Tell Me One Thing

by Deena Goldstone

  “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.

  The mothers stir, sit up straighter, punch off their cell phones. What’s happening here? They weren’t really paying attention. But some of their children are crying now as well. This is a disaster runs through Clemmie’s mind as she moves to stand in front of Trudy.

  “The Story Lady …” she begins to explain, but Trudy stands up, hiccuping now with more sobs, and rushes out of the library, through the glass front doors and out onto the street. The children watch her with open mouths of astonishment.

  Trudy is mortified, terrified. What is happening to me? is the only coherent thought she’s able to manage before the sobbing picks up again, another round of anguished sounds escape from her throat as she runs down La Cruza Street, desperate to get away from the scene of her humiliation. She gasps for breath as she runs. Maybe she’s having a heart attack. Maybe’s she dying. She runs anyway.

  By the time she reaches her front door, the sobs have become whimpers and it feels as though her body has cracked open. Everything is shaking—her legs, her hands as she tries to turn the key in the front door lock, her chest as it searches for air.

  She manages to make it to the living room easy chair and pull herself into it. And she sits, staring at nothing, waiting for she doesn’t know what. She’s emptied out and stone cold and incapable of forming a thought or action.

  She h
as no idea how long she’s been sitting there when she sees the flatbed truck pull into her driveway and a man she doesn’t recognize begins to wrestle a bulky electric mower down onto the pavement. And then Armando gets out of the driver’s seat and goes to help.

  Trudy watches because she doesn’t believe she can stand up and move away from the window. She knows she can be seen, but she also doesn’t have the will to do anything about it.

  When the mower is on the grass and the other man has begun the back-and-forth trudging across the lawn with the machine, Armando looks up and sees her in the front window.

  The sounds of the two gardeners continue to wash over her—the lawn mower, the tinny scrape of the rake across the brick of the front path, one of them yelling in Spanish to the other. And then it’s quiet and Trudy thinks they may have left, but no, she hears the lawn mower start up again in the backyard and then she hears a loud rapping on the back door. She ignores it. It starts up again.

  Armando is standing on the back door stoop, knocking as loudly as he can over the lawn mower’s engine. Maybe she doesn’t hear me, he thinks, over the noise. Maybe he should try the front door, although he always used the back when he needed to ask Mr. Brian something.

  Trudy sees him come around the side of the house and take the straight brick path to the front door. He knocks. Waits. Knocks again. He knows she’s there and debates whether he should just leave her alone, but the picture of her sitting there, in that costume, staring at nothing, worries him.

  “Mrs. Dugan,” he says loudly as he knocks again, “could I just speak with you for a minute?”

  Trudy uses her arms to push her body from the chair. It may be one of the hardest things she’s ever done. Her body feels as if all the bones have drained away and she’s left with flesh that won’t sustain her weight.

  “Mrs. Dugan?”

  And Trudy opens the front door.

  “I’m so sorry to bother you …” Armando starts, waiting for her to say something, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t know how to form the words right now.

  “Could you come out into the backyard, please?” he asks.

  She nods and closes the door. He waits for her on the back lawn, not at all sure she heard him or that she will come, but no, the back door opens and Trudy walks out, comes over to him where he stands, two square, four-inch plastic pots in his hands.

  “This one,” he says, pointing to one pot, “is a Caspian Pink, and the other is something called Eva’s Purple Ball. I plant this one because of my mother. Her name is Eva.” He pronounces it “Ava.”

  She looks at him without comprehension.

  “They’re tomato seedlings. Heirloom tomatoes that I grow on my kitchen windowsill. Every year I would give Mr. Brian five or six and he would plant them, but I thought, maybe this year, you would want only one or two.”

  Trudy raises her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “But I wouldn’t know …”

  “I can plant them or I can show you how to plant them. There.” He gestures to the raised beds Brian built so many years ago. “Come,” he says, and he walks to the earth he has already prepared and kneels down, his back to her as it was the first time she saw him through her bedroom window.

  “I added compost and tomato food so all you have to do is transfer the plants into the dirt. I’ll show you,” he says, and Trudy finds herself moving toward him and kneeling, in her Story Lady gown, beside Armando.

  “This will be simple for you,” he says. “And then you will have some tomatoes in the summer. I thought that if I didn’t bring you some plants, you would have to eat those cardboard ones from the grocery store.”

  He digs a small hole in the pliable earth, turns the plastic pot over in his hand, the stem of the seedling sheltered between his first and second fingers so that the plant slips easily from its container. Trudy watches his hands as he lays the plant deeply into the hole and smoothes the earth back around the stem so that only the top leaves are visible.

  “They like to be buried deep,” he tells her, “because all along the trunk new roots grow and they make the plant stronger. You would think if so much of the plant is buried under the dirt, it wouldn’t be good, but for tomatoes that’s not true. The deeper you plant them, the stronger they get and the more they blossom. Now, you do the other one so you will know.”

