So Long, Chester Wheeler(72)

“I’ll say.”

“That’s why I thought I’d just call you and say hi. None of that unbearable nonsense where Anna pretends to be having a little get-together at her house and we have to pretend we don’t know it’s a set-up. That’s so weird.”

“So very weird,” I said.

I realized I was not helping myself much, but I was off balance, and my mouth wasn’t working well. Or maybe I should have been blaming my brain, as my mouth did seem to be doing a fair job pronouncing the wholly inadequate words it had been sent.

“So here’s what I was thinking,” he said. “If you’re up for it, that is. What if we just met for a cup of coffee? One cup. Could be twenty minutes. And if we’re not feeling it, then we’re just not.”

I opened my mouth to say no. That there was just too much going on. My life was too far out of balance to meet somebody new. What if he asked me what I did for a living? I wouldn’t even know what to say. What if he asked me if dinner fit into my schedule that week or the following one? I didn’t even have a schedule, or, if I did, I wasn’t privy to it yet.

And beyond and underneath all those concerns, I was still sorting out the emotions of the previous days. Trying to get them to drop into some kind of slot of understanding, so they would go away and leave me alone. Allow me to function.

“Sure,” I heard myself say. “Why not?”

As if I hadn’t just thought of a number of reasons why not.



I walked back to my house for a few starter trash bags. Then I walked back to Chester’s, and began discarding the man’s life. I didn’t even spend a lot of time stewing about the wisdom—or lack of same—behind my coffee date later that afternoon, because I was too wrapped up in listening to the things Chester said over my shoulder as I threw his belongings away.

At first it was mostly silly little things I was discarding, all firmly and inarguably in the trash category.

There was a drawer literally full from top to bottom with bottle caps. He had either saved every bottle cap from every beer he ever drank in that house, or he had saved the ones from beers he drank on occasions that felt special to him for some reason. Without knowing how much beer he drank, it was impossible to guess. If the latter, the man had lived out a lot of significant occasions, at least in his own mind.

There was a stack of newspaper sections, all the same section, and all open to the crossword puzzle. The puzzles had been done, though some not completely. They had been filled in with pen, and had lots of cross-outs and scribble-overs.

There were a few books sitting on a plain metal shelf, a surprising number of which were corny joke books from the 1950s.

Then I opened his bedroom closet and things got decidedly less silly.

On a high shelf, above a dozen Hawaiian shirts and a blazer with slightly frayed cuffs, I found an old-fashioned scrapbook with black paper pages, and a shoebox.

I opened the shoebox first.

In it were dozens of letters, all in the same handwriting, and clearly very old. The paper of the envelopes was discolored, and just at the borderline of disintegration. They were all addressed to Chester Wheeler in Phoenix, Arizona. All from Mike Erikson in Los Angeles, California.

I sat there on Chester’s bed for a minute, sorting through them in my hands. Counting them. There were sixty-seven letters.

So what would Chester want me to do with all of his letters from Mike? I imagined his horror if I loaded them into a plastic bag and put them out on the curb for the garbage collection truck, treating them like just more trash. On the other hand, I knew nothing would horrify Chester more than the idea that they could fall into the wrong hands—that somebody might read the words that felt so personal to him.

I thought about it for a few minutes. And felt about it.

Then I took them into the kitchen, turned on the gas burner, and lit the corner of one of the letters on fire. I carried it to the fireplace, the box under my left arm, and threw the burning letter in.

I opened the flue and started the next letter on fire, using the flame from the first one to light it. Then I just kept feeding them in. Letter after letter curled and browned and turned to ash, and the smoke rose up the chimney and joined the sky, the ether. It felt as close as I could get to giving the letters back to their rightful owner.

When the letters were gone and I was sure the fire was safely out, I walked back to Chester’s bedroom and opened the scrapbook. I paged through it with half-squinted eyes, prepared to close the cover and look away if there was anything inside that I felt I was not meant to see.

It was all mementos of his children.

He still had all of Johnny’s report cards from the third grade. Crayon drawings of houses and families and cows, signed by “Ellen.” A handmade Father’s Day card from Danny. As I got deeper in, there was apparently a long gap of time, followed by newspaper clippings. Ellie’s wedding announcement in the Akron newspaper. Johnny—now John—in an article about a court case in which he was the lead attorney.

I closed the cover again, having seen enough to help me know what to do.

I called Ellie, and she picked up on the second ring.

“You don’t want to do it anymore,” she said in place of “hello.” “I was afraid of this. What can I say to change your mind?”

“I’m doing it,” I said.

Then I just sat there on the edge of Chester’s bed for a time, breathing into the phone. And she just waited for me to tell her why I’d called.