Tell Me One Thing (20 page)

And he was not a man to complain. There was about him that sort of Midwestern stoicism, a practical quality that embraces what is and doesn’t pine for what could have been. Trudy struggles with that now but finds nothing in her life worth embracing and everything worth pining for.

The only thing that propels her out of the house in the morning is the certainty that staying home would be worse. She has nowhere free of pain, but at least at the library she has to pretend, and that pretense carries her through the majority of the day. People marvel at how she’s coping, really, since she and Brian were so close. It’s amazing, they say, that she’s doing so well. But none of those people follow her home and almost none of them call to see how she is, and even neighbors on Lima Street hesitate to ring her bell or bring over a newly baked banana bread or cookies. Trudy has never invited those sorts of easy neighborly exchanges. She’s not one to stop on the street and ask after children or comment on the beauty of the first roses of the season in someone’s yard or exchange gossip about the new restaurant filling the vacant spot on Banyon Street.

And so she is left alone. Carter calls dutifully every Sunday afternoon. And Trudy assures him that she’s fine. And since he wouldn’t know what to do if she weren’t, he gratefully gets off the phone after five uncomfortable minutes of descriptions of the amount of snow they’ve had that week or the fall in temperatures predicted to be below the freezing mark. Trudy thinks of those weekly calls as “the weather report.” She has no idea what the weather is going to be in Southern California, but she’s up to date on New Hampshire.

•  •  •

FALL FINALLY COMES AFTER A SCORCHING
September and October. It took Trudy quite a while to realize that in Southern California, October can be as hot as July, only with the near certainty of wildfires breaking out on the hillsides from Santa Barbara to San Diego, thickening the air with mustard-yellow clouds of ash, making it painful to draw a deep breath.

But November brings fall, with crisp nights that can dip into the forties or even the thirties and sparkling crystalline days of sun and bright, clean air. For the first time since last winter, Trudy reaches for a jacket in the front coat closet and finds Brian’s gardening windbreaker instead. She forgot about that closet when she was packing up his things back in September, and so here it is—blue, well worn, streaked with dirt down one sleeve. She puts it on—it comes to her knees—and zips it up. Her hands in the pockets find his gardening gloves, and she takes them out and stares at them. Caked with mud, they hold the curve of Brian’s fingers.

One in each hand, she puts them back in the two jacket pockets and holds the right glove with her right hand and the left one with her left. As she leaves the house for the short walk to the library, she feels she’s carrying a secret. Arms in Brian’s jacket, hands holding the imprint of his hands, she feels lighter. She also wonders, not for the first time since his death, if she’s going slightly crazy. But she wears the jacket every day, and Clementine manages not to comment on it.

When the rains come, it’s the holiday season. Carter doesn’t come home for any of it. Not for Thanksgiving—too short a time, the airfare’s too expensive—or Christmas—he’s going skiing. Trudy thinks he should have offered to even though she’s not sure she’d want him there, but she says nothing.

“Will you be all right?” he asks her on one of his punctual Sunday calls.

“I’m going to Clementine and David’s,” she says even though it’s a lie. She’s told Clementine she was meeting Carter in San Diego where her sister lives, that she’s driving down on Thursday night after they close the library for the long weekend—Christmas being on a Saturday this year—and that she won’t be back until late Sunday.

There’s nothing to do but hide her car in the garage, pull the drapes on the house windows that face the street, and lie low for the three days. She can’t have someone see her—Sierra Villa is just the sort of small town where somebody would—and report back to Clemmie that she lied about having somewhere to go for Christmas. Clementine has a readily available look of pity. “Oh, the poor thing” is her standard response to a child whose mother speaks harshly to him, or to a toddler who sports a large bandage over a skinned knee. The last thing Trudy wants is for that solicitude to be directed her way.

On Friday morning when she awakes, she sees no reason to get out of bed. She can’t leave the house. She can’t even walk down her front path to pick up her copy of the
L.A. Times
, lying there in its plastic sleeve. She turns over and goes back to sleep. If she could, she’d sleep away the three days until it was time to get dressed and walk the four blocks to the library and begin her pretend life, which at this point is far better than her real one.

