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.
And he was not a man to complain. There was about him that sort of Midwestern stoicism, a practical quality that embraces what is and doesn’t pine for what could have been. Trudy struggles with that now but finds nothing in her life worth embracing and everything worth pining for.
The only thing that propels her out of the house in the morning is the certainty that staying home would be worse. She has nowhere free of pain, but at least at the library she has to pretend, and that pretense carries her through the majority of the day. People marvel at how she’s coping, really, since she and Brian were so close. It’s amazing, they say, that she’s doing so well. But none of those people follow her home and almost none of them call to see how she is, and even neighbors on Lima Street hesitate to ring her bell or bring over a newly baked banana bread or cookies. Trudy has never invited those sorts of easy neighborly exchanges. She’s not one to stop on the street and ask after children or comment on the beauty of the first roses of the season in someone’s yard or exchange gossip about the new restaurant filling the vacant spot on Banyon Street.
And so she is left alone. Carter calls dutifully every Sunday afternoon. And Trudy assures him that she’s fine. And since he wouldn’t know what to do if she weren’t, he gratefully gets off the phone after five uncomfortable minutes of descriptions of the amount of snow they’ve had that week or the fall in temperatures predicted to be below the freezing mark. Trudy thinks of those weekly calls as “the weather report.” She has no idea what the weather is going to be in Southern California, but she’s up to date on New Hampshire.
• • •
FALL FINALLY COMES AFTER A SCORCHING September and October. It took Trudy quite a while to realize that in Southern California, October can be as hot as July, only with the near certainty of wildfires breaking out on the hillsides from Santa Barbara to San Diego, thickening the air with mustard-yellow clouds of ash, making it painful to draw a deep breath.
But November brings fall, with crisp nights that can dip into the forties or even the thirties and sparkling crystalline days of sun and bright, clean air. For the first time since last winter, Trudy reaches for a jacket in the front coat closet and finds Brian’s gardening windbreaker instead. She forgot about that closet when she was packing up his things back in September, and so here it is — blue, well worn, streaked with dirt down one sleeve. She puts it on — it comes to her knees — and zips it up. Her hands in the pockets find his gardening gloves, and she takes them out and stares at them. Caked with mud, they hold the curve of Brian’s fingers.
One in each hand, she puts them back in the two jacket pockets and holds the right glove with her right hand and the left one with her left. As she leaves the house for the short walk to the library, she feels she’s carrying a secret. Arms in Brian’s jacket, hands holding the imprint of his hands, she feels lighter. She also wonders, not for the first time since his death, if she’s going slightly crazy. But she wears the jacket every day, and Clementine manages not to comment on it.
When the rains come, it’s the holiday season. Carter doesn’t come home for any of it. Not for Thanksgiving — too short a time, the airfare’s too expensive — or Christmas — he’s going skiing. Trudy thinks he should have offered to even though she’s not sure she’d want him there, but she says nothing.
“Will you be all right?” he asks her on one of his punctual Sunday calls.
“I’m going to Clementine and David’s,” she says even though it’s a lie. She’s told Clementine she was meeting Carter in San Diego where her sister lives, that she’s driving down on Thursday night after they close the library for the long weekend — Christmas being on a Saturday this year — and that she won’t be back until late Sunday.
There’s nothing to do but hide her car in the garage, pull the drapes on the house windows that face the street, and lie low for the three days. She can’t have someone see her — Sierra Villa is just the sort of small town where somebody would — and report back to Clemmie that she lied about having somewhere to go for Christmas. Clementine has a readily available look of pity. “Oh, the poor thing” is her standard response to a child whose mother speaks harshly to him, or to a toddler who sports a large bandage over a skinned knee. The last thing Trudy wants is for that solicitude to be directed her way.
On Friday morning when she awakes, she sees no reason to get out of bed. She can’t leave the house. She can’t even walk down her front path to pick up her copy of the L.A. Times, lying there in its plastic sleeve. She turns over and goes back to sleep. If she could, she’d sleep away the three days until it was time to get dressed and walk the four blocks to the library and begin her pretend life, which at this point is far better than her real one.
It’s the drone of the leaf blower that wakes her. Aren’t those things illegal yet? is her first conscious thought. She slaps the pillow over her head, but the whine insists on continuing. Even with all the windows shut, the noise is assaultive. Is this what happens every Friday? She’s always at the library.