Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [46]
“I guess she thought it was a bad time to bother you.”
“No, she blames me for something. But now! To leave now! Why, I’ve been thinking of her as one of the family. I took her right in.”
“Maybe you could talk to her,” Matthew said.
“Oh, no. I couldn’t.”
“If she knew how you felt about it—”
“If she wants to leave, let her go,” said his mother. “I’m not going to beg her to stay.”
Then she settled herself in a flowered armchair, arranging her skirt beneath her, and pushed her bracelet back on her wrist and leaned forward with perfect posture to pour herself a cup of tea.
Matthew went downstairs and into the kitchen, where he found Peter eating the sandwich that had been on the drainboard. “Oh, sorry,” Peter said. “Was this yours?”
“I didn’t want it.”
“Just got to needing a little snack,” Peter said. He gulped down one more bite and then set the rest of the sandwich aside, as if he felt embarrassed at being hungry. He was forever embarrassed by something, or maybe that was just his age—nineteen, still unformed-looking, clomping around in enormous loafers bumping into people and saying the wrong things. He had come at the tail end of the family, five years after Melissa. The others had no more than a year between them and some of them less; they were a bustling foreign tribe, disappearing and reappearing without explanation, while Peter sat on the floor beside his rubber blocks and watched with surprised, considering eyes. Then the oldest ones were given quarters on the third floor, into which they vanished for all of their last years at home. They read in bed undisturbed, visited back and forth in the dead of night, formed pacts against the grownups. Peter stayed in the nursery, next door to his parents. No one ever thought to change the pink-and-yellow wallpaper. He grew up while their backs were turned, completely on his own, long after the third floor was emptied and echoing. Now when he came home on visits he bumped into doors and failed to listen when he was spoken to, as if he had given up all attempts at belonging here.
“Mother’s upset because Elizabeth is leaving,” Matthew said, trying to draw him into the family.
“Gee, that’s too bad. Who’s Elizabeth?” “Elizabeth. The handyman.”
“Oh. I guess she must think we’re a bunch of kooks after all that’s happened.”
“No, she—”
“Is that Elizabeth? I thought her name was Alvareen.”
“No—what? Whose name? Oh, never mind.”
Matthew left, bypassing the living room. He was tired of talk. He went out through the sunporch, a quiet place lit with diagonals of dusty orange light. Alvareen stood ironing a table cloth while tears rolled down her cheeks. (She had shown up two days in a row, on time, impressed by tragedy.) Margaret was curled on the windowseat reading a book and chewing on tight little cylinders that she had made from the page corners. Neither of them looked up as he passed.
“Elizabeth,” he said, standing under the poplar tree.
“Here I am.”
She sat on a branch above the one she had just cut off, leaning sideways against the trunk.
“Shall I help you down?”
“I like it here.”
“I’m going home now. I’m not coming back until the funeral.”
“Oh. All right.”
“Could you come down? I’d like to talk some things over with you.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Well, would you rather I stayed here? What do you want to do?”
“I want to sit in this poplar tree,” Elizabeth said.
He nodded, and stood around for a while with his hands in his pockets. Then he left.
Matthew’s house was out in the country, part of a rundown old farm that his father had somehow come into possession of. His family called it a shack, but it was more than that. It was a tiny two-story house, the front a peeling white, the other three sides unpainted and as gray as the rick-rack fence that separated it from the woods behind. To get there he had to leave the highway and drive down a rutted road that rattled the bones of his old car. At the end of the road he