It’s the drone of the leaf blower that wakes her.
Aren’t those things illegal yet?
is her first conscious thought. She slaps the pillow over her head, but the whine insists on continuing. Even with all the windows shut, the noise is assaultive.
Is this what happens every Friday?
She’s always at the library.

Groaning, she gets out of bed, her body resisting this upright position. It wants nothing more than to dissolve back into the sheets, but the noise is like a prod. It forces her to the bedroom window. What she sees is not the gardener operating that noisy
contraption but, instead, a quiet man, bent over the soil. He’s kneeling, his back to her, but she can see that he cups tiny seedlings in his large hands and lays them gently into the soil of the planting bed next to the garage.

Brian’s planting the sweet peas
is her first thought, and she grabs the windowsill for support.
Of course it’s not Brian, idiot
, she tells herself.
This man looks nothing like Brian
. He is much shorter, his back is broader, and his skin is darker. And yet, there’s a whisper of Brian in the way he carefully unmolds the seedlings from their black plastic and places each tenderly, yes, tenderly, in the prepared soil, firming the dirt around the slender stem of each young plant with two fingers.

Trudy opens the back door and walks out. The man doesn’t hear her because the damned blower is still going somewhere in the front of the house. Trudy has to walk farther into the garden, and it’s then that she sees he’s fastened columns of white string to the garage wall, from soil to roof as Brian did every December—a place for the sweet peas to go is how Brian explained it. “They like to know what’s ahead for them,” he always said with a grin. “Don’t we all?”

“What are you doing!?” She tries to raise her voice over the mechanical drone, but the man doesn’t hear her. “Hello!” She doesn’t know his name. She’s never seen him before. Or she’s never noticed him. As she walks farther into the yard she sees that he’s young, probably in his thirties, and he wears a red sweatshirt that says
ARMANDO’S HOME GARDENS
across the back.

“Armando!” By now she’s yelling and then, suddenly, the whine from the leaf blower cuts off and she finds herself standing two feet from this strange man screaming his name.

He scrambles to his feet. “Mrs. Dugan …” And they look at each other. He sees a small, middle-aged woman with salt-and-pepper hair flying every which way as if she’s just gotten out of
bed and rumpled clothes as if she had slept in them and a face full of sorrow. That’s what he notices first—the sorrow.

She sees a broad, open face and thick, straight black hair cut short. Hispanic, Latino, she’s not sure which is the proper term these days. But it’s his eyes that hold her—they’re full of concern.

“I was sorry to hear about Mr. Brian. I haven’t seen you before to tell you.”

“You speak perfect English.”

He shrugs—it’s not quite true, he worries about his English still—and she wonders if she offended him. “Were you born here?”

“No, Mexico. I came when I was thirteen.”

Trudy looks at the garage wall, the sweet pea seedlings in the rich, brown dirt. “Brian always …” she starts and then can’t continue.

“I thought I would plant the sweet peas this year,” Armando says to her. “I thought, maybe, you’d want to see them cover the wall.”

“Yes,” she tells him. She realizes she wants very much to see the sweet peas blooming.

“I would have used netting, you know, plastic netting across the wall,” Armando tells her, comfortable, it now seems, with a lengthy conversation, “but Mr. Brian always liked to stretch the strings. It takes more time, but it’s the way he would have done it.” Another shrug. “I thought—he can’t do it, I’ll do it his way.”

All she can manage is a “thank you” even as it catches in the back of her throat. She has to get back to the house. She can’t have this conversation. She can’t discuss Brian with this young man.

Armando watches her walk across the yard.
How does a woman live with so much pain?
is what he thinks.

•  •  •

SPRING ARRIVES IN FEBRUARY
. When Brian used to tell his mother back in Ohio that bulbs begin to push up in February, that roses break out with their first red leaves, that fruit trees blossom white and pink popcorn in February, she refused to believe it. While the rest of the country is miserable in winter, Southern California sashays its way right into spring.

Across the backyard and the front planting beds daffodils, anemones, ranunculus, and narcissus seem to appear overnight where there was nothing but empty space. By March, the sweet peas are halfway up the garage wall. Trudy gets up every morning, puts on Brian’s windbreaker, holds her hands around his curved gloves, and walks the four blocks to the library. Nothing’s changed. All around her the natural world screams renewal, but she doesn’t notice it.

