Tell Me One Thing

by Deena Goldstone

“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.

  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 b
ecause 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.

  When Armando arrives the next Friday afternoon there sits a pot or two or three on the backyard patio table. He has to knock on Trudy’s back door and they have to have a discussion about where these plants might go in the garden. Some days that discussion is lengthy because Trudy hasn’t thought through any of these purchases, but Armando never questions her choices. Together they figure it out. It makes his workday longer—he’s often late for his next house—but he doesn’t mind. He thinks of these spontaneously appearing plants as gifts, and Trudy, if she were honest with herself, would say the same about the conversations.

  IN JUNE, WHEN SCHOOL IS OUT for the summer, things change. One Friday afternoon, Trudy comes home to find a small boy raking up the grass clippings from her front path. He looks to be about seven or eight, she thinks, dark skinned with thick black hair like a curtain across his forehead. He’s skinny and quiet. Trudy is incensed.

  “Who do you belong to?” is what she says to him. The boy stops what he’s doing and considers the question, almost as if he’s pondering the philosophical underpinnings of it.

  “Maybe God,” he says, but not with any attitude, simply his evaluation of the right answer, and it disarms Trudy. She puts her hands on her hips and shakes her head.

  “No,” she says, “are you here with your dad?”

  “Uh-huh,” and he points to Armando, who is just coming around the house from the backyard.

  “Armando, what is your son doing working on my property?!” This is not said sweetly.

  Armando puts a calming hand on his son’s shoulder before he answers, “Did he do something wrong, Mrs. Dugan?”

  “Not him. You. A child this age—how old are you?” she asks the boy.

  “Eight and a half,” he says.

  “Exactly!” Trudy snaps. “What is an eight-year-old child doing working?! He should be at camp or riding his bike or just playing! Not raking my front path!”

  “Mrs. Dugan,” Armando says quietly, “there are days he does these things, but my wife works and today my sister can’t take care of him and so he spends the day with me. There are worse things, don’t you think, than spending a whole day with your father?”

  The boy moves closer to Armando and leans back against his legs.

  “What’s your name?” Trudy asks him.

  “Ricky,” the boy says.

  “Enrique,” Armando says at the same time and then laughs. “Okay, Ricky.” He explains to Trudy, “That’s what the kids at school call him.”

  “Do you like stories?” Trudy asks the boy and Ricky shrugs. “Come on”—she holds out a hand—“let’s go get you some books with really cool stories in them.”

  Armando grins at the “really cool” reference, and Trudy understands immediately what he’s grinning at. “I can’t be around kids all day without picking up some of their rotten language.”

  “Go on with Mrs. Dugan,” he tells his son, “she knows everything about books,” and reluctantly the boy takes the two steps to move closer to Trudy.

  “We’ll be back in a few minutes,” Trudy tells Armando before she puts a hand around Ricky’s wrist and begins walking briskly back to the library with him. “Really, Armando,” is her parting shot, “there has to be a better way. An
eight-year-old working?!”

  But Armando just smiles as he watches the tiny, round lady and his skinny and adored youngest son walk side by side down Lima Street. To the library! Only good can come of that.

  “What do you like to read about?” Trudy asks the child as they walk.

  Ricky shrugs. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what do you like to do?”

  “Play soccer.”

  “Good,” she says, “so we’ll get you some books about soccer.”

  When she walks back into the library with Ricky in tow, both Clementine’s eyebrows rise. Trudy marches Ricky past her, explaining, “That’s Clementine, she pays far too much attention to everything that happens around here.”

  “Find a seat,” she says to Ricky as they approach the children’s section, “and I’ll bring you some books about soccer.” With that, Trudy disappears behind some tall bookcases and reappears two minutes later with an armful of books.

  She takes the child-size seat next to him, which seems to serve her small body well, and lays the books out on the table in front of them like a fan.

  “Did you just finish second grade?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Then this one—Brendan Wins the Game—should be right at your level.”

  Ricky takes the book, head down, and opens it to the first page—a simple drawing of a boy about his age kicking a soccer ball. The narrative starts, “Brendan loved his soccer ball.” The boy stares at the picture, then the words, but only for a split second, and then he turns the page. On page two he examines the picture and ignores the words.

  Trudy watches him go through the book, sleuthing out the story from the illustrations and skimming over all the words. Having sat with children in this library for over thirty years, she knows exactly what’s going on.

  She watches him go through the second book the same way, his eyes glued to the pictures.

  “I’m going to let you take these books home,” she tells him. “Your dad should read these with you. I’ll tell him.”

  The boy shrugs. “Okay.”

  On the walk back to her house, Trudy watches the boy. He walks with his eyes on his feet.