“With all the security hassles …” is what he says now, standing in the doorway. He shrugs—an apology of sorts, for what he’s long forgotten, probably his very presence. “They tell you to be at the airport at least an hour—”
She cuts him off. “Of course.” Then, “I should have asked you. Do you want any of Dad’s clothes? He’d want you to have whatever—”
“God, no.” And then softer, “I couldn’t, you know?”
He comes into the room then and awkwardly puts an arm around Trudy’s shoulders. “You’ll be all right.” Trudy doesn’t know if it’s a question or a statement, but she nods. The last thing she wants is for him to worry about her.
As he gets into the waiting taxi, Carter looks up to see his mother’s face in the living room window. She’s getting old, he thinks, but really it’s mostly the grief. Trudy is fifty-seven, but today she feels ancient.
She puts a hand up on the glass. He takes it as a wave and waves back before closing the car door.
And then she’s alone in the house. She knows she should walk back into the bedroom and finish the job she started. Trudy prides herself on finishing jobs. But she can’t. Instead she walks out into the backyard, and it’s here, despite the oppressive heat of late September, that she can draw the first deep breath of the day.
It is here she still feels Brian’s presence. While the house might be small, although it suited them fine, the backyard is enormous. She always called it “Brian’s work of art.” Now she sees it as a living testament to Brian’s kindness because you can’t garden without kindness. Brian taught her that.
The cosmos bloom because he seeded them. The wisteria climbs the arbor over the patio because he planted it more than twenty years ago. The camellia bushes, fifteen feet high now, thrive in the shade from the large oak tree.
The Costa Rican butterfly vines cover the back fence with purple-winged flowers set against dark green, heart-shaped leaves. Trudy remembers he had to special-order them and that it was touch and go before they took off.
The garden doesn’t look its best, even Trudy can tell that. In the San Gabriel foothills the summer heat has done its work. The more tender plants are burned and shriveled, the astromerias beaten back into the relative cool of the soil, the sunflowers drooping and brown. The raised vegetables beds hold ripening peppers and eggplant—they love the heat—but the heirloom tomato plants, more delicate, are stalks of crackling brown shafts.
She sees Brian here—digging and weeding and amending and cutting back and turning with an enormous grin that could have graced the face of a seven-year-old who’s just hit a home run to show her two arms full of peppers and tomatoes and trombone squash three feet long.
She remembers all the early evenings when she’d come home from work to find him planting the lettuce seedlings that would soon fill their salad bowl or pruning the bougainvillea before it brought down the trellis attached to the garage or spreading his homemade compost around the rosebushes. And she’d pour two glasses of wine and take a book and come out to the backyard.
He’d always turn with surprise—Is it so late already? And she’d take a chair and sit close to him and read to him as he finished whatever job he’d started. And the sun would go down and the light would turn purple and they would finish their wine and Brian would finally stand up, his gardening pants patched with mud, and they would be happy. Completely happy. Both of them.
She doesn’t know what she’s going to do about the garden—none of Brian’s gardening knowledge has rubbed off on her—but she knows she must deal with the clothes. And so she walks back into the house to finish.
ON MONDAY, TRUDY GOES BACK to work. Clementine, the assistant librarian, is horrified to see her.
“Oh no, Trudy,” pops out of her mouth before she thinks. “It’s too soon.”
“Who makes the rules, Clemmie? You?”
“But I thought you’d want to take maybe another week—”
“To do what? Mope around the house?”
“But you loved Brian” is what Clementine says.
Tears spring to Trudy’s eyes. “That’s not going to stop,” she says crossly. “That’s the problem, it doesn’t stop with death.”
Clementine doesn’t know what to say. She’s never managed to find a way to comfort Trudy about anything and especially not about anything this important, but she feels compelled to try. “You have all those wonderful memories—”
“That makes it worse, don’t you see? I want what I had. Just exactly what I had. Thirty-two years wasn’t enough, do you understand?”
Clemmie nods. She does. You could feel it when they were together—that they couldn’t get enough of each other. She often pondered that. Brian was nice enough, but he could be daunting to talk to—small talk, pleasantries, seemed to make him even stiffer and more uncomfortable. And as much as Clementine has gotten used to, even found an affection for Trudy, she still can see that Trudy is not the easiest of people to be around.
“What happened to the blue beanbag chair?” is what Trudy says now, her tone accusatory as she makes a beeline to the children’s section. She stands in the reading corner, where large floor pillows, a green and yellow rug, and small wooden chairs are set up in a loose semicircle.
