So Long, Chester Wheeler(76)

So I did that, but she was not picking up.

I left her a voice mail that said, “Full disclosure. I got home last night and forgot to call. But I’m fine. I’m cleaning out Chester’s house because Ellie is paying me to do it, and it feels weird. So, so weird. But other than that, I’m fine.”

I opened my mouth to tell her about the scrapbook, but I realized it was the last thing she would want to hear. The only possible outcome would be to fill her with guilt.

“Okay, then. Bye.”

I hung up the phone and worked long into the night. Well past the time I should have done myself a favor by sleeping.





Chapter Twenty-Five:




* * *





Calling

In the morning I woke up early, despite having gone to bed late.

I dressed quickly and made myself a coffee for the road, with the goal of doing important errands.

Before I left, I let myself in over at Chester’s house and opened all the windows. Every damned one. I figured Ellie would have a real estate agent showing the place soon. And I knew it would be nice if every potential buyer didn’t have to start their tour by doing that vague sniffing thing with their nose working the air.

Just as I was leaving again, I stopped, and questioned the wisdom of going away and leaving the place wide open like that. The window screens certainly offered no protection at all from a break-in.

Then I laughed out loud at my own foolishness.

Force-of-habit thinking on my part. I should have been so lucky as to have someone break in and clean the place out. They’d be saving me hours of labor.

I jumped into my car and drove.

I rented a hand truck from an equipment rental place, for furniture moving. Then I stopped at a big-box store and bought a silly number of garbage bags, and some miscellaneous cleaning supplies.

Back in my car, I picked up the phone to see if anyone had called or texted.

And then, just like that, I was looking at a web page for my local hospice. And I swear I couldn’t even remember the thought process behind it, not to mention keying the word into the browser on my phone.

I decided now would be as good a good time as any to drop in and say hello to the folks at my local hospice.



Their office was a big old two-story house in what clearly had been a high-end residential neighborhood in the distant past.

I stepped inside.

There was a youngish woman doing some kind of paperwork in the front lobby, but she didn’t look up. I sat down with my now stone-cold coffee, feeling awkward.

A minute or two passed, and I was just getting ready to change my mind about the whole thing and slip out the door.

Right at that moment she looked up.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. I get wrapped up in what I’m doing.”

“No worries,” I said, even though it had nearly sent me back out the door.

Well. That and so many other things.

“What can I help you with?”

“I wanted to talk to someone about what’s involved with being a volunteer.”

“Oh,” she said. She sounded surprised, as though that was the last thing she had expected me to say, but I had no idea why. “We have a training course. You’ll want to be sure it’s something you really want to do, though, because it’s thirty hours.”

“Just the training course.”

“Right. Then we ask that you commit to at least four hours of volunteer work a week. But you’re more than welcome here if it’s what you want. Most people sign up for the course by phone or online. But if you’d like to talk to Trudy while you’re here . . .”

“Yeah. Since I’m here. Unless she doesn’t have the time right now. It’s not like she knew I was coming.”

I realized, listening to myself speak, that I was sounding unsure. As if I could just as happily walk out the door and forget the whole idea. Which is probably the last thing they look for in a volunteer.

She picked up the phone, punched a button, and said, presumably to Trudy, “A young man is here, and he’d like to talk to you about our volunteer training.”

She seemed to put an odd emphasis on the words “young man.”

Then she hung up the phone and said, to me, “It’ll just be a couple of minutes.”

I fidgeted in my chair for what could only have been a minute or two. For some reason I was flashing back to that hospital in Denver—to all that time I’d waited for a nurse to come around and hover over me and tell me I’d done it all wrong.

I looked up to see a woman who looked surprisingly like Pauline Fischer. Her hair was cropped less extremely, and she had a more solid build. And she was much more casually dressed. Still, it made me like her immediately. I wondered if she could tally how many states away from home a person had driven, without looking at a map. She gave the impression of being smart.

“Hello,” she said.

And I said, “Hello.”

“I’m Trudy.”

“So I hear.”

Then I realized, a bit late in the game, that she was giving me the opening to introduce myself.

“Oh, sorry,” I added. “Lewis.”

“Come on into my office, Lewis.”

I followed her into her office, which was not what I had expected. Speaking frankly, it was a mess. Not a mess as in actually dirty. No old coffee cups or food containers. Just files. Boxes of files. Stacks of files. Stacks of boxes of files. Everywhere. At first I wondered why they weren’t all in filing cabinets. Then I wondered if there were enough filing cabinets in town to do the trick.