went on crooked unless she was very careful. She seemed to have memorized