Years ago Trudy divided the library’s modest space into a children’s section on the left and an adult section on the right. It escapes nobody’s notice that the children’s area is twice the size of the adults’ and much more thoughtfully furnished with several small worktables and chairs, a play area with Legos, a wooden train set, and a table that holds picture books open to the most enticing illustrations. And, of course, the reading corner, where every Friday afternoon Trudy transforms into the Story Lady, complete with medieval costume and rhinestone tiara.
By contrast the adult section looks bereft. There are the stacks, a few large rectangular tables, and two old computers, back to back, set up against a wall.
The double glass doors of the entry open directly to the transaction desk where Clemmie now sits, and behind it is a small glassed-in cubicle with one desk for her and one for Trudy.
“The blue beanbag chair?” Trudy demands again. “The one Graham always likes to sit in?”
“It split, Trudy. We had stuffing all over. Really, there was no saving it.”
“That’s what I get for taking any time off whatsoever. You threw it out, didn’t you?” And without waiting for an answer, “Perfectly good chair.”
Clementine opens her mouth to respond, then quickly closes it. Despite her youth—she’s young enough to be Trudy’s daughter—Clemmie has learned not to argue with Trudy. Softly now, Clementine says only, “I’m glad you’re back.”
When Trudy’s at the library, the hours go. They pass, and somewhere inside Trudy the rhythm of it lulls her into thinking that maybe she can get through the days. But then she has to go home. It is the stillness of the air in the house when she first opens the front door that does her in—it is Brian’s absence made tangible. And it assaults her, like the reverberations of a bomb detonated miles away but still terrifying. Her legs give out and she grabs the nearest chair, the one in the living room that looks out over the front garden. And she sits there, sometimes until the old-fashioned streetlights (which she’s always loved) go on and the neighbors are finished walking their dogs for the evening and the streets are still and dark.
It is only then that she can manage to stand up, walk into the bedroom, and climb into her side of the bed. She sleeps near the edge in the clothes she put on that morning, desperate not to roll over and feel the emptiness where Brian’s long body once lay. She cannot, she simply cannot, confront the loss every night of his arms, which enfolded her body and made her feel, if only for those hours, as if the world were a safe and generous place.
They were an oddly matched pair, Trudy short and round, Brian resembling a whooping crane with all the angles and odd posturing that those birds employ. They never saw the mismatch. Trudy found in Brian an unu
sual grace, and Brian was always reassured that Trudy fit so easily into his embrace.
They were the sort of couple that most people didn’t understand—the attraction, the connection, the longevity. She’s so caustic, it was often said, such a brusque sort of person. He was so quiet, that’s the first thing people noticed. The sort of guy who could sit in a crowded café—in fact could often be found at a window table at Sully’s Coffee on Fremont Street—head down over his laptop, oblivious to his surroundings, startling if you happened to say hello to him. A detail sort of guy, people would say, precise, as befit someone who restores historical buildings. Brian relished spending weeks matching replacement tile colors to the original hue, painstakingly uncovering crown moldings under decades of paint, preserving creaky window hinges that only he understood were beautiful.
This is where his architectural degree from the University of Southern California got him—a career in historical restoration. Instead of creating new buildings as he had once envisioned, he spent his days preserving and making beautiful what had been neglected and overlooked. He eventually made peace with the way things had worked out, never quite understanding why his own visions had never been enough.
He had struggled as a young architect, finding the give-and-take process of designing and reworking and adapting and redesigning a mystery. Clients complained to the head of his firm that he didn’t seem to listen to them or that the new drawings had nothing to do with what they had discussed. Brian was always baffled by these comments. He had tried, he really had, to give them what they wanted, but collaboration was not his strong suit. He took their corrections and began to alter the blueprints, but somehow, during the rethinking and the redrawing, the concerns of the clients seemed to vaporize into thin air and the drawings took on a life of their own. Brian was frequently astonished at the finished product but usually also very pleased. It was as if he had been in a trance, a creative maelstrom, as he drew, and then, suddenly, here was an entirely new design. Wonderful, he always felt. His clients were more often than not bewildered.
Gradually he found his way into a field where he was more anchored. The building dictated its needs and Brian complied. And it was all right, limiting in a way that creating from wishes had not been, but comforting nonetheless. Brian found beauty and satisfaction in restoration and relief in not having to disappoint clients.
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 m
uch 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.
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