So Long, Chester Wheeler(88)

She smiled wryly and shrugged her shoulders.

“What can I say? That’s my family. And I’m sorry about the smoking thing. And also I’m sorry I told my mom about it. I had no idea she’d use it against you. But mostly I’m just sorry it ever happened in the first place.”

“I know Estelle can make you do things against your better judgment.”

“Hey,” Estelle said. “You think I can’t hear you?”

“No, I know you can.”

Estelle’s granddaughter stood up on the toes of her red cowboy boots, her fingers braced in the RV’s window pocket.

“It was nice to see you again, Grandma.”

“Likewise, dear,” Estelle said.

I thought they would make some kind of arrangement for keeping in touch, but the granddaughter only wandered away.

I sat a minute with the engine running, watching her go.

“Hey,” Estelle said. “Don’t just sit there, Bozo. We’ve got a patriotic monument to see.”



We drove a good third of the distance in silence. I couldn’t help hoping that Estelle’s reasons for leaving were nothing she would later regret. I was curious, but I didn’t want to push.

“You know it’s going to be much more crowded on the weekend,” I said. “Right?”

“More crowded than what?”

“Than if we’d stayed at the reunion all weekend and gone on Monday.”

“Oh. Right. Well . . . it’s up, right? The monument. It’s high. You look up to see it, right?”

“I can’t argue with that,” I said.

“So who cares what’s on the ground?”

We fell silent again, but not for long. I had popped the cork on Estelle, and she started bubbling over.

“I feel very free,” she said. “And do you know why?”

“I wouldn’t venture a guess.”

“Because I remembered why I haven’t seen my family for so long. It’s because they’re a royal pain in the ass. Somehow I spent all this time wondering why they didn’t want to see me. Like what was so terrible about me? And then this morning it hit me that I didn’t want to see them, either. And it’s very freeing. Oh, I’m sure they’d say it’s me. But at least I know it’s not just me. They think I’m too hard to get along with, but they’re every bit as bad.”

She looked out the window in silence for a few beats.

Then she asked, “Do you think I’m too hard to get along with, Lewis?”

“I think you’re hard enough,” I said.

It probably sounds like a harsh thing to say, but I was trusting her to hear it in the spirit in which it had been intended.

She chewed on that for a second or two, then brayed with laughter. Honestly, she laughed like a donkey. It was kind of fun. It was contagious.

“See, that’s what I love about you, Lewis. Now hurry up and let’s go see some dead presidents.”

On the way, she told me at length about how she’d lived with her husband, Mel, in Spearfish, South Dakota, for thirty-seven years, not seventy miles from Mount Rushmore. But did she ever get to go see it?

Spoiler alert: no she did not.



I limped with her down the Avenue of Flags, very slowly, guiding her by the elbow and towing the oxygen behind. The monument itself was clearly visible above and beyond the rows of state flags. Under the presidents lay a sort of cone-shaped slope of loose rocks, with a few evergreen trees poking up.

On the ground, the place was packed. A sea of humans.

“Who knew all these people would be here?” Estelle asked.

“We . . . talked about it, actually.”

“Did we? What did I say?”

“That the monument is up, so we’d be looking up. So it didn’t matter what was on the ground.”

“Right. I guess that’s easy to say when you’re not right in the middle of this crush of humanity.”

She stopped, so I stopped, too. I could feel an unusual amount of her weight on me, as if I was holding her up more than normal. It had been a long day for Estelle.

“Look,” I said. “You can see the damn thing from literally everywhere. Why don’t we just go back to the RV, and I’ll make us some lunch, and we can look at it out the window?”

“Eh,” she said. “We can head for home. Once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. And now I’ve seen it.”

We just stood for a moment, arm in arm, letting the crush of humanity spill around us like a river. Grown-ups jostled us with their shoulders and a kid stepped on my foot. The good one, fortunately.

“You know,” I said, “I really didn’t expect to say this, but . . . despite my many misgivings . . . just in its sheer size and scope, it’s pretty impressive.”

“Eh,” she said again. “I think it’s overrated. A little anticlimactic after all this time.”



“So, listen,” I said on our way back east through South Dakota.

Estelle said, “Uh-oh.”

Then we just drove in silence for a moment.

“You’re leaving me,” she said.

“I just need to explain—”

“It’s because I’m too hard to get along with.”