The dirt feels warm to her touch and damp as she nestles the seedling into the hole Armando has created for it. For the first time she realizes the sun is particularly bright and the day has a wisp of a breeze.
“Perfect,” he tells her, “you will have gorgeous pink tomatoes in July. Lots of them to eat. Now we water.”
He stands and waits for her but she doesn’t move. “Mrs. Dugan?” He places his hand on her back — a soft gesture of concern — and it’s the gentleness of the touch, the warmth of his hand that she can feel through the thin fabric of her dress. Dimly she’s aware that his is the first human touch she’s had since last September 16, the day that Brian died.
She turns to look at him, at the concern on his face, at the goodness she sees in it. She gives him her hand — to steady her as she bunches the flowing gown up around her legs. He takes her hand and helps her up.
What We Give
THE FIRST TIME CLEMENTINE REALIZED something was up was when Trudy moved the Story Lady to Thursday afternoons from Fridays, where it had been for decades. Clemmie hadn’t been at the library for all those years, only four of them, but Trudy often made a point of reminding her that the Story Lady had been appearing in front of the preschoolers of Sierra Villa for almost as long as Clemmie had been alive, every Friday, three o’clock.
Trudy was nothing if not a model of consistency. Repetition seemed to fuel her soul instead of dampen it. Newness for newness’s sake made no sense to Trudy. Clementine had seen articles of clothing Trudy must have bought well before she even moved to California. They were neat and clean but also thirty years out of style. Trudy didn’t seem to notice. And Clementine knew exactly what she would have said if Clemmie had been foolish enough to point that fact out to her—So what?
Because Trudy had never seen the value of most change and certainly not precipitous change, life, with its appetite for irony, meted out exactly that seismic shift. At least that was Trudy’s bitter reasoning as she trekked through the mire of her particular sadness. Brian, her husband of thirty-two years, went out for his customary run one Thursday morning last September, calling back to her as he always did before he shut the kitchen door that he’d be “back in forty-five,” but this time it wasn’t so. One of their neighbors, Peggy Coopersmith, walking her chocolate Lab before work, found Brian sprawled across Madia Lane. Dead before the paramedics could get there and ascertain that his aorta had ruptured. Dead before Trudy could tell him she loved him one last time. Dead, alone. That last part — that he died without her there to comfort him — never stopped tormenting her.
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?”