  He places the Caspian Pink seedling in her hand. “Turn it over carefully,” he says, “with the stem between your fingers.” She does and the seedling pulls free of the plastic pot. “Good. You have gentle hands. Now into the earth. Deep, and pull up the covers to its chin.” He smiles at her to let her know it’s a small joke.

  The dirt feels warm to her touch and damp as she nestles the seedling into the hole Armando has created for it. For the first time she realizes the sun is particularly bright and the day has a wisp of a breeze.

  “Perfect,” he tells her, “you will have gorgeous pink tomatoes in July. Lots of them to eat. Now we water.”

  He stands and waits for her but she doesn’t move. “Mrs. Dugan?” He places his hand on her back—a soft gesture of concern—and it’s the gentleness of the touch, the warmth of his hand that she can feel through the thin fabric of her dress. Dimly she’s aware that his is the first human touch she’s had since last September 16, the day that Brian died.

  She turns to look at him, at the concern on his face, at the goodness she sees in it. She gives him her hand—to steady her as she bunches the flowing gown up around her legs. He takes her hand and helps her up.

  What We Give

  THE FIRST TIME CLEMENTINE REALIZED something was up was when Trudy moved the Story Lady to Thursday afternoons from Fridays, where it had been for decades. Clemmie hadn’t been at the library for all those years, only four of them, but Trudy often made a point of reminding her that the Story Lady had been appearing in front of the preschoolers of Sierra Villa for almost as long as Clemmie had been alive, every Friday, three o’clock.

  Trudy was nothing if not a model of consistency. Repetition seemed to fuel her soul instead of dampen it. Newness for newness’s sake made no sense to Trudy. Clementine had seen articles of clothing Trudy must have bought well before she even moved to California. They were neat and clean but also thirty years out of style. Trudy didn’t seem to notice. And Clementine knew exactly what she would have said if Clemmie had been foolish enough to point that fact out to her—So what?

  Because Trudy had never seen the value of most change and certainly not precipitous change, life, with its appetite for irony, meted out exactly that seismic shift. At least that was Trudy’s bitter reasoning as she trekked through the mire of her particular sadness. Brian, her husband of thirty-two years, went out for his customary run one Thursday morning last September, calling back to her as he always did before he shut the kitchen door that he’d be “back in forty-five,” but this time it wasn’t so. One of their neighbors, Peggy Coopersmith, walking her chocolate Lab before work, found Brian sprawled across Madia Lane. Dead before the paramedics could get there and ascertain that his aorta had ruptured. Dead before Trudy could tell him she loved him one last time. Dead, alone. That last part—that he died without her there to comfort him—never stopped tormenting her.

  Trudy coped with Brian’s death the only way she knew how, by continuing to put one foot in front of another. She couldn’t think of anything else to do. She went to work every day, walking the four blocks back and forth from her house to the library, presenting to the world the same slightly irascible manner, only more so. And holding close to her heart the devastating pain she felt every day at the loss of the man she had known and loved quietly, but oh so overwhelmingly, for all her adult life.

  It was only at the end of the day when she closed the front door of their neat house with the green shutters on Lima Street that the loss of her sweet and gentle Brian walloped her into near catatonia. No one knew—not Clemmie, whom she saw five days a week at the library, or her son, Carter, who called every Sunday for his five minutes of s
mall talk and weather report from New Hampshire, or her sister in San Diego who checked in with her once a month. None of the neighbors, who nodded and smiled at her but never intruded, suspected. None of them had any idea of the countless hours she sat in her living room armchair, staring out the large picture window and seeing nothing but the bleakness of her life without Brian. Seven months went by like that, in a blur of misery, until the day Armando noticed and rang the bell, two tomato seedlings in his hand.

  Armando had never lost a spouse, being too young for that particular tragedy, but his father, Juan, had died after a long illness. From the day Armando finished high school—and his father had insisted he finish—father and son had worked side by side for thirteen years in the gardening business Juan had started. It was only then that Armando had come to truly know the taciturn man that his father had been and to admire his resolve as well as his stoicism that he had mistaken for indifference when he was a young child.

  From the months and months of watching his father diminish and then suffer too much for too long, Armando understood loss. It wasn’t the last patch of his dying that had been the hardest to bear. It had been the months right before when Juan was too ill to get out of the truck but still insisted on coming with Armando every day. His father had to be helped into the passenger seat and he would sit there, staring straight ahead, staring at his own death, Armando often felt, although his father never said a word. Juan didn’t move from the truck as Armando mowed the various lawns, raked the leaves of other, more fortunate people’s houses, but his father always knew what had been left undone or not done well enough.

  “Did you spread Mrs. Marston’s grass clippings in the compost pile?” he would ask as Armando climbed back into the cab. And Armando would shake his head, climb back out, and spread the grass clippings.

  “The front border needs to be weeded,” Juan would say as Armando began loading up their equipment at another house, the afternoon light beginning to fade.