Deena Goldstone - Tell Me One Thing

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 small 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.

“Next week, Papa,” Armando would say, “we’re late today.”

“Next week they will be bigger.”

And Armando would sigh — he was very tired. Doing the work of two men — his job and his father’s — was wearing him down. But he would go and weed the front border before they moved on to the next house.

Once his father became too ill to sit in the truck, then his mother took over, nursing him through the long, last month herself until he died at home, surrounded by his ten children.

From then on, as he drove his father’s truck and walked in his footsteps, Armando understood about continuation and honoring the dead.

ON THAT MARCH AFTERNOON, as Armando helped Trudy plant her tomato seedling, kneeling by her side, he felt something shift within her, something tiny to be sure, but he heard a small sigh escape from her body, and with it, he was certain, came some measure of the sadness that seemed to weigh her down so. For all that he was grateful and very pleased with himself that he had thought to bring the tomatoes.

For Trudy, to her amazement, those few quiet moments in the garden, cupping the tender seedling in her hands and firming the earth around it to ensure its growth, Armando at her elbow coaching and encouraging her, meant more to her than anything that had happened to her since Brian’s death. She was astonished to realize that the weight of pain she had carried in her heart for seven months had lifted a little. She could draw a deep breath. She could feel the spring sunshine across her back as she knelt.

The next Monday morning she walked into the library and told Clementine that she was changing the Story Lady time from Fridays to Thursdays because so many families now went away for the weekend and too many children would miss the stories.

Clementine looked at her in puzzlement. “But, Trudy, the library is always packed. We couldn’t hold any more children than we do.”

“I read an article in the paper over the weekend.” Trudy is dogged about her logic because she is building a case against the truth. “It said there’s a definite trend of families taking three-day holidays on weekends. Didn’t you see it?”

Clemmie shook her head.

“Summer vacation is coming and there’ll be more and more of that.”

“We’ve got three months before the schools are out,” Clementine is foolish enough to say.

“So what,” Trudy snapped, irritated she was being forced to defend her decision. “We have to get people used to a new schedule.”

“But, Trudy, don’t you think if we waited until the summer—”

“What’s the big deal about changing the Story Lady day?” Trudy definitely does not want this conversation to continue. “If it doesn’t bother me, why should it bother you?”

Clementine is nonplussed. She shrugs and says, “Fine … I’ll make a sign to put out front.”

“Make sure it says starting this Thursday.”

NOW THAT THE STORY LADY APPEARS on Thursdays, Trudy starts to leave the library early on Friday afternoons. Instead of staying to close up at five, she begins eyeing the clock at about three and manages to leave by three thirty at the latest. Clemmie raises an eyebrow the first few times but knows enough not to say anything. Each Friday’s early exit is accompanied by an excuse Trudy has tried out that morning in front of her bathroom mirror—“I have a dentist’s appointment,” she tells her image to see if it sounds credible, or “I need to get to the post office before it closes.”

Some Fridays when she walks from the library to her house and turns right onto Lima Street, she finds her heart sinking because she can tell by the neatly mowed lawn and the trash cans lined up at the curb that Armando has come and gone. It is on one of those days when she sits in her empty kitchen and looks out over the empty backyard that Trudy thinks that, maybe, it would have been better if she had made more friends during all those years she lived on Lima Street. This thought had never occurred to her while Brian was alive because Brian was all she needed. But now she wonders if she should have tried to navigate through all those female rituals that always mystified her — gossiping on the phone or shopping together for clothes she didn’t need or sitting through those ladies’ lunches she always thought were worthless wastes of time.

But on those Fridays when she can hear the drone of the leaf blower well down the block, her step brightens and her back straightens and she makes her way home with something like expectation.

Often on those Fridays she and Armando will exchange only a few words. “How are you, Mrs. Dugan?” he will ask, or he will tell her “The tomatoes are doing nicely. You are watering them just right.” Then she will sit at her kitchen table and watch him work in the backyard, hoeing and weeding and cutting back the lemon tree so it doesn’t shade the raised beds — all things she had watched Brian do for all those years. If Armando stands up and catches Trudy watching him, he will wave and smile and she will wave and smile back and that is enough. For now it is enough.