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.
“Do you like school?” she asks him.
He shakes his head.
“Do you have a rotten teacher?”
He looks up at her, surprised that an adult has made that kind of judgment about a teacher. In his house, no one would say that.
“She’s okay.”
“Then what don’t you like about it?”
Ricky shrugs again, hoping that if he doesn’t say much, she’ll stop asking him questions.
“That doesn’t tell me anything, a shrug. Tell me one thing you don’t like about it.”
“It’s boring.”
“Okay, I get that. Tell me one more thing you don’t like.”
Ricky doesn’t know what this lady wants him to say, why she keeps asking him questions, but he figures he has to come up with something to tell her. “The boys’ bathroom smells stinky.”
And Trudy laughs. “I bet it does. But I have a hunch there’s something else about school that you don’t like.”
Jeez, this lady won’t leave it alone. Ricky risks a glance up at her and she’s looking straight at him. She’s not letting him off the hook anytime soon, it’s obvious, and so he tells her, “I’m in the dumb kids’ reading group and everybody knows it.”
“Ahhh,” says Trudy, “I see.”
They walk together in silence. That answer seemed to satisfy her. Maybe now she’ll stop asking him things. But when they get to the intersection, she starts talking again. “I have a secret for you.”
He gives his all-purpose shrug again. He doesn’t think this lady can tell him anything he’d like to hear.
“Being able to read right away and being smart have nothing to do with each other. Smart kids can have trouble reading.”
After they cross the intersection, eyes down again, Ricky begins kicking a small stone as they walk. Trudy watches him. She wants to tell him to stop that, it’s annoying her, but she doesn’t. She walks and waits. Finally, he says without looking at her, “Is that true?”
“What do you think I do every day?” she asks him and then continues on without waiting for his answer. “I help kids read books and I’ve been doing it for almost as long as your mother and father have been alive, so I know it’s true.”
He doesn’t look at her as she explains and he doesn’t ask anything as they continue their walk. She watches the boy. She’s not sure he believes her.
WHEN THEY GET BACK TO HER HOUSE, Armando and his helper, Faustino, are just finishing up, loading the heavy mower back into the truck bed.
“Armando,” she says, “I need to show you something in the backyard,” and she hands Ricky the three books she chose for him. “You bring these back next Friday and we’ll get three more.”
The boy takes the books but doesn’t seem happy about it.
“Say thank-you to Mrs. Dugan,” Armando tells his son. The boy mumbles something, but Trudy isn’t interested in gratitude.
In the backyard, away from Ricky and Faustino, Trudy tells Armando what she suspects he doesn’t know. “Your son can’t read, Armando. He doesn’t understand the first thing about letters and sounds and how they make words.”
“Mrs. Dugan, he’s only eight. He has time to learn all these things.”
“No, what I’m telling you is that he’s not going to learn these things without some help. Can you help him with that, or your wife?”
Armando shakes his head. “Maybe if he was learning to read in Spanish, then—”
“Bring him with you every Friday. We have the summer. Every Friday. All summer.”
“No, Mrs. Dugan, I couldn’t—”
“You want him to fail in school? You want him to drop out? Because that’s what happens to kids who can’t read.”
“No, of course not, but I couldn’t ask—”
“You’re not asking. I’m telling you — bring him to me.”
And they look at each other in silence. Trudy’s gaze is clear and determined and, Armando suddenly sees, eager. He understands she wants to do this for him, for his son. For herself as well.
“Thank you” is what he says.
So now, on Friday afternoons when he looks into Trudy’s kitchen window, he sees she’s not alone. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, head bent over a book, busy teaching Enrique how to read. His son squirms and rests his head in his hand and sighs a lot — Armando can tell he is anything but pleased to be there — but Trudy pushes ahead and Armando knows that this is the summer that his son will learn something new. He will learn to read.
The Neighbor
IT IS NOT A NOBLE SENTIMENT TO DETEST one’s neighbor — the rational part of Trudy’s mind knows this. Hatred leads to no good. Unfortunately, these days rationality holds little sway on Trudy’s emotions.
Until a year ago, Trudy would have described herself as the most sensible of people. Just look at my life, she would have argued a little too proudly — a practical job as head librarian, a thirty-two-year marriage to her first and only love in which she was faithful and happy, and she would have bet her last dime that Brian, her husband, would have said the same. Together they crafted the life that they, and in Trudy’s exacting opinion every sane person, would have wanted — a judicious, measured life.
And then all that changed in the beat of a heart. One September morning, when the Santa Ana winds were leaching all the moisture out of the air, Brian went out for his regular three-times-a-week jog and didn’t come back.
In the early months of her widowhood, during those brutally hot September and October days, Trudy was barely functional, managing only to get herself to the library each day and back home late each afternoon. Then, once the front door was closed and no one could see her, she would collapse into her living room armchair and stare out the front window until it was dark enough to climb into bed.
Through those awful autumn and winter months, sitting in the dark, in the living room, evening after evening, playing back in her mind every kind and dear thing Brian ever did for her, Trudy got an eyeful of the new neighbor who had moved his family into the house next door only months before Brian died. And an earful. She learned right away that he is a yeller, a screamer of ugly words, and that she is in for an entirely unpleasant experience living next door to this man.
When Brian was alive she had easily ignored the commotion next door because what she and Brian had built together in their green-shuttered house didn’t leave any room for animosity. She didn’t have the energy or the inclination or the taste for it.
But now, more than a year after Brian’s death, she’s found that life is just chockful of things to rail against. Take the park situation. Even Trudy, who disdains the word “beautiful”—“Rendered meaningless by overuse,” she complains — has been heard to admit that the park adjacent to her library is “beautiful.” Set back from the street so it seems slightly hidden, ringed by hundred-year-old trees that keep the park cool and dappled in sunlight, Sierra Villa Park is an oasis of calm. And so, when the city council raised the question of selling the land to developers, there was a hue and cry in the neighborhood. Condos where neighborhood children now play soccer?! Concrete where the dignity of ancient oaks provides shelter for toddlers to play and for weary mothers to grab a few minutes of respite?! Trudy is incensed! She’s seen the architect’s drawing of the proposed complex. It makes her blood boil.