Anne Tyler - The Clock Winder

“Have you lost all common sense? How much is this going to cost you?”

“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said.

But she found out, as soon as the call was finished. She dialed the operator, who said, “Eight-sixty,” and then “Ma’am?” when Elizabeth laughed. “Ho there, Timothy,” she said. “Can you hear me? I just made an eight-sixty phone call.”

Silence.

“Timothy? Now I’m going to call California station-to-station. I’m going to tell some store they delivered the wrong package, and get switched from department to department to—”

Something was thrown against the door. Then he kicked the door until it shook, and then he turned the key and rattled the knob. It was still locked from inside, but Elizabeth didn’t open it. “Damn it, let me in,” he said.

“You’re beginning to get on my nerves,” she told him.

“Do I have to break the door down? I want to talk to you.”

“Say please.”

“I’m warning you, Elizabeth.”

“Pretty please?”

There was a pause. Then he said, “I’m pointing a gun at you.”

“Ho ho, I’m scared stiff.”

“I’m pointing Andrew’s gun. I’ll shoot straight through the door.”

“Oh, for goodness sake,” Elizabeth said. The whole situation was getting out of hand. She slid off the bed and went over to open the door. “You’re lucky I’m not the hysterical type,” she said, brushing past him. “How do you know that’s not loaded? Put it down. Send it out with the garbage.”

She stopped off by the couch to slip into her moccasins, and then she headed out to the entrance hall. It was a pity she had no money; she would have to thumb her way home. Or take a taxi, and have Mrs. Emerson pay for it.

Behind her there was a click, a metallic, whanging sound. She wheeled around.

“Stop there,” Timothy said.

But it wasn’t at her the gun was pointing, it was at himself, at an upward angle near the center of his chest. His wrist was turned in a sharp, awkward twist. “Timothy Emerson,” she said. “Did you just pull that trigger? What if there’d been bullets in it? Of all the—”

“No,” Timothy said, “I think I took the safety catch off.”

She started walking toward him, slowly and steadily. Timothy kept his eyes fixed on her. His hand was shaking; she saw a glimmer trembling on the gun barrel. “Stop there,” he said. But an edge of something was moving into his face, and she could tell that in a moment there would be a shift in the way he saw all this: he would laugh. Didn’t he always laugh? So she kept chewing her gum all the way across the room, the eternal handyman, unafraid. “This family is going to drive me up a wall someday,” she told him. “What did you do before I came along? What will you do when I’m gone?” Then she lunged.

Her hand closed on his. She felt the short blond hairs prickling her palm. There was an explosion that seemed to come from somewhere else, from inside or behind him, and Timothy looked straight at her with a face full of surprise and then slid sideways to the floor.

It was all up to Matthew. It was Matthew who made the funeral arrangements, brought his mother endless cups of tea that he had brewed himself, met his brother and sisters at the airport and carted them home, answering their questions as he drove. “But why—?” “How could he—?” “I really don’t know,” Matthew said. “I’ll tell you what little I’ve pieced together, that’s all I can do.”

Peter came from college, looking young and scared with his hair slicked back too neatly. Mary flew out from Dayton with her little boy; Margaret came from Chicago and Melissa from New York. Andrew had not been told. He would arrive on Saturday, as he had planned before all this happened. Then they could sit him down and lay comforting hands on his shoulders and tell him gradually, face to face. The funeral would be over by then, but just barely, which made Matthew picture his family burying Timothy in haste. They didn’t really, of course. There was the usual waiting period, with the usual tears and boredom and the sense that time was just creeping until they could get this business finished. They wore out the subject of Timothy; they began to feel bruised and battered at the sound of his name. People kept paying formal calls, requiring them to make hushed and grateful conversation that did not sound real even though it was. No one ate regular meals. No one went to bed at regular hours. Any room Matthew went into, at any time of day, he might find several members of his family sitting in a silent knot with coffeecups on their knees. Sometimes a piece of laughter broke out, or an accidental burst of enthusiasm as they veered to other subjects. Then they caught themselves, checked the laughter, dwindled off in mid-sentence, returning to a silence that swelled with inappropriate thoughts.

It used to be Elizabeth who managed this family. Matthew had never realized that till now. She was the one they had leaned on — he and his mother and Timothy, and the house itself, whose rooms had taken on her clear sunny calmness and her smell of fresh wood chips. Only now, when she was needed most, Elizabeth had changed. With the others present she looked bewildered and out of place, like any ordinary stranger who had stumbled into the midst of a family in mourning. Mrs. Emerson called on her continually, but she answered with her mind on something else. Her care-taking had descended to the most literal kind: errand-running, lawn-sprinkling, lugging down more toys for Mary’s Billy. At twelve o’clock one night Matthew found her on a stepladder in the pantry, changing lightbulbs. She wandered through crowded rooms winding clocks or carrying table-leaves, her face set and distant, and while Father Lewis was in the parlor offering his condolences she stayed on the sunporch, yanking weather-stripping from all the windows.

“Why are you working so hard?” Matthew asked her.

“This is my job,” she said, and dumped tangles of cracked stripping into a garbage can that she had brought in from outside.

“So that’s Mother’s famous handyman,” said Mary. “Is she always so grim?”

“No, not ever,” Matthew said.

Then he removed his glasses and rubbed the inner corners of his eyes. Mary looked at him a moment but said nothing more.

Late Friday afternoon, Elizabeth came into the kitchen while Matthew was making a sandwich. She was in her oldest jeans, carrying a curved pruning saw that she set on a counter. “I thought you would be the one to tell,” she said. “After the funeral I’m going home for good.”

Matthew spread jam over peanut butter and patted another slice of bread down on top of it. Then he said, “I don’t know what I’d do if you left.”

“I think I’d better.”

“Is it because of the trouble with the police?” “No.”

“Mother’s going to rely on you to keep her going, these next few months.”

“I don’t want to be relied on,” Elizabeth said.

Matthew laid the sandwich carefully on a plate and offered it to her. She shook her head. He set the plate on the drainboard. “If you would just give it a little more thought,” he said.

“I have.”

“Or if you held off till things here were settled. Then I could come with you. I’m still planning on it.” “No,” she said.

“Well, all right. Not now. But as soon as you want me to.”

She said nothing. He laid a hand over hers, over cool rough knuckles, and she kept still until he removed it. Then she picked up her saw and left.

“Where is Elizabeth?” Mrs. Emerson said. “Why don’t I see her around any more?”

“She’s out cutting that hanging branch, Mother.”

“That’s not what I need her for.”