Deena Goldstone - Tell Me One Thing

He closes the door. She walks quickly across the street. He watches from behind his living room drapes. When she closes her own door, he drops the drape back in place and all is quiet.

THE FENCE PROGRESSES. At a pace that drives Trudy crazy. The Angie’s List reviews were right. He works slowly. When she mentions this to him, as if he didn’t know, he simply looks at her and utters the word “meticulous.” Is he reading his own reviews?

Trudy knows there’s nothing she can do about the pace, but knowing and accepting are two different things. She’s sick and tired of accepting things she doesn’t like. The biggest, of course, is Brian’s death. But then the list includes her horrendous neighbor with his screaming and his power tools and his cigars. And her disapproving son with his dutiful weekly phone calls in which neither of them utters a word worth speaking and neither is satisfied when they hang up. And now she has a handyman who works in slow motion to add to the list!

She tells Clemmie all of this one Wednesday afternoon when things are slow at the library. She enumerates the list for her, ending with her handyman woes.

“Oh, I know Fred,” she says.

“You do?” For some reason Trudy is surprised, almost as if she doesn’t quite believe Clemmie has a life outside the library, because that’s the only place she sees her. A failure of imagination , Trudy tells herself.

“My mother always used him, and when David and I wanted to add a deck to the back of our house, I hired Fred.”

“How long did it take?”

“Oh, I don’t know.…” Clemmie thinks about it, then grins. “Forever. He works very slowly.”

Trudy throws up her hands — just her luck to have hired the slowest man alive.

“He is definitely an exercise in acceptance,” Clementine adds, watching Trudy’s face to see how her comment lands. She doubts Trudy has reached the acceptance plateau for any of the items on her list — Brian’s death, first and foremost, her son’s distance next in line. And immediately Trudy turns away from the younger woman, gathers up a pile of returned books to reshelve, conversation finished. Oh, how thin-skinned she is! Trudy’s body language says it all. She felt Clemmie’s words as an implicit reprimand. Clementine could kick herself. In an effort to be helpful, Clementine has gone too far. But no, Trudy comes back with empty arms and the need to ask, “But he does good work, right? Everyone on Angie’s List said that.”

“You will have the world’s most beautiful fence,” Clemmie assures her. Trudy heaves a sigh of relief and gives her colleague a rare smile.

WHAT TRUDY SEES WHEN SHE GETS HOME that afternoon is a work in progress. All the supporting posts, each exactly six feet from the last, have been cemented into place. Around each post Fred has built a small, sloping mound of concrete to eliminate water pooling at the base of the posts.

“Water rots wood,” he tells her the next morning when she asks. “We don’t want that.” The heads of the posts have been rounded off for the same reason. This way the posts will last longer. She nods; that makes sense to her. She is sure Brian would have approved of this man and his thoughtful work.

“Did you know my husband?” Trudy finds the words jumping out of her mouth before she has time to reconsider.

Fred, in the middle of mixing more cement in a large plastic bucket, looks up at her. The topic of dead relatives is one he doesn’t want to even consider. “No,” he says, although he remembers that if he happened to be outside his house early in the morning, Brian would wave as he jogged down the street. Fred never waved back. Waving led to conversation the next time around, something to be assiduously avoided. He doesn’t tell Trudy now that Brian continued to wave despite his lack of response. He just shakes his head no.

“He died,” she continues on despite herself. “One year and two months ago.”

“I know,” Fred says. It was hard not to know. The man collapsing just blocks from this street. The fire trucks racing in. Their neighbor Peggy, who found him, talking about it for weeks afterward. “My wife is dead almost thirteen years now.”

Trudy tries hard to remember his wife and vaguely calls up an image or two of a small Japanese woman who rarely left the house without her husband.

“You know what they say, about it getting easier over time? That’s not true,” Fred says as if reading Trudy’s thoughts.

“How comforting.”

He shrugs. Is it his job to be comforting?

For her part, Trudy wonders why she is having this conversation with a man she hired to build a fence. She already feels much worse for it. Let him build the fence and keep quiet , Trudy tells herself.

From that morning, she and Fred settle into a routine, something that has always soothed Trudy — the repetition of events. He arrives promptly at seven o’clock, as he told her he would. They “discuss” the fence if she has any questions, and only the fence. Otherwise, she says hello to him on her way out and leaves him to it. Increasingly, she has fewer and fewer questions. At a few minutes after five when she gets home, he is nowhere to be found, already finished for the day as he said he would be, driveway swept up and tools put away. He is as regular in his habits as she. They dance to the same beat and that helps Trudy relax.

Even the Yeller doesn’t seem to bother him. Trudy asks him that one morning after she is sure her neighbor has left with the two boys, driving them to the Catholic school several miles west along the 210 Freeway.

Quietly, because the wife may still be home, Trudy asks, “Does it get noisy here in the afternoon?”

Fred has no idea what she means. “No,” he says, “just the power saw sometimes when I need to cut the wood.”

She shakes her head, glances at the Doyles’ house again to make sure the wife isn’t outside, getting into her car. “I mean him .”

Fred shrugs. “When he brings his sons home, he yells at them to get in the house. Every day. Is that what you mean?”

“Exactly!” Then, “Don’t you wonder what goes on inside that house?”

Fred stares at her as if she’s insane. In truth, Trudy occasionally worries that on this topic she’s veering in that direction.

“It’s not my business,” Fred says and turns on the saw, conversation finished as far as he’s concerned.

But for Trudy the obsession isn’t. Now that her mind is no longer focused on the fence building — Fred is in place, the boards are going up — it has more room to ponder the drama next door.

One Saturday afternoon when Fred is not there — he never works on the weekends — Trudy is rinsing out her morning coffee cup when she hears the wife’s heels on the driveway. She has a distinct way of clopping along, as if her shoes never quite fit. It’s the rat-tat-tat of weary feet in low-heeled shoes worn by a heavy woman. She’s walking down the driveway to her car, which is parked on the street, her boys with her. She’s got a gentle hand on the head of the younger one, Aidan, as he trails along beside her. The older one, Carl, runs ahead.

The wife is just this side of being very fat. She never wears pants or jeans, too fat for that. She wears one long, printed skirt or another every day. And, like her husband, she’s always on the phone. But she seems nice. In the year they have lived next door, Trudy has overheard dozens of conversations, and the woman — her name is Brenda — never yells. In fact, she always seems unduly cheerful, telling people all the time that she’s “super!” but Trudy supposes that’s in counterbalance to her husband’s nastiness. And most importantly, she is sweet with her children. She calls them “honey” a lot and praises them often. What Trudy does not understand is how she remains married to the rodent. Doesn’t she see how much damage he’s doing to the boys?