So Long, Chester Wheeler(50)

I reached over and showed him the screen of my phone.

“Oh,” he said. “That’s weird.”

“Didn’t you think to bring a book?”

“A what? You and your newfangled terms.”

“I fail to see how refusing to read is something you should be joking about with pride. What do you do when you’re at home?”

“Watch TV.”

I looked around myself, sure I had seen one somewhere. I found it right where my eyes had left it, on a swinging bracket over the kitchen counter.

“What do you call that?” I asked, indicating it with a jerk of my thumb.

“It’s a TV. But I can’t watch anything on it because it’s not hooked up to anything.”

“Then what’s it doing there?”

“When you stay in an RV park with full hookups, you can usually watch TV.”

“You said RV parks were a waste of money and it’s better to sleep in a Walmart parking lot.”

“Unless you want to watch TV.”

I sighed, and swiped the e-reader closed on my phone.

“What?” he said. “Why are you sighing and rolling your eyes at me?”

“Because every time I try to have a conversation with you I feel like you just take me around in circles.”

His face took on a perturbed expression, and he opened his mouth to offer some sort of retort. I probably wouldn’t have liked it, but I never got the chance to find out.

A hard knock came at the side door, and we both jumped the proverbial mile. I swear somebody could have shot off a gun next to the window and not gotten a bigger startled reaction from us. It struck me as odd, because we’d been waiting for hours for something to happen, and then, when it finally did, we were caught up in absolute nonsense and not expecting it.

I opened the door.

It was dark out on the street, but I could see Sue’s face pretty well in the light that spilled out of the RV. She looked different than I was used to seeing her. More tentative and off balance. Not as though she were in charge of things in any way.

“Are you guys coming to me?” she asked, and her voice sounded just the way I described her face. “Or am I coming up there, or . . .”

“If you wouldn’t mind,” I said, “it would be really nice if you would come in here. It’s an incredible project to get him in and out of here, and I feel like it gets more dangerous every time we do it.”

She stepped inside without comment.

She looked at Chester. He did not look back.

I leaned over and hissed three whispered words into his ear.

“Not. A. Word.”

“Where do I sit?” Sue asked me.

“You could sit next to me, but the light over me doesn’t work. The light is good up in the cab.”

I knew better than to suggest she sit close to Chester.

“Looking through the windshield, with my back to you guys?”

“No, those seats swivel.”

I jumped up and attended to swiveling the passenger seat, but it wasn’t as easy as the directions made it sound. The lever was finicky. There was grunting involved.

“There,” I said when I had it more or less facing Chester.

She sat down.

She had a handful of papers in her grip, but I couldn’t really tell how many, or if they were written or typed, one sided or two sided.

“I thought you said the light was good here.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

I leaned over her and switched on the dome light. It was positively blinding. I watched her blink too much for several beats.

“Yeah, that’ll do it,” she said. “Ready?”

“We’ve been ready for hours,” Chester barked.

I caught his eye and warned him. Then I warned him out loud, for good measure.

“Chester . . .”

He dried up.

“Okay,” she said. “Here goes.

“Chet. The first few sentences of this won’t sound much like an apology. But before you get mad and decide I’m doing this all wrong, please try to bear with me until I can make my point.

“From the time we first started dating to the time our divorce was finalized, you hurt me every day. Little things, mostly. Little barbs, sharp things that came out of your mouth that made me feel invisible and small. And that’s still on you. But it’s my job to teach others how I want to be treated. Now I know that, but at the time I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to talk to you and you didn’t know how to talk to me. There was no real communication between us. Then again, I knew your parents, and I knew my own, and I’m not sure who was supposed to be teaching us how to communicate. You can’t teach somebody to do something if you don’t even know how to do it yourself.”

She stopped reading for a brief moment. Shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Scratched her head. I got the distinct impression that her discomfort had nothing to do with itches or seating.

She cleared her throat and continued.

“I didn’t know how to say what I needed, or how to speak up for myself, so I just buried it all, over and over until there was no more room to stuff anything. And then, when I was ready to blow, I hurt you back. But my hurt was big.

“I want to say I didn’t mean to, but that’s only half true. I didn’t start up with somebody else by accident. Then again I never woke up in the morning and thought, ‘I think I’ll rip Chet’s heart out today.’ I know I did, but it wasn’t the objective.