Tell Me One Thing (19 page)

Trudy and Brian were people who were not easily dislodged. Neither saw any reason to change what was good enough decades ago—this two-bedroom house with green shutters on Lima Street or their commitment to love, honor, and cherish each other. Until Brian died, nothing had changed.

Now the boxes stood waiting, freshly creased and open-mouthed. There was no way Trudy was going to throw Brian’s monochromatic sweaters, button-down shirts, and threadbare jeans into black garage bags as if they were junk to be picked up with the rest of the trash.

No. She folded and smoothed and lined up the creases in his suit pants, which he rarely wore, and rolled his black socks into tight balls, and evened out the shoelaces on his running shoes, which he laced up every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday rain or shine. And she packed each box tightly and secured the top with clear cellophane packing tape, also newly bought. She couldn’t deny the satisfaction of zipping the tape across the top of each box, a tiny piece of the work completed even though the task was one that bit into her heart.

“Mother …?” Her son, Carter, is standing in the doorway.

“What?!” she answers too sharply. He had startled her. With each garment her hands touch, another memory ambushes her, but she doesn’t explain this and her son doesn’t hide his sigh of exasperation.

He’s so short
, Trudy thinks again as she does at least once on every visit.
Why did he have to take after my mother’s side of the family?
Trudy’s maternal grandfather was barely five feet tall. Her maternal grandmother was not much bigger. She remembers them from her childhood as gnome people. Holding hands in their wedding picture her mother kept on the mantel, they looked like the illustrations in her fairy-tale books.

Brian had been tall. Tall and lanky. Angular. The sort of person who never seemed to be able to fold his body comfortably into conventional chairs. Definitely not the sort of person to have a fatal heart attack. Too many people expressed that same opinion to Trudy after the fact. But there it was—an undetected defect in his aorta biding its time, bulging and pressing and finally rupturing.

Carter shows Trudy his packed duffel bag. “I’ve got to go.”

But Trudy doesn’t answer. He’s not sure she’s heard him, because she’s turned her back and is taking in the mounds of clothes, a lifetime of clothes, spread across the bedspread, the dresser, the chair where Brian sat every morning to lace up his shoes.

For his entire life, Carter has found talking to his mother difficult. He often wondered why his parents ever had a child. They seemed like such a self-contained unit, the two of them. Always, always he had felt like an interloper in someone else’s world. Oh, it’s not that they neglected him. Not at all. There were the requisite birthday parties when he was young, and carpooling to school and tennis practice, attendance at his matches when he was in high school, and visits to various potential colleges when the time was right.

It was just that when his parents were together, they were present with each other in a way that never worked itself into his relationship with either one of them.

It was hard to explain. With his first girlfriend, Sabrina, he had tried. “It’s like they’re going through the motions with me … but when they’re together it’s like the house and everything in it, including me, could go up in flame and they would just say, ‘Is it getting warm in here?’ ”

They were naked at the time, and she ran her hand up the inside of his thigh, teasingly. “Oh, Carter’s feeling neglected.”

He shook his head—that wasn’t it, but it was as close as he could come to explaining. No one was surprised when he chose a college as far from sunny California as he could get. It was in New Hampshire, with its brutal winters, that he began to feel less invisible.

“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 unusual 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.