And Trudy plunges in. “I have a petition here stating the neighborhood’s opposition to turning Sierra Villa Park into condo units. Our position is stronger the more signatures we have.” She holds the clipboard out to him. He turns his eyes from her face, which he finds mesmerizing in its intensity, to the petition but makes no move to pick up the pen attached by a string to the clipboard. He does nothing. Doesn’t read it. Doesn’t close the door. Simply looks at the piece of paper as if he were waiting for it to do something interesting. He has learned from years of working for irrational people that the best course of action when facing anger is not to engage.
Trudy is now beyond exasperated. “Do you speak English?” she demands of him. “Is that the problem here?”
“You, I think, are the problem.”
“How rude.”
“Yes, rude,” he says, but he doesn’t close the door.
“I live on this street,” Trudy finds herself saying. She has no idea why.
He nods.
“And I work at the library.” Why is she telling him this? His silence is unnerving, maybe that’s it. “That’s why the park matters to me.”
The man picks up the pen and signs his name, Fred Murakami.
“Thank you.” Trudy has to say it.
“You are welcome.” But he doesn’t close the door, and Trudy can’t quite figure out how to get off his porch gracefully.
“That’s it,” she tells him.
“Yes.”
And finally she turns and makes her way down his front path, turning right at the sidewalk and moving to the next house. She can feel his eyes on her back the whole way.
She gets signatures from three of the last four houses and feels, as she walks home, as if she’s climbed Mount Everest. Later that evening, as she eats a bowl of cereal for dinner, she reviews her afternoon’s work and sees that he has signed, “Fred Murakami, Handyman,” even though the petition didn’t ask for the signer’s occupation.
TRUDY BRINGS THE PETITION into the library the next morning and Clemmie looks askance at it.
“I know what you’re going to say and I’m going to ignore it,” Trudy says before Clementine can get her mouth in gear.
“Well then”—and here Clemmie chooses her words carefully—“I was only thinking what would happen if a city official came into the library?”
“You mean like Scott Thurston?”
“Yes, maybe Scott.”
“He’d tell us to put the petition away. He’d say this library is a city service and not a place for a personal agenda.”
“Exactly!” Clemmie feels vindicated.
“And I’d ignore him as soon as he walked out the door.”
They are at an impasse and that is where things are going to stay, Clemmie knows by now. Four years working under Trudy is more than enough time to understand that Trudy doesn’t budge. Truthfully, four months was enough to pick up that predominant character trait — inflexibility.
The fact that she’s young enough to be Trudy’s daughter undermines Clementine’s position even more. And the fact that she looks like Ramona in the Ramona and Beezus books. And the fact that there’s an unquenchable optimism about her. All that makes equal footing with Trudy an impossibility.
But they have worked out a way to be together, these two women. Clementine has carved out areas of responsibility that border Trudy’s but don’t overlap. She greets the public. She remembers the children’s names. She loves to spend however long it takes helping people find exactly the right book. She reads everything new that comes into the library. And Clementine, thankfully, takes care of the two computers they have in the adult section.
Trudy does all the administrative work, usually spending her day in the glass-enclosed office that faces the front door. From her desk Trudy can observe what goes on in the library but not necessarily engage. Only on Thursdays when she transforms herself into the Story Lady, does she mingle with the patrons, and those are mainly children, Trudy’s humans of choice.
But Trudy likes Clemmie, even if she isn’t demonstrative in that regard, and Clemmie has figured that out. When she first started working at the library, fresh out of graduate school, Trudy intimidated her — so curt, nothing soft or yielding about her. But Clementine has learned that’s not entirely true. All the soft places were saved for Brian, and now that he’s gone, Clementine wonders these days whether those same tender spots have hardened off and begun to die.
For her part, Trudy considers Clementine pretty near perfect. Oh, of course, she’s too emotional. And she drives Trudy crazy with her solicitousness, but Trudy sees her goodness and her trustworthiness and her work ethic and her genuine love of books. The whole package, you have to take people as the whole package, Trudy knows by now in her life, and with Clemmie that’s easy to do.
Now Clemmie watches as Trudy takes the clipboard with the petition on it and places it at the far end of the front counter, nestling it among the pamphlets for the Sierra Villa Farmers Market on Friday afternoons and the Pancake Breakfast at the local fire station on the first Sunday of every month.
“Really?” Clementine asks.
“Really,” Trudy answers.
And people sign the petition as they leave with their checked-out books, Trudy is gratified to see. Every time another person signs on the dotted line, Trudy shoots Clemmie a look of triumph, and Clementine rolls her eyes.
TRUDY CONSIDERS THE DAY A SUCCESS as she walks the four blocks home and turns onto her street, Lima Street. The signatures on her petition now take up five whole pages, and she’s not done yet. She wants to walk into that city council meeting with a thick wad of petition pages, all signed by irate citizens of Sierra Villa. She flips the sheets, considering the fruits of her indignation as she turns up her brick front path. The fact that her neighbor is zooming up his driveway at the same time in his black BMW convertible with his two sons in their Catholic school uniforms in the backseat barely registers.
But then the yelling starts, even before Trudy can get her key into the front door lock, and she stops and listens. It’s that scene-of-a-traffic-accident feeling — dismay and fascination in equal measure.
“Get in the house!” Kevin Doyle is yelling even as the boys walk up the driveway, dragging their overlarge backpacks, and step onto the front porch. For some reason, he never lets them enter the house by the back door, so much of their life is played out on the long driveway. The older boy, maybe seven, is more talkative. The younger one, the one who opened the door for Trudy yesterday, is quieter. Both are blond with the pasty white skin of their father and the small, pinched features of their mother.
The boys enter the house to the accompaniment of their father yelling, “Close the door, close the damn door!” Trudy is sure that something unnatural happens in that house. Why else would he always be admonishing his sons to “get in the house,” to “close the door”? He doesn’t allow them to play on the front lawn or with the neighborhood children. She stands on her front porch, helpless, feeling that she should be doing something — intervening, protecting the boys — although she has no idea how she would accomplish either, when the Yeller starts his relentless cleaning. He has a power washer, a leaf blower, a car polisher, a chain saw, and various other mechanical devices Trudy can’t name. She knows them all by sound though. They all whine or whoosh or shriek.
Today it’s the leaf blower. He has a complex about keeping his driveway free of anything associated with nature. The sound! Oh, how Trudy hates that sound! So much uproar for so little result. Why doesn’t he take a broom like everyone else and sweep his driveway? With the blower, dirt and twigs and leaves launch up into the air in surprise and then settle back down on her driveway, which bothers him not at all and makes her want to scream back at him.