Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [17]
“Or I might come with you. Is that all right? I’m always on the lookout for something to do while I’m home.”
He hadn’t been home at all yet, but Elizabeth didn’t bother reminding him. “Fine,” was all she said, and she reached under her paint-shirt to pull, from her jacket pocket, a set of keys dangling from Mrs. Emerson’s lacy gold initials.
The car was a very old Mercedes with a standard shift that tended to stick and make grinding noises. Elizabeth was used to it. She drove absentmindedly, keeping the clutch halfway in and watching the scenery more than the road, but Timothy changed positions uneasily every time she shifted gears. He kept one hand tight on the dashboard, the other along the back of the seat. “Have you been driving long?” he asked her. “Since I was eleven,” Elizabeth said. “I haven’t had time to get a license yet, though.” She swerved neatly around an on-coming taxi. The roads here in the woods were so narrow that one car always had to draw aside when it met another, but Elizabeth made a game out of never actually coming to a full stop. She ducked in and out of parking spaces, raced other drivers to open sections of the road and then rolled easily toward their bumpers as they backed to let her by. “I can see that I’m making you nervous,” she told Timothy, “but I’m a better driver than you realize. I’m trying to save the brakes.”
“I’d rather you saved us,” Timothy said, but he loosened his grip on the dashboard. Then they hit Roland Avenue, and he settled back in his seat. “I don’t suppose you know if Andrew’s coming,” he said.
“He’s not.”
“I was afraid to ask Mother on the phone. She can go on and on about things like that. But Matthew will be there.”
“Nope.”
“What, no Matthew? He practically lives there.”
“He used to,” said Elizabeth. “Then your mother said he was wasting his life on a dead-end job. Running a dinky country newspaper and getting all of the work but none of the credit. I don’t know why.”
“The owner drinks,” Timothy said.
“She said for him to come back when he got a decent job. He never did. It’s been three weeks now.”
“Matthew is the crazy one in the family,” Timothy said.
“Oh, I thought that was Andrew.”
“Well, him too. But Matthew is downright peculiar: I don’t believe he hears a word Mother says to him. He visits her every week, no matter what she’s up to. Brings tomatoes he’s grown himself, stays an hour or two.”
“Not any more he doesn’t,” Elizabeth said. “Will he get another job, do you think?”
“No.”
“Well, what then? Won’t he ever come home again?”
“Oh, sooner or later Mother will give up. Then he’ll wander in again and that’ll be the end of it.”
“I doubt if he’s crazy at all,” Elizabeth said.
She parked haphazardly in a space barely longer than the car, and they climbed out. Standing on the curb she peeled her paint-shirt off, shut it in the car, and brought a curling vinyl wallet from her jacket pocket. “I wonder how much turkeys cost,” she said.
“Let me pay. It was my idea.”
“No, I have enough.”
“Aren’t you saving up for college or something?” “Not really,” Elizabeth said.
The grocery store was vast and gloomy, even under the fluorescent ice-cube trays that hung from the ceiling. There was a smell of damp wood, cardboard, cracker crumbs. They had barely stepped inside when someone said, “Timothy Emerson!”—a sharp-edged woman in a fur stole, one of Mrs. Emerson’s tea guests. “Don’t tell me you’re honoring your mother with a visit,” she said. “Did she recognize you?” She flung out a little peal of laughter. Elizabeth slid past her and went over to the meat counter. “I’d like a turkey,” she told the butcher. “Kind of fat.”
“Fifteen pounds? Twenty?”
“I wouldn’t know. Could you let me hold one?”
He disappeared into a back room. Mrs. Emerson’s friend could be heard all over the store. “… never known a braver woman, just so sweet and brave. Disappointments never faze her. I said, ‘Pamela,’ I said, ‘why don’t you sell that big old house and find yourself an apartment now that—’ ‘Oh no, my dear,’ she told me, ‘I’ll need all that