“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.