The only thing she looks forward to is her Friday afternoon turn as the Story Lady. She gets to pretend on top of the pretense of her whole life now. It’s the highlight of the week for Trudy and for many of the exhausted mothers of Sierra Villa who have preschool children and crave an hour off.

By three o’clock the library has filled up with children aged two to six. Usually once the kids hit seven, they won’t be caught dead listening to the Story Lady.

Trudy makes a production out of it. The costume she found at the Rose Bowl Flea Market. It must have been made for some movie, she thinks, because it’s intricately embroidered with silver thread, and fake pearls, and yards of flowing chiffon. The tiara Trudy wears she found at Walgreens, but the cachet of the dress extends to the insubstantial crown and makes it look like the real thing.

All the children are seated on one of the tiny chairs or big, floppy pillows arranged around a brightly painted big chair that Brian created for the Story Lady one Sunday. It almost looks like a
throne, but right now it is empty, waiting for the children to settle so that Trudy can make her big entrance.

Clemmie manages to hush the last few whispers and then announces to the audience, “And now, straight from Fairy Tale Lane, our own Story Lady!” And she turns with a flourish and a sweep of her hand in the direction of the library’s bathroom—where else could Trudy transform herself?—and there are “ooh’s” and “aah’s” as Trudy floats in her floor-length gown and diamond tiara to the reading circle.

“Today,” Trudy tells the children, who gaze up at her with expectant faces, “I’m going to read you a story called
Wylie Makes a Wish.”

The mothers, sitting at the wooden tables in back of the story circle, lean back, take out their cell phones or iPads, make grocery lists, sip their Starbucks. All heave a sigh—a free hour while Trudy works her magic.

“ ‘Wylie wanted many things. He wanted a baseball mitt and chocolate-chip cookies for breakfast and swimming lessons in the summer. But most of all, he wanted a grandpa.’ ” Trudy turns the book toward the children so they can see the picture of Wylie. He’s about five and has freckles and a thatch of red hair across his forehead. Above his head spin pictures of a glove, the cookies, and an outdoor pool.

“Sometimes my mommy lets me eat cookies for breakfast,” pipes up one four-year-old with a mass of tiny black ringlets haloing her face, and a woman with the identical hair slides down in her undersize chair, her face blooming beet red. “Once,” she murmurs, “I let her once.” Clemmie, patrolling the perimeter of the reading circle, pats the woman on the shoulder.

“ ‘Wylie had two grandmas,’ ” Trudy continues. “ ‘One he called Nana and the other he called Toots because she didn’t think she was old enough to be a grandma, and they were both
very nice. But they weren’t grandpas. It wasn’t the same. Not at all!’ ”

The next picture shows a very stubborn Wylie with his arms crossed against his chest and his jaw set with indignation.

“ ‘ “Why don’t you make a wish for one?” his mother said as a last resort since no amount of reasoning seemed to make a difference. “Yes!” Wylie yelled. “That will do the trick!” And so that night when his father was putting him to bed and he saw the first shining star, Wylie wished for a grandpa.’ ”

Now Trudy rests her forearms on her knees and turns the book so the children can see Wylie wishing on his star. “ ‘Wylie believed that wishes come true …’ ”

Trudy pauses for a fraction of a second
—if only
is what she hears romping through her brain—and then continues. “ ‘… and that because he wanted a grandpa more than anything, he would get one.’ ”

“That’s right,” says a very serious child, nodding as he speaks. “If you wish hard enough, you get it.”

Fat chance!
Trudy wants to scream but, of course, she doesn’t. She starts the next page. “ ‘Wylie worked very hard at his wishing,’ ” only now tears are falling from Trudy’s eyes, straight from her eyes into her lap. She doesn’t seem to know that this is happening. The little boy with the serious eyes sitting near her puts a hand on Trudy’s leg in comfort.

“ ‘And he kept opening the front door to see if a grandpa had arrived,’ ” Trudy manages to get out, though her voice is trembling. “ ‘But the front step was always empty. No one was there.’ ”

And Trudy puts the book down on her lap, her face in her hands, and begins to sob. Huge, breath-shattering sobs that thunder from her clenched body as if propelled by an avalanche—an avalanche of grief.