Clock Winder - Anne Tyler [83]
“I’ll never get up for the wedding tomorrow. Are there going to be many guests?”
“No. I don’t know. Just whoever they invited.”
“Why was I invited?” Margaret said—something she never would have asked sober. But Elizabeth didn’t seem to mind. She straightened up from a pile of books, thought a while, and then said, “I don’t know,” and went back to work again. Margaret decided it was better than a lot of answers she could have been given.
Twice some people stopped by—a married couple with a gift, two boys with a bottle of champagne. The couple stayed only a minute and kissed Elizabeth when they left. The boys sat down for a beer. Margaret couldn’t remember seeing them go.
And meanwhile Elizabeth worked steadily on, clearing the room. Her clothes were the last thing she packed. She threw them into a steamer trunk and slammed the lid. “Done,” she said.
“How are you getting all this to Ellington?” Margaret asked.
“Dommie will move it in a truck, later on.”
“Dommie? Oh. You haven’t said anything about him,” Margaret said. “What’s he like? What’s he do?”
“He’s a pharmacist. He’s taking over his father’s drugstore.”
“Well, that’ll be nice.”
“How’s your family?” Elizabeth asked suddenly.
“They’re fine.”
“Everything going all right? Everyone the same as usual?”
“Oh, yes.”
Margaret’s mind was still on Dommie, trying to picture him. It wasn’t until several minutes later that Elizabeth’s questions sunk in. Had she wanted to hear about Matthew? There was no way of knowing. By then Elizabeth was making up the daybed, moving around with sheets and army blankets while Margaret watched dimly and sipped the last can of beer. “On the way down here,” Margaret said finally, “we passed so close to Matthew’s house I was tempted to stop in and see him.”
Elizabeth folded the daybed cover, slowly and silently.
“He never married, you know,” Margaret told her.
But all Elizabeth said was, “Didn’t he?” Then she put a pillowcase on a pillow and laid it at the head of the daybed. “Well, here’s where you sleep.”
“How about you?” Margaret said.
“I have a sleeping bag.”
She brought it out from the closet and unrolled it—a red one, so new that a label still dangled from the zipper-pull. “We’re supposed to go camping on our honeymoon,” she said.
“But you can’t just sleep on the floor. Why don’t we change places? You need to rest up for tomorrow.”
“I don’t mind the floor, it’s the ground that’s going to bother me,” Elizabeth said. “Old roots and stobs and crackling leaves.”
“Why are you going, then?”
“Dommie likes nature.”
“Doesn’t the bride have some say?”
“I did. I chose camping,” Elizabeth said. “You don’t know Dommie. He’s so sweet. He makes you want to give him things.”
“Well, still—”
“You want first go at the bathroom?”
“Oh. All right.”
She had thought she would fall into a stupor the minute she was in bed, but she didn’t. She lay on her back in the dark, watching the windowpane pattern that slanted across the ceiling. Music and faint voices drifted over from the main house. A screen door slammed; crickets chirped. On the floor Elizabeth breathed evenly, asleep or at least very relaxed, as if tomorrow were any ordinary day. Her white pajamas showed up blurred and gray—the same pajamas, probably, that she had worn back in Baltimore. There they had slept in Margaret’s old twin beds, with fragments of Margaret’s childhood lining the bookshelves and stuffed in the closet. And she had lain awake, just as now. She had been going over and over Timothy’s death—not yet wondering why he died, or picturing how, but just trying to realize that she would never again set eyes on him. Tonight he seemed faded and distant. The sadness