Fred turns and eyes Trudy. There is no need for him to say—Look what I just saved you from. And she doesn’t have the good grace to thank him. She simply turns on her heel and stomps into her house, angry still.
She paces around the house, stirred up, agitated. Through the living room, down the hall she goes, then into the small dining room where she no longer eats, and out the kitchen door. Oh, why isn’t Brian here when she needs him? She’d rail and rant and he’d listen and she’d figure out this whole mess! She looks around the heavenly backyard, this place where she feels Brian most fully. It shelters her and surrounds her and protects her from the rest of the whole ugly world.
Help me, she says, not sure whether she’s spoken out loud and now not caring. She’s calling up something — Brian’s spirit or his love for her or something. Help me. And Fred, in the driveway, measuring another plank, hears her because Trudy has pleaded aloud.
Here’s the issue, Trudy explains to Brian, making sure now that it’s only thoughts she’s sending forth and not words, how can what I saw inside that house be at such odds with what happens every day outside of it? Brian, everything inside seemed so ordinary. It could have been Carter’s room when he was a child.
She paces on the patio, trying to sort this all out on her own. If you saw those boys’ rooms, you’d think nothing was wrong. And then a thought occurs to her that makes her stop moving and sink into a patio chair. Is this a normal family? Could the yelling and demeaning simply be ordinary life for some people?
Oh! — and here Trudy sucks in her breath realizing suddenly—isn’t that worse? That those boys think ordinary life always contains such ugliness. Trudy’s heart is suddenly breaking. “Oh, Brian,” she voices into the quiet backyard air. “Oh no.”
Fred, carrying two more slats of cedar over to the sawhorse, hears the lament. He puts the wood down and stands motionless for a minute, paying quiet attention to the two factions wrestling within him.
Trudy, in the backyard, leaning forward in her chair, forearms on her thighs, her head in her hands, hears, “I talk to my dead wife, too, but she never answers me.”
Trudy doesn’t move. She knows Fred is standing there and she understands his presence is a compassionate gesture. She just doesn’t know whether she can accept it. Finally she says, “Maybe she’s had enough of you,” without raising her head.
And although Trudy can’t see it, Fred begins to grin. His face cracks open into a genuine smile and he lets out a sort of guffaw that could be taken as a laugh. Trudy hopes it is a laugh.
“Maybe so,” he agrees.
ON THE FIRST TUESDAY OF DECEMBER, as it nears five o’clock, Trudy tidies up the library. She is always scrupulous about opening and closing the building on time. From the end of the front desk counter, she retrieves the protest petition. There are pages and pages and pages of signatures, hundreds of them, she is very quietly proud to notice.
As Clemmie gently shoos the last people out of the library, Trudy gathers her sweater and petition and keys to lock the library. The two women walk out together, stop on the sidewalk for a moment before Clementine heads to her car and Trudy walks the four blocks home. The sun is almost down now that it’s winter and the air is chilly. There may be frost on the lawn tomorrow morning.
“What’s going to happen tonight?” Clementine asks.
Trudy shrugs. “I’ve never been to a city council meeting before, I have no idea. I’ll hand over these,” she says as she indicates the well-thumbed pages bursting from the clipboard.
“And will you say something? Like a little speech?”
“What for? It’s all here.” The thought of having to speak in public sends a spike of irritation through Trudy. Of course not, she tells herself, nobody wants to hear me speak. Clemmie doesn’t know what she’s talking about. But Trudy, in a rare show of discretion, refrains from telling her so.
“Seven o’clock, then.”
“Are you coming?” Trudy is surprised.
“I love the park, too. I thought you knew.” Clemmie says this softly, without rancor.
“Well, of course. Who wouldn’t love this park?” And the two women look out over the gray green oaks and the winding paths and the gentle hillocks that form the edges of the sunken park.
AT SIX FORTY-FIVE THAT EVENING, Trudy closes and locks the front door of her small house and stands for a moment appreciating the six-foot-tall, meticulously crafted cedar fence along her property line. It is almost finished. And then, as she diagonally crosses Lima Street, she is surprised to see Fred Murakami waiting patiently on the sidewalk in front of his house.
“I thought I would go with you,” he says when she nears.
She shrugs. “It’s a public meeting.”
The two small people fall into step beside each other, their strides matched effortlessly, a serendipity Trudy isn’t used to. At six foot three, Brian was over a foot taller than she, and his legs seemed to take up most of that difference. When they walked anywhere together she had to hurry quite a bit and he had to consciously slow down.
“The fence is coming along,” Trudy says as they reach the end of their block and cross the street.
“Yes. Almost finished now.”
“I feel better — not seeing them.”
He knows she means the Doyles, but particularly the giant rodent as he now thinks of the father.
“Ah, that’s good then, isn’t it? The fence will serve its purpose.”
“Exactly!” Trudy is cheered that Fred immediately understands what she means.
WHEN THEY REACH THE Sierra Villa Elementary School auditorium, Fred opens the heavy door for Trudy and they are presented with a room crowded with residents. Someone has set up two long tables, end to end, at the front of the room, below the stage, with a microphone and a name card identifying each of the five city council members, one at each seat. The burgundy upholstered seats, bolted to the floor and worn from generations of proud parents watching their children’s plays and graduations, are split into two sections by a narrow aisle. It is there that a podium with a microphone attached to the lip has been placed for residents’ comments.
People are milling about, talking to each other, yelling across the rows of seats to neighbors they haven’t seen in a while. Children are darting up and down the aisle and across the stage. The hubbub of so many voices bounces off the walls.
Trudy is taken aback. “Is it always like this?” she asks Fred.
He shakes his head. He has no idea. He’s never been to one of these meetings in his life. He hates crowds — they make him feel small and mean and anxious — but he’s there tonight because Trudy is presenting the petition.
They take seats close to the front and on the aisle so that Trudy can easily reach the podium microphone to present her signed petition pages. But first they have to wait through the reading of last month’s minutes and discussion of new business: whether the bike lane should be extended along Foothill Boulevard, whether a building permit should be granted to turn the empty Southern California Credit Union building into a homeless shelter. There is vigorous debate on both sides of the issues, taking up the better part of an hour.
Trudy tries to be patient, but she finds all this less than compelling. Extend the bike lane, okay, fine, what could be wrong with that? Biking is healthy. Brian would sometimes take out his bike to run an errand or two. He would have liked more bike lanes. And the other issue — of course they should build somewhere for homeless people to sleep. A slam dunk. All those nervous Nellies afraid of people down on their luck should just shut up.