Read Online The Clock Winder by Anne Tyler - Free Book Online Page B

the seat beside her. The two of them looked something alike, both scruffy and ragged and lost in their separate trances. “We should be going,” Timothy said.
    “Oh, is it time?”
    “But it wouldn’t hurt to put a dress on.”
    Elizabeth shrugged and uncoiled from the couch. “All right, back in a minute,” she said, and padded out of the room in her rundown moccasins. She left behind her a silence that spread and hardened, until Mrs. Emerson came to herself and sat straighter in her chair.
    “I was just thinking,” she said. “This is the first Christmas we’ll be spending without your father.”
    “That’s true,” said Timothy.
    “He always did love Christmas so. Just like a child.”
    “I remember he did.”
    Matthew said nothing at all, although he was the one who had been closest to their father. Sometimes Timothy had trouble even picturing what their father had looked like. He was a forgettable man. He had come up from nothing, from nowhere, married a Roland Park debutante and made a fortune in real estate—a line of work so beneath notice that no one had ever thought of suggesting it for his sons, least of all Mr. Emerson himself. Only strangers considered him important. “At the settlement on our house,” Timothy had once heard someone say, “things got so tangled I thought theynever
would
straighten out. Fortunately I happen to know Billy Emerson personally. I just popped in his office and said, ‘Billy—’ “—as if Billy Emerson were a name worth dropping. That conversation had made Timothy stop and think. Was there something about his father that he had overlooked? Something he should reconsider? But his father’s only talent, after all, was for making money. Money sprang up around whatever he touched, a fact that he seemed to take for granted. He never mentioned it, at least not to his family. “Money is essential,” Mrs. Emerson said, “but not important.” Her children had no trouble understanding her.
    “When you were all little,” Mrs. Emerson said now, “he used to take you to visit Santa Claus. Do you remember that? Urging you all to make lists beforehand, practically sitting in Santa’s lap himself just to overhear what you asked for. And all of you so hard-headed you never believed in Santa for an instant, not a one of you. Remember, Matthew?”
    But if Matthew remembered he didn’t say so. He was slumped in one corner of the couch, examining the helmet Elizabeth had left behind. He straightened the chin-strap, tucked the ear-flaps in, pulled them out again and then held the helmet up on the tip of a finger to frown at it.
    “He would have had that yard lit up like the Fourth of July, if I hadn’t begged him not to,” Mrs. Emerson said. “Always so fond of Randolph. Rudolph. The reindeer. I don’t know why. And birthdays! How he loved birthdays!” She narrowed her eyes at Timothy, who shifted his weight uneasily. “I don’t suppose you remember what day it is tomorrow,” she said.
    “It’s my birthday,” said Timothy.
    “It’s your birthday. Andrew’s and your birthday. Will you be spending it with us?”
    “I don’t think so, Mother.”
    “Andrew
likes birthdays.” She pulled off a ruby ring and twisted it in the firelight. “He always sends me a dozen roses, thanking me for having him.”
    “How do you know? Maybe he’s congratulating you.”
    “You
would be.” She shoved the ring back on. “I used to give you double birthday parties, remember that?”
    “Yes,” said Timothy, and remembered Andrew, thin and frantic and overexcited, aiming a sputtery breath at his side of the cake, suffering even then from some jerkiness of mind which Timothy had feared a twin could catch like a cold.
    “I sent him his presents in plenty of time,” said Mrs. Emerson. “How is school going, dear?”
    For what
she
feared was that twins had to split a single share of intelligence between them—something she had read in a long-ago ladies’ magazine and never