Deena Goldstone - Tell Me One Thing

ARMANDO WONDERS WHY she sits by herself every Friday. He has never seen her with friends or visitors. She never seems to be talking on the phone. There are never young children running around, nieces and nephews perhaps. He wonders why her mother doesn’t sit with her in the kitchen, drinking coffee or cooking Friday night dinner, anything to help her through this difficult time. The solitude that comes from that house is so unlike his own large, messy family.

His mother, Eva, lives nearby in the house they were raised in — all ten of them. Two brothers live at home with her. A sister, Jessenia, lives around the corner, next street over. Sunday dinners at his mother’s start at four and continue until the last brother carries the last sleeping child to his car and the last sister washes the last platter and puts it away. Even in his own home there are his three children, his wife’s relatives coming and going, his own brothers, who drop by whenever they want, the friends of his children, the two dogs — activity, people, noise, energy.

In the days and weeks and even months after his father died, his mother was never alone. They all made sure that the kitchen was filled with women cooking and talking, the backyard crowded with young children racing back and forth, the living room overloaded with Eva’s sons yelling at the television screen as they watched football or basketball or baseball in the summer.

It makes Armando uneasy to see Trudy sitting alone week after week, and so one Friday he knocks on the back door and she comes immediately to open it.

“Mrs. Dugan,” he says, “could you come around the side of the house with me? We have a problem.”

“Serious?”

“We can fix it,” he tells her. And she knows it’s not too bad because he’s smiling as he says it.

Along the driveway, between the paving and the fence, is a line of westringia, feathery shrubs with thin, arching branches and tiny lavender flowers. Trudy remembers when Brian put them in years ago. Right in the middle of the row, one plant is brown and wrinkled.

“You see”—Armando points to it—“I must take this one out.”

“It looks dead.”

“It is, but it can be replaced. If you buy another, I will plant it for you.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know where to—”

“At the Home Depot. It’s not far. You take the 210 Freeway and when you see the sign for Mountain Avenue, you get off and you are there. Ask for westringia.”

“Westringia,” she repeats.

He can tell she doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t know that she avoids freeway driving whenever possible.

“Won’t the others just fill in?”

“No,” he says, “it will always look like a line of teeth with one missing. You must buy a new one.” You must get out of the house is what he really wants to say to her. You must try . But, of course, he has no right to say either, so he tells her to buy the westringia when he could very easily get it for her. He’s at the Home Depot Garden Center several times a week.

“We must put a new plant in here or there will be an empty space always.”

She nods. Somehow, maybe because he is so unequivocal, she agrees to do what she has no interest in doing.

TRUDY FOLLOWS ARMANDO’S DIRECTIONS exactly. The 210 Freeway is close to her house. She takes it going east and is soon at the Mountain Avenue exit. As she gets off the freeway, Trudy sees the large orange Home Depot sign on her right. So far, so good. She’s a bit surprised at how well she managed to navigate the 210.

Once she’s parked the car, Trudy enters the Garden Center through large open wire gates and stops in her tracks. In front of her, displayed on waist-high tables, are the most gorgeous colors she has ever seen gathered in one place. Pinks and purples and the deep red of roses, pristine white flowers whose name she doesn’t know. Shocking magenta bougainvillea vines. Lavender and sage she recognizes from Brian’s herb garden. Yards and yards of flowers and shrubs and vegetables neatly arranged in rows and ready for spring planting. Far from the entrance, in the back, are the citrus trees, palms, and flowering maples.

This is what Brian saw, she realizes. This beauty. These luminous colors and scents. This bounty of choices. Like entering a library, it occurs to her suddenly, with all the possible books laid out on their shelves and the excitement of any choice taking her somewhere she’s never been.

Here she is lost in the possibilities. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around to help her, so she wanders and reads the small plastic tags stuck into the pots and tiny six-packs. Nowhere does she see the name “westringia.”

In the middle of the last aisle, with a dense jumble of plants in front of her, she stops, dismayed. How will she ever find the right plant, the one Armando has sent her to buy?

“This place can be overwhelming, can’t it?” A woman about her age, pushing a large orange shopping cart filled with all sorts of plants, stops beside Trudy.

Eyeing her cart, Trudy says, “You seem to have found your way.” Often she doesn’t realize how abrupt she sounds, but the other woman simply shrugs. She’s good-natured, a large woman, nearly six feet tall and broad rather than fat. She’s wearing jeans and an oversize pink sweatshirt that reads GRANDMA’S JOB IS TO SPOIL ROTTEN.

“I just pick up what calls to me, you know.” The woman surveys her crowded cart with a bit of wonder as to how she managed to accumulate so many plants. “It seems I just have to have all of these.” She shrugs. “Even though I have no idea where I’m putting any of them.”

“But you’re buying them anyway?”

“Oh, they’ll go somewhere.…” The woman waves her hand to indicate that the “somewhere” is amorphous.

“Not a very efficient system, is it?” Trudy can’t help but say.

The woman just laughs. “Nope, but this is gardening, not running a Fortune Five Hundred company. Half the fun is experimenting, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. I’m new at this.”

“Well then,” the woman says, “you’ve got so much good stuff ahead of you.”

Trudy shakes her head. This woman has no idea what’s ahead of her, but Trudy would never classify it as “good stuff.” “Do you know where I could find a ‘westringia’?”

“Oh, what a beautiful shrub,” the woman gushes, “so delicate.”

“Yes, well … I need one and there’s just too many plants here for me to …” Trudy looks around, at a loss, and the woman sees it.

“You wait right here, honey,” she says and takes off for the middle aisle.

Honey?! Trudy thinks to herself. Why do people use endearments when they barely know you? What is that? Sloppy language, Trudy concludes.

“There you go,” the woman says as she comes back with a tiny westringia plant in a gallon container and hands it over. As she begins pushing her shopping cart forward, down the aisle toward the back of the nursery, the woman says over her shoulder, “I’ve decided I just have to have an apricot tree,” and waves as she goes.

Walking back to her car, westringia plant tucked in her arm, Trudy feels as though she’s accomplished something. She’s managed the freeway, a task that was always Brian’s responsibility. She’s been bowled over by the colors of the flowers. She has bought the right plant.

When she gets home she places the plant in the empty space in the line of westringia, where it already looks like it belongs. She knows Armando will plant it next Friday.

Without really thinking about it, on those Fridays when Armando has come and gone by the time she gets home, Trudy finds herself driving to Home Depot and buying a plant … or two … or more. Plants she doesn’t know the names of. Plants she doesn’t need. It doesn’t escape the rational part of her mind that she may well be turning into the woman with the extra-large grandma sweatshirt— Oh, please , she begs herself, no clothes with writing on them —but she brings the plants home anyway.