Pushing aside her natural reluctance to get involved, Trudy decides to draw up a petition. If Brian were alive, he’d tell her to let the politicians handle it. Maybe, if she pressed him, he would have made a call to their city councilman, Scott Thurston, who lives around the corner, and registered his mild objection. But Brian is not here. He has left her to her own devices, and her own device is a neighborhood petition. That’s how her disdain for her neighbor, acquired during those months after Brian’s death, turns into full-fledged, lip-licking fury.
Brian had been fond of the ancient Russian woman who had lived next door to the Dugans since the day they moved in, her small ranch house’s driveway abutting theirs. When Vivianna reached her late eighties and slowed down quite a bit, Brian added chauffeur duties to the list of tasks he did for her, a list that included grocery shopping, lugging the trash cans back and forth from the curb on garbage day, and watering her patchy lawn. Her grown children had been making noise for some time about how their mother couldn’t take care of herself anymore, a sentiment Vivianna disdained. She told Brian that she planned to lock all the doors and windows if they ever came for her.
And they did. The night Vivianna started a fire in her kitchen, locked doors were no impediment to the firemen who burst through to put out the flames. Behind them came Russell, Vivianna’s son, who used the opportunity to take her away. Too quickly, it seemed to Trudy, he rented an industrial Dumpster, parked it in her driveway, and filled it with a lifetime’s worth of memories and debris, indiscriminately tossing out photo albums alongside mountains of saved plastic bags, gorgeous beaded gowns long out of style along with broken furniture. Both Brian and Trudy had to turn away as the workmen piled up Vivianna’s life, higher and higher in the Dumpster. “Sadder and sadder,” Brian said, and he was right.
The son and daughter had the house cleaned and painted and then sold it to the Yeller who lives there now. His name is Kevin. Trudy sometimes hears the wife calling him, “Kevin Doyle!”
“He looks like a giant rodent,” Trudy tells her son, Carter, during his dutiful Sunday afternoon phone call. “This guy who moved into Vivianna’s house. Pointed nose, beady eyes, and an overbite.”
“Now, Mother …” Carter says. Although he restrains himself, she can hear the tsk-tsk he’s desperate to make. She knew he would admonish her. Since Brian’s death, their weekly phone calls consist of her complaining and his admonitions. The interaction is satisfactory to neither but familiar by now and thankfully, Trudy thinks, short.
But when did they ever have satisfactory conversations? Maybe when Carter was three or four and Trudy began to introduce him to the children’s books she had always loved. He loved them, too, and would ask her to read them to him over and over, and that bond lasted until he started first grade and began a life apart from her — friends, sports, the technology that boys seem to inhale into their pores. Every year after that, the distance between them grew wider and wider until finally, when Carter was able to make a choice of his own, he insisted on moving all the way across the country to attend Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, New Hampshire. Ridiculous place to go to school, Trudy has often thought but never said outright to anyone but Brian. “Freezing, in the middle of nowhere,” Trudy would complain to Brian. “Yes, but so far away,” Brian would say because he understood what Trudy didn’t — that Carter was never comfortable with them.
She gets off the phone with him every Sunday afternoon dissatisfied and cranky. And misses Brian even more. Gentle, patient Brian would listen to her rants, shake his head at whatever unfairness she was railing against, and get on with whatever he had been doing, usually gardening, before Trudy had sought him out and unloaded her latest diatribe. The listening and the moving on — both brought Trudy comfort.
Now she has no avenue but action to displace her anger, and so she finds herself, petition in hand, ringing her neighbors’ doorbells. The fact that she knows none of them, not a one, despite her thirty-plus years on the block doesn’t seem unusual to Trudy. She’s never been the sort of woman who stands and chitchats at the curb or makes small talk when out walking the dog. They’ve never owned a dog. In truth, Trudy didn’t feel the need to know her neighbors while Brian was alive. He was the one who would say hello as he gardened out front. He knew them by sight. He waved as they drove by. That was sufficient.
So now Trudy has to introduce herself to her neighbors. At the first house, the woman who answers the door of the small Craftsman, way down at the end of the block, quickly signs the petition. She’s young, maybe thirty, and has the distracted look of a mother of too many young children. Trudy can see at least three running around the living room, carrying on, as the woman, Susannah, as Trudy can see from her signature, tells Trudy how important the park is to them.
“Well, I can’t imagine not having the park.”
Trudy nods. She feels the same way. Good, a supporter.
“Where would the kids play?” and then she shrugs self-consciously and turns her shoulder to indicate the activity behind her. “And how much of that in the house could any one person take?”
As she hands the petition back to Trudy, she says, “You’re so good to do this,” and a fair-haired little girl of maybe four slips in beside her mother, holding on to one of her legs.
“You’re the Story Lady,” the child says, a thumb going into her mouth.
“You’re right. Good remembering. And I remember you from when I read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.…”
The child nods, pleased, and the mother takes the opportunity to say, “We’re so sorry about your husband” and what has been a fine interaction, a moment that feels almost normal, suddenly stabs Trudy in the heart. She doesn’t want to, she can’t, share her grief with strangers, however well meaning. That’s the only trouble with living in Sierra Villa, Trudy thinks as she says good-bye and moves on to the next house, everyone knows your business.
To her relief, the rest of the block goes smoothly and everyone on her side of the street signs. Trudy is fierce in her advocacy and people quickly agree that they must keep the park, that condos on that land would be horrible. To Trudy’s great relief, no one else mentions Brian. And then, there’s only one house left — the Yeller’s, at the corner. Trudy could skip his house and head to the opposite side of the street. She’s tempted to, but she won’t allow herself this weakness. She knocks on what she will always consider Vivianna’s door and a little boy of maybe six opens it for her. He’s blond and solemn, the sort of child whose features seem to have migrated to the middle of his face, leaving lots of cheek and forehead.
“Is your mother home?” Trudy asks him. Far better to speak with the mother than the rodent father. Not that she’s ever exchanged a word with the woman, but she seems more reasonable than the screamer. Trudy hears her speak nicely to the two boys.
But the child shakes his head no to her question; his mother isn’t at home. And then she hears the voice from somewhere inside the house, that ugly voice which disrupts the daily quiet of her house. “Never open the door! WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?!” And Trudy sees the little boy flinch and then his father is there. “Get away from here,” he tells his son, who flees back into the house. And it is only Trudy and this man, this Kevin person, facing each other across the threshold. It’s the first time she’s ever been face-to-face with him and she’s surprised at how tall he is. Tall and white skinned and just as menacing as his words.