So Long, Chester Wheeler(78)

I had even pulled up all that horrible shag carpeting, rolled it up, and left it in the driveway for pickup. And underneath it I’d found . . . this is going to be hard to believe, I think. I know it was for me. Hardwood. A beautiful old hardwood floor, albeit in need of some renovation. Now, I ask you: Who puts shag carpeting over a hardwood floor? Well, sure. Right. The answer to that question is obvious. But who else?

I stood in the empty living room for a moment, wrestling with a slight unease that I couldn’t quite pin down.

The windows were still open, and the air was cold and fresh. And it smelled fine. Perfectly neutral. It contained no remnant of its old owner at all. And maybe that was the source of my unease right there.

I had erased him more successfully than I would have thought possible.

I shook the thought away again.

I locked up Chester’s house and went home, where I showered for a seriously long time. Then I made myself a sandwich.

I had eaten about half of it when a knock came at my door.

I opened it to see a woman in her fifties in a smart skirt suit. A total stranger.

“Mr. Madigan?”

“Yes.”

“Ellie Frankel says you’ll have the key to next door.”

“And you are?”

“The listing agent.”

“Oh. Right. Okay. That was quick.”

“Is the place not anywhere near ready to show?”

“Oh, it’s ready. I just apologize for that nightmare in the driveway.”

“What nightmare in the driveway?”

“You didn’t see?”

“See what?”

I stepped outside in my bare feet, and walked along the sidewalk until I drew level with Chester’s driveway. It was empty. Utterly empty. Perfectly clean.

“Huh,” I said in the general direction of the real estate agent, who I could feel standing behind me. “I know Ellie was going to hire somebody to come get everything and haul it to the dump. But I didn’t even hear anything. They must’ve come while I was in the shower.”

“May I see the inside of the house?”

“Oh, right. Sorry. Let me just run home and get the key.”

I ran home in my bare feet and grabbed the key off my hall table. Ran back.

I opened the door to Chester’s house for her, and we both stepped inside.

I felt a swell of pride for my work. The place was perfect. I mean, if perfectly empty is what you’re after, it was perfect.

“Oh,” she said, and she sounded quite surprised. “This is great. I was told it would still be a bit of a disaster. Well. I shouldn’t say disaster, even though she did. A work in progress.”

“I managed to get it done today.”

“Good. Thank you. This is just the way we like it. As though the former owner had never existed.”

It was a decidedly odd thing for a real estate agent to say, and it hit like an arrow into my discomfort, running me through and pinning me to the wall of Chester’s very clean house.

I’d made the place look as though Chester had never existed.

She seemed to sense my discomfort, because she backpedaled violently.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I was thinking out loud, and I should never do that. I know when a person goes into a care home there’s always this uncomfortable sense of them having been erased from the world, and it was very careless of me to feed into that. Please forgive me.”

“He didn’t go into a care home,” I said. “He’s dead.”

“Oh dear.” Her face flushed red. “I’ve really stuck my foot in it now, haven’t I? I’ll just take the key and go.”

She reached one well-manicured hand in my direction, palm up, and I dropped the key into it.

We walked out together, and she locked up behind us.

I half expected another apology, but she was apparently more humiliated than sorry, and she got to her car and drove away as efficiently as possible.

I sat down on Chester’s front stoop and tried to decide how best to atone for having erased him.

It was dusk by then, and quite cold. I wasn’t wearing a jacket, and my feet were still bare. But I just sat there for many minutes, wearing the cold like some kind of hair shirt, wondering what part of Chester I could still salvage.

I had all that stuff for the thrift store in my car. I could keep some little piece of it for posterity. Something that fairly screamed Chester Wheeler by manner of its very existence.

There was that horrible cuckoo clock that no longer told time, and no longer sent its cuckoo out into the world on the hour. But it was so awful to look at. I couldn’t imagine keeping it around my house.

Maybe something very small, but Chester-reminiscent, like that souvenir spoon from Niagara Falls, or the bottle opener made of carved wood, polished and lacquered.

Even a very small thing would be something. Just a reminder that he had walked the earth in this neighborhood for years. Decades.

Then I opened my eyes, figuratively speaking. They had been open the whole time, but without really seeing. I had been too caught up in the landscape inside my own brain. I focused outside myself for a moment, and there it was. Filling my line of sight. The unwieldy behemoth of Chester’s Winnebago.

Nothing screamed Chester Wheeler as loudly as that Winnebago screamed it.

I got up and walked back to my own house. Picked up my phone and called Ellie.