So Long, Chester Wheeler(2)

It might also help to know that when I was four years old, my father lost his job. He and my mother immediately started fighting, and he left the family for parts unknown. I haven’t seen him since.

I’m sure that bit of youthful trauma factored in.

Tim and I also had a dream of leaving the dull gray sky and dirty snow of Buffalo and living near the ocean in California. We’d been saving up to make it a reality. As I sat there in the hallway with my head in my hands, I watched it fly away. In my imagination it had actual wings, that dream, which it flapped in a sort of dreamy slow motion. I think I might have waved goodbye in my head, behind my closed eyes.

When I dropped my hands and opened my eyes again, Carol Linley was standing over me.

“You too?” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

“You going to be okay?”

“I don’t think I am,” I said, “no. But with any luck I’ll turn out to be wrong. I’ve been wrong before.”

“At least you don’t have to move back in with your mother.”

“We’ll see.”

Truthfully, I knew that was out of the question, as my relationship with my mother had always been . . . strained. To put it the most polite way possible. But it sounded like a good line.

Her face took on a wry, twisted smile, and she moved off down the hall.

“Take care of yourself, Lewis,” she said over her shoulder.

“Thanks,” I said. “You too.”

Then I got up and fetched my briefcase and walked out to my car, which I liked very much but which wasn’t yet paid for, and which I knew might be the next casualty. Trying not to like it any more than necessary, I drove home.



When I pulled up in front of our two-story brick rental house, Tim was loading packing cartons into the rear of his older hatchback car.

I stepped out and stood in the street, more or less in front of him, and too much into the traffic lane. A tricked-out sports car blared its horn, then swerved around me, which I figured it could have done in the first place. You know. Without all the histrionics.

I was seized with a sense of very recent déjà vu. Standing there watching him load his car felt so similar to standing in the hallway at work staring at the pink slip. Knowing and not knowing, understanding and not understanding. All at the same time.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

I hadn’t meant to ask it out loud. Because that, of course, would be inviting him to tell me.

“Moving to California,” he said, avoiding my eyes.

“By yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“Any special reason?”

He looked right into my face, and I immediately wished he hadn’t.

It’s weird how you think you know somebody, but then suddenly you don’t. How you think you know what a person thinks and how they feel, but then it turns out you only knew what they chose for you to know. How there are two whole people in there, and one is a perfect stranger.

“You don’t really need me to explain that,” Tim said, “do you? Really?”

I’m deeply ashamed to report this next part.

I’d had no idea he’d been unhappy. I couldn’t even have ventured a guess as to what he thought the problems had been. I couldn’t even choose a general area of our relationship in which to begin shooting in the dark.

“I guess not,” I said.

I’m not even sure why I said it. Because I didn’t want him to know I was too thick to have seen the truth? Because if I asked, he might tell me? Because I was already exhausted from the day and couldn’t take any more? More shots in the dark.

“I have a few more things to pack,” he said. “Could you help me carry some boxes?”

“No,” I said, without giving it a moment’s thought.

I knew I had no choice but to stand there helplessly as he left me. My only choice was whether or not to contribute to the effort. Helping him move out would have felt like abandoning my own army and joining the enemy side.

I sat on the curb while he finished, and he drove away without saying goodbye. Without a hug. Without giving me an address to forward his mail to, or a promise to call when he got settled in safely.

I guess he was mad because I wouldn’t help him carry his boxes.

I sat listening to his car’s old, rattly muffler fade away down the street. The sun had dipped to a long slant, and it was almost dusk. I had two thoughts, one right after the other. The first: I don’t have to break it to him that I lost my job and we’ll be living on his salary. The second: I have nothing to live on.

I got up, dusted off the seat of my good work pants. Turned around.

My next-door neighbor, Chester Wheeler, was sitting out on his front porch in his wheelchair. His Dominican health-care worker was standing behind him, her back up against his front door, smoking a cigarette.

I ignored Chester as best I could and walked up the pathway to my front door.

“Well, well,” Chester said. “Things are looking up.”

I stopped cold. I should have let it go by. I knew, as I didn’t, that I should have.

“How do you figure?” I asked.

“I used to live next door to a whole bowl of fruits. Now at least we’re down to one piece.”

Our friend Anna had lived with us as a roommate until about a month previous. I figured she constituted the rest of the “whole bowl.” Anna was straight, but, then again, this was Chester Wheeler. Not what you might call a reliable narrator.