One night, as she’s closing up the house, shutting windows and thinking about going to bed, she hears him say, “Here’s how we’ll do it. It’s too easy to just fire him. We’ll promote him. Well, he’ll think it’s a promotion.” And he chuckles. “He’ll come work directly under me and then I won’t give him anything to do, not one job, and I won’t talk to him.” Trudy can hear the glee escalate in his voice, which positively skips along as he says, “We’ll freeze him out! He doesn’t exist! … Then he’ll quit. No liability. No paper trail. Hell, he even got a promotion!”
That night, as she heard him plot to humiliate someone, Trudy slammed all her windows shut, but she could tell from his conversation, which didn’t miss a beat, that her protest didn’t register.
This morning she’s waiting impatiently for Fred Murakami to show up. Yesterday, she gave him half his agreed-upon fee so he could go to Home Depot and buy wood. She walks into the living room and cranes her body out to the left to see if his truck is in his driveway. It isn’t. Hopefully, that’s where he is and when she gets home there will be a stack of freshly cut, sweet-smelling cedar planks piled on the driveway.
That is exactly what she sees when she turns onto Lima Street at five minutes after five, a very imposing pile of raw wood stacked neatly with no Fred Murakami in sight. Trudy searches the backyard, calls his name — nothing — so she marches smartly across the street and drills her knuckles on his door.
Fred watches her come from the barrier of his living room drapes and shakes his head. Sighing, he opens his door.
“I see you got the lumber.”
“Yes.”
“But nothing’s been done with it.”
“That’s not true. I’ve set the end posts and stretched the plumb line.”
Trudy has no idea what he just said.
“I work seven to four, that’s it. When four o’clock comes, I am finished for the day.”
“I don’t get home until after five.”
He shrugs. That’s not his problem.
“When will we discuss?” Trudy asks him.
“We’ve already discussed. A wood fence. Along the driveway. Six feet tall. What is there left to discuss?”
“How ’bout this — I want it eight feet tall so I never have to see even the top of his head. He’s a tall man.”
“You can’t have it.”
And he stares at her, not as a challenge but because for him the topic is finished.
“Why not?”
“Building code restrictions. No fence on a property line in Sierra Villa can be higher than six feet.”
“Are you sure?”
And now he is getting angry. She’s implying he doesn’t know his job.
“I have been a handyman for forty-four years. If you don’t think I know what I’m doing, hire someone else.” And he starts to close his door. This woman is too much trouble, just as he thought.
“I don’t want to hire someone else,” she says to him, “I want an eight-foot fence.”
“Too bad,” he says.
“Yes,” she says, “it’s too bad.” Then, “I’ll see you at seven tomorrow morning.”
He closes the door. She walks quickly across the street. He watches from behind his living room drapes. When she closes her own door, he drops the drape back in place and all is quiet.
THE FENCE PROGRESSES. At a pace that drives Trudy crazy. The Angie’s List reviews were right. He works slowly. When she mentions this to him, as if he didn’t know, he simply looks at her and utters the word “meticulous.” Is he reading his own reviews?
Trudy knows there’s nothing she can do about the pace, but knowing and accepting are two different things. She’s sick and tired of accepting things she doesn’t like. The biggest, of course, is Brian’s death. But then the list includes her horrendous neighbor with his screaming and his power tools and his cigars. And her disapproving son with his dutiful weekly phone calls in which neither of them utters a word worth speaking and neither is satisfied when they hang up. And now she has a handyman who works in slow motion to add to the list!
She tells Clemmie all of this one Wednesday afternoon when things are slow at the library. She enumerates the list for her, ending with her handyman woes.
“Oh, I know Fred,” she says.
“You do?” For some reason Trudy is surprised, almost as if she doesn’t quite believe Clemmie has a life outside the library, because that’s the only place she sees her. A failure of imagination, Trudy tells herself.
“My mother always used him, and when David and I wanted to add a deck to the back of our house, I hired Fred.”
“How long did it take?”
“Oh, I don’t know.…” Clemmie thinks about it, then grins. “Forever. He works very slowly.”
Trudy throws up her hands — just her luck to have hired the slowest man alive.
“He is definitely an exercise in acceptance,” Clementine adds, watching Trudy’s face to see how her comment lands. She doubts Trudy has reached the acceptance plateau for any of the items on her list — Brian’s death, first and foremost, her son’s distance next in line. And immediately Trudy turns away from the younger woman, gathers up a pile of returned books to reshelve, conversation finished. Oh, how thin-skinned she is! Trudy’s body language says it all. She felt Clemmie’s words as an implicit reprimand. Clementine could kick herself. In an effort to be helpful, Clementine has gone too far. But no, Trudy comes back with empty arms and the need to ask, “But he does good work, right? Everyone on Angie’s List said that.”
“You will have the world’s most beautiful fence,” Clemmie assures her. Trudy heaves a sigh of relief and gives her colleague a rare smile.
WHAT TRUDY SEES WHEN SHE GETS HOME that afternoon is a work in progress. All the supporting posts, each exactly six feet from the last, have been cemented into place. Around each post Fred has built a small, sloping mound of concrete to eliminate water pooling at the base of the posts.
“Water rots wood,” he tells her the next morning when she asks. “We don’t want that.” The heads of the posts have been rounded off for the same reason. This way the posts will last longer. She nods; that makes sense to her. She is sure Brian would have approved of this man and his thoughtful work.
“Did you know my husband?” Trudy finds the words jumping out of her mouth before she has time to reconsider.
Fred, in the middle of mixing more cement in a large plastic bucket, looks up at her. The topic of dead relatives is one he doesn’t want to even consider. “No,” he says, although he remembers that if he happened to be outside his house early in the morning, Brian would wave as he jogged down the street. Fred never waved back. Waving led to conversation the next time around, something to be assiduously avoided. He doesn’t tell Trudy now that Brian continued to wave despite his lack of response. He just shakes his head no.
“He died,” she continues on despite herself. “One year and two months ago.”
“I know,” Fred says. It was hard not to know. The man collapsing just blocks from this street. The fire trucks racing in. Their neighbor Peggy, who found him, talking about it for weeks afterward. “My wife is dead almost thirteen years now.”
Trudy tries hard to remember his wife and vaguely calls up an image or two of a small Japanese woman who rarely left the house without her husband.
“You know what they say, about it getting easier over time? That’s not true,” Fred says as if reading Trudy’s thoughts.