Hi,
As I understand, you do not wish to use AT89C52 and utilize its timer2 because the cost (for me it looks strange because here the diff is 1.15->1.30 USD).
Okay, so I can suggest you one more trick: use UART interrupt as a timer. Yeah! set its mode to fixed speed (for example, OSC/64), allocate one more byte as timer software counter and then just send bytes via SBUF. Each time when TI is set it calls UART ISR where you should clear TI, write another byte into SBUF and decrement your timer counter byte. When it is zero, reload counter value and execute needed part of code.
Good days!