Instead, she quickly opens her front door and slams it shut with as much force as she can muster, a gesture she knows is lost on him. The whoop of the door closing is no match for the roar of the leaf blower.
From her kitchen window Trudy watches him. He’s got that disgusting cigar clamped in his protruding teeth and that tiny phone earpiece hooked to his right lobe (she hopes he gets a brain tumor from excessive cell phone use), and he’s methodically sweeping the blower across his driveway, right to left, where her driveway resides and where the debris flies over to and settles. Right to left, right to left — dirt and more dirt!
If only she and Brian had had the foresight to build a fence between their two properties as soon as this Kevin Doyle person moved in. A tall, wooden fence so she wouldn’t have to see his rodent face. A very high wooden fence so that all the blowing in the world wouldn’t yield piles of debris on her driveway.
And then it occurs to her that she can build such a fence now. What’s stopping her? Only the habit of discussing every decision with Brian. Only the backbone she received from Brian’s calm wisdom. “Well, Brian’s not here,” she reminds herself. And this time she knows she has spoken aloud in her empty house. Not a good sign for anyone’s mental health.
She gets on her computer and finds the Angie’s List site. Brian bought himself a lifetime membership when they first posted the site because he was hopeless about home repair and relied on Angie’s recommendations when they needed a washing-machine part replaced or a shower floor regrouted. She types in “fence” and up pops a screen full of names; most are handymen or carpenters. She scrolls down and is overwhelmed. There are eight pages of names. This is way more than she bargained for. How does she narrow her search? Does she have to read all the reviews about all these guys? And then her eye catches a familiar name, Fred Murakami, and she sits back in her chair and contemplates it.
On the one hand, she knows who he is. On the other, he’s a most unpleasant human being. But then again, he probably won’t steal from her or disappear with the fence half done. She can easily track him down across the street.
She reads his reviews. They’re all good. He’s meticulous, an Old World craftsman. He takes his time, but his finished product is always worth it. She realizes she has to hire him.
There’s nothing to do but cross the street and knock on his door again. She waits until Kevin Doyle has finished with the leaf blower and has entered his house with a yell at his trademark high volume, “Get away from the window!” (Why, Trudy wants to know, why? What’s wrong with looking out the window?) And then the street returns to its customary quiet. That’s one of the reasons people move up here, Trudy thinks as she crosses Lima Street, the quiet, which is now permanently compromised. The luck of the draw, she laments to herself. Trudy feels like Lady Luck has done an about-face. Until that awful September day last year, she would have considered herself among the luckiest. Now she’s afraid it’s going to be nothing but a slide through bad luck until the grave.
She heads up the cement path to the beige ranch house, and Fred Murakami watches her come, all the while debating whether to open the door. He doesn’t like aggressive women. His wife was no trouble at all, and though she’s been dead for close to thirteen years, he still misses her. No, he won’t open the door.
Trudy knocks with vigor and without stop. Her experience yesterday tells her that he doesn’t like to open his door and therefore, today, she is forewarned and determined. Finally, she wins the contest of wills. He opens the door a few inches, a deep scowl on his face.
“You make a lot of noise,” he says.
“Yes, well, it’s nothing compared to what he does,” and she indicates her neighbor’s house with a turn of her chin. “Haven’t you noticed the leaf blower and the power washer and the car buffer and the screaming, but of course you can’t fix the screaming.”
“I don’t fix screaming,” he says.
“But you could build me a fence along the driveway, couldn’t you?”
“Maybe.” He wants to say, No, I can’t, but the recession has hurt his business and he can’t be as cavalier about turning away work as he has been in the past.
“How much would that cost?”
“Depends.”
Trudy is getting exasperated again. Talking to this man is like wading through a vat of molasses. “On what?”
“The kind of materials, how high.”
“High enough so I never have to see the giant rodent.” And then Trudy realizes what she’s said. She’s spoken out loud the name she acknowledges only in the sanctity of her own mind. More fodder for her concern about her sanity.
“Made of what?”
“Wood.”
“And how long.”
“The whole driveway.”
He looks across the street at her driveway. He can’t see the far end from where he stands in his own doorway. “How many feet?”
“I don’t know,” and now exasperation is getting the best of her. “Bring a tape measure and come and see.”
He doesn’t want to start this, so he doesn’t move. She, however, is not going away, “Now, I mean now! Why can’t you measure it now?”
He shrugs. He can’t think of a reason except for the fact that he doesn’t want to engage with this woman.
“All right, come on, I’ll give you a tape measure.” And she turns and strides across the street, and he finds himself following her rapidly moving back. She walks with as much conviction as she talks.
By the time he gets to her driveway, she’s holding out a carpenter’s metal tape measure, the square box with the pliable steel coiled up inside, and she places it in his hand. As he gets down and measures the length of her driveway, she stands over him and continues talking, sotto voce. “He screams at his children. Do you hear him?”
“Sometimes.”
“Awful. So I want a fence.”
“All right.”
“How much?” she asks as he finishes measuring and stands up.
He studies the length of the driveway and considers. “Twelve hundred dollars.”
Trudy is taken aback. “That’s a lot of money.”
“Not for this fence. I’m giving you a discount. Nobody will build you a fence for less.”
And she believes him. She doesn’t know why she does, but she does. “Okay.” And then, “You need to start tomorrow.”
And again he finds himself saying, “All right.”
TRUDY WAKES UP THE NEXT MORNING with a sense of purpose. Today the fence building starts! But when she looks out her kitchen window, out over her driveway, there’s nothing to see. There’s her empty driveway, looking no different from yesterday, and there’s her neighbor yelling at his boys to “get in the car! Why are you ALWAYS late, Aidan?! Every single morning you can’t get your butt in gear!”
Trudy sees the two boys scramble into the backseat of the convertible, the younger one, Trudy realizes he’s Aidan, tripping over his backpack. Kevin barely waits until they’re seated and then zooms out of the driveway, leaving a waft of cigar smoke lingering in the crisp November air. The fence won’t do anything about the smell, she knows. What kind of man smokes continually from seven forty-five in the morning, which it currently is, until well after midnight? Every night the west side of her house is assaulted by the putrid odor of cigar. He sits on his front porch whatever the weather, bundled up when it’s chilly, stripped to a pair of shorts when it’s warm, and smokes. And talks on the phone attached to his ear. In fact, he seems to work very little and sit there far too much, always on the phone. Who would talk to this man, Trudy wonders, unless they had to?