Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [50]
“But how about Elizabeth?” Mrs. Emerson said.
“Elizabeth, oh. Does she eat with us?”
“I’ll get something later,” Elizabeth said. She was zigzagging across the front lawn, gathering the debris left by last night’s rainstorm. In church, in her beige linen dress, she had looked like anyone else, but there was nothing ordinary about her now when her arms were full of branches and rivulets of barky water were running down the wrinkles in her skirt.
“Is that girl all right?” Mary said. “You’d think she’d change clothes first.”
Billy was waiting on the top porch step, guiding his mother back with his intense, unswerving stare. Alvareen stood behind him in a shiny black party dress. “Dinner’s set,” she called. “Come on in, you poor souls, I got everything you’d wish for right on the table.” When Mrs. Emerson came near enough Alvareen patted her arm. “Now, now, it’s finished now,” she said. Mrs. Emerson said, “I’m quite all right, Emmeline.”
“Shows you’re not,” said Alvareen. “I’m Alvareen, not Emmeline, but don’t you mind. Come on in, folks.”
Then she led the way into the house, shaking her head and moving her lips, no doubt preparing what she would say to her family when she got home: “Poor thing was so tore up she didn’t know me. Didn’t know who I was. Called me Emmeline. Didn’t know me.” Behind her, Melissa stumbled against a step and laid one hand on Matthew’s arm, but so lightly that the stumbling seemed artificial. Margaret followed, swinging a weed that she had yanked from the roadside. Mary bent to scoop up Billy, and at the end of the line came Aunt Dorothy, talking steadily to Peter although he didn’t appear to be listening. “Now what I want to know is, who made the arrangements? Don’t you people believe in the old-fashioned way of doing things? First no wake, no one at the funeral home, just the remains waiting all alone. Then that scrappy little service with hymns I surely never heard of, and the casket closed so that I couldn’t pay my—why was the casket closed?”
“I asked it to be,” Matthew said. “I thought it would be easier.”
“Easier!” She paused in the doorway, her mouth open, a wrinkled, scrawny caricature of Mrs. Emerson. “Easier, you say! My dear Matthew, death is never going to be easy. We accept, we endure. We used to put them in the parlor. Now you’re telling me—or was he, um, I hope the bullet didn’t—”
Nobody rescued her. She closed her mouth and entered the house, leaving Peter horror-struck behind her. “Did it?” he whispered, and Matthew said, “No, of course not. Go on in.” (And pictured, clearer than Peter there before him, Timothy’s dead, toneless face, so solemn that it had to be a mockery—much worse than blood or signs of pain, although he never could have explained that to Peter.)
Alvareen stood scolding in the dining room. Nobody was coming straight to the table. They were milling in the hallway, or heading for bathrooms, or going off to put away hats and gloves. “You’re breaking my heart,” Alvareen said. “Here, little Billy, you’ll pay me mind.” She hoisted him into a chair with a dictionary on it and tied a napkin around his neck. He ducked his round yellow head to examine the tablecloth fringe. There was always something he was checking up on—as if he considered himself the advance scout for the grandchildren yet to be born. He peered at people suspiciously, drew back to study Mrs. Emerson