So Long, Chester Wheeler(35)

“I can’t go in,” he said, still underwater in panic.

“Long drive not to go in.”

“You should go in,” he said.

“Oh no. Not a chance, Chester. That is way above my pay grade. This is your deal. You wanted to do this. The time has come, so do it.”

“But it’ll take so long to get me down out of here and into the chair, and she’ll see me, and she’ll go away or something.”

“If she doesn’t want to see you, we can’t force her.”

“She won’t see me.”

“I wish you’d come to that conclusion before we drove two thousand miles in this rust bucket.”

“Hey!”

“What?”

“My Winnebago is not a rust bucket.”

“Is that really what we’re focusing on now?”

More silence.

I was beginning to realize that if anything was going to happen, I’d have to make it happen myself. At least get it rolling. It was an abhorrent idea, and no, it was not part of my job description. But I was the one who wanted to be sure we hadn’t come all this way for nothing. The only one, it now seemed.

“Okay, I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’ll go talk to her and at least see if she’s willing to come over here, or if she’s willing to stay around while I get you down into your wheelchair. I’ll feel out the situation.”

No reply.

“Earth to Chester.”

“Thank you,” he said, his voice breathy.

It was a pretty stunning two words coming from Chester Wheeler. I’d never heard such a thing come out of his mouth before.

I opened the side door and stepped out.

The air was surprisingly warm considering it was only . . . well, I really had no idea what time it was. I didn’t know how long I’d slept. But it was autumn, so I hadn’t been expecting morning heat.

The woman looked up immediately.

I walked up her concrete path, and she walked to the edge of her porch to meet me.

As I got a closer look at her, I could see her as possibly in her sixties. Her hair, which I had taken for platinum blonde from more distance, was actually gray going to white. She wore it cropped into a stylishly short cut. She had lines around her eyes and mouth that let me know she had frowned, laughed, smiled . . . you know. Lived.

Oddly, as I approached her, she was smiling. Before I could open my mouth to speak, she let out a short bark of a laugh.

“What’s funny?” I asked, thinking it was odd that we hadn’t started with introductions.

“Oh, it’d sound crazy,” she said.

Her voice was gravelly and deep like Chester’s. As though she’d been a smoker all her life. But if she’d smelled like cigarettes, I was standing close enough to know it. She didn’t. She smelled like some kind of light, flowery perfume.

“Try me,” I said.

“Well. I’ve been staring at that big old Winnebago all morning. And some part of me half expected my ex to step out. Crazy, I know, but he always talked about getting himself a big Winnebago like that one. Then when I saw it was a total stranger, I just felt so relieved.”

“Oh,” I said. “Bad news about that.”

She leaned on her broom, and her face went hard and dark in a hurry.

“Don’t even tell me,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“It really is Chet in there, too?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“What in the bloody hell did you bring him here for?”

I could have hedged around the thing. Eased into it. But I was worried about losing her, so I broke out the big guns immediately.

“It was his dying wish,” I said.

She said nothing. Just leaned on her broom, with various thoughts and feelings—I’m not sure which ones, of course—flitting by behind her eyes.

So I said more.

“I realize it’s not the biggest favor to you, and I’m sorry. Even more than I realized I should be before I met you. But a guy tells you he wants one thing to make his life complete before he dies. How do you say no to that?”

She narrowed her eyes at me, and we held each other’s gaze for a few seconds. She seemed to be reading me in some way I couldn’t quite pin down.

“You seem like a nice enough guy,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“He’ll eat you for breakfast.”

“He tries. But apparently I’m tougher than I look.”

“You’d almost have to be,” she said. “What are you doing with him, anyway?”

“Ellie is paying me to take care of him.”

“Oh,” she said. “Ellie. And Ellie never even told me he was sick. Then again, she knows better than to bring up his name around me. You sure he’s really dying? It’s the kind of thing he’d make up if he thought it’d get him what he wants.”

“Oh, I’m positive. He’s in bad shape.”

“What’s he got?”

“Cancer.”

“Of the . . . ?”

“Of the everything. Started out in his lungs, but it’s all over now.”

In the silence that followed, I realized I had used Ellie’s phrasing almost to the word, and that the double entendre still stung.