1A Bump in the RoadThe morning of October 5, 2010, started as most mornings did in the Hickey household. Ersel Hickey, a sixty-eight-year-old school bus driver in the village of Hoosick Falls, New York, rose before dawn. He pulled on his jeans and baseball cap and dropped by Stewart’s convenience store for some coffee. Then he headed out for his morning shift. Ersel’s bus route wound through the village’s Second Ward, a mix of old brick factories and faded Victorian homes with American flags flapping from their porches, and then into hardscrabble hill country sprinkled with rusty trailers and ramshackle farmhouses. Along the way, Ersel cracked jokes, handed out candy, and let the kids blare music over the bus’s radio.
On this particular day, after delivering the kids to school, Ersel returned to the brown-shingled cottage he shared with his wife, Sue. He grabbed a snack, slipped into the bathroom to relieve himself—and watched the toilet fill with blood. Ersel hollered for Sue, who gasped at the sight of the reddish water, then he headed straight to the office of the family’s longtime doctor, Marcus Martinez.
Marcus examined him, took some X-rays, and decided to put him in the hospital overnight for some tests. The doctor was on the phone making arrangements when Ersel’s youngest son, Michael, dropped by the office to check on him. Marcus cupped his hand over the receiver and told Michael not to worry—Ersel was probably just constipated. After the inevitable quips about what Ersel was full of, Michael drove him to the hospital.
Michael, a thirty-one-year-old insurance underwriter with a firm belief in the power of positive thinking, spent the following day in his cubicle. Afterward, he attended a breastfeeding class with his fiancée, Angela. She was nine months pregnant with their first child, and Michael had been trying to persuade her to name the baby Ersel, so far without success. When he called his mother after class, he could tell from her voice that something was wrong. “I didn’t want to tell you this over the phone,” Sue told him. “But it’s worse than what we thought. It looks like your father has kidney cancer.”
Michael was stunned; it was hard to imagine someone so vigorous being seriously ill. But he was determined not to dwell on worst-case scenarios. The following night, he and Angela took Ersel out to dinner and Michael assured his father that everything would be okay. Ersel would get through the treatment, and then he could live out his dream of traveling the country in his RV. “This is just a bump in the road to the places you want to go,” Michael told him.
At one point, Angela left the table, and Michael couldn’t resist the urge to make a joke. “Maybe we can even sell her on Ersel now,” he said, leaning in close to his father. “You know—maybe we can get something positive out of this situation.” Michael had only seen his father cry once, but at the mention of his future grandson, Ersel started quietly sobbing.
About two weeks later, tiny blood clots began breaking off the tumor in Ersel’s kidney, clogging his urinary tract. He was transported to St. Peter’s Hospital in nearby Albany to have his kidney removed. Angela, who by then was past her due date, arranged to have her labor induced at St. Peter’s, so the entire family could be there for Ersel’s surgery.
The day of Ersel’s procedure, she and Michael rose around 4 a.m., packed some baby clothes, and drove toward Albany through the cool autumn dawn. When they arrived at St. Peter’s, Sue was sitting in the deserted waiting room with Michael’s sister, Katy, their brother, Jeff, and Ersel’s brother, Rich. Michael tried to distract himself with Sports Illustrated, but after an hour or two, he found himself fixating on an LCD screen with a scrolling color-coded list of patients. Navy blue meant pre-op; fuchsia meant undergoing surgery; lavender meant the patient was in recovery.
Gradually, the waiting room filled up. People in scrubs hustled back and forth through the swinging doors leading to the surgery suites. Patient after patient flipped from navy, to fuchsia, to lavender and then drifted off the screen. But Ersel’s entry lingered up there in fuchsia. Finally, around two that afternoon, the surgeon emerged. The procedure had been more complicated than expected, he said. But Ersel had come through just fine—and he was now cancer-free. Exhausted but relieved, the family paid a brief visit to Ersel, who was lying unconscious in a recovery bay. Then Michael and Angela went down to the labor and delivery floor so that she could give birth to their son.
The Hickeys spent much of the following morning shuttling between Angela’s and Ersel’s rooms while Angela’s relatives played rummy in the Pepto-Bismol-pink birthing suite. By early afternoon, Angela’s contractions were coming hard and fast. But she wasn’t making any progress, and after six or seven more hours of intense labor, the baby’s heart rate began wavering. Her doctor was preparing for a cesarean when suddenly the baby entered the birth canal and emptied the contents of his bowels, a substance that can be fatal to a newborn if inhaled. The doctor ordered everyone except Angela’s parents and Michael out of the room.
What happened next was a blur; nurses scurrying and the tap-tap of Angela’s father’s shoes as he paced behind the curtain they’d pulled around her bed. Then, around 10 p.m., Angela gave one last push and the baby emerged. Her mother cut the umbilical cord; a breathing specialist declared him healthy. The relatives who had been waiting in the hallway poured back into the room, many of them in tears. Michael was shaking so hard he had to sit down. Then Katy laid the swaddled newborn in his arms, and Michael held him close, marveling at his plump cheeks and tiny cleft chin.
Later, when the baby was sleeping, Michael asked the nurse to make an extra copy of the birth certificate. He took it to his father’s room and pinned it on a board by the bed so Ersel could see the baby’s name: Oliver Ersel Hickey. “You get to go home healthy, and Angela agreed to put Ersel in the middle, so it’s a win all around,” Michael told him. Ersel was so hazy from the surgery that he could barely open his eyes, but a smile flickered across his face.
A lot of things changed after Ersel’s surgery. He’d always been a hard worker—for most of Michael’s life, he’d not only driven the school bus but also worked the night shift at a local factory. He rarely complained, but his punishing schedule had kept him from doing things he dreamed of, like hitting the road in his RV or taking the family to the South Dakota Badlands.
Now, it seemed, he finally had the time. After the surgery, Ersel found driving the bumpy back-country roads on his bus route painful, so he moved to a part-time schedule and lavished attention on his new grandson. At one point, Oliver’s sitter had to take several months off, and Ersel, who had rarely changed a diaper before Oliver’s birth, volunteered to fill in. Each morning, he would arrive at Michael and Angela’s with his newspaper and his Stewart’s coffee, then spend the day playing on the floor with his grandbaby or proudly ferrying him around town in his stroller.
When Ersel wasn’t with Oliver, he played golf or drove his buddies to the stock car races in his yellow Corvette. As usual, come spring, he rolled the loose change he’d collected all year and put it in a pail for gas money. Then he and Sue drove the RV to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where many blue-collar Hoosick Falls families vacationed. Sue, who had nerve damage in her legs and walked with a cane, dreaded these excursions. “I’ve always felt I deserve, once a year, on vacation, to have somebody else make my bed instead of me,” she grumbled. But Ersel loved bumping into neighbors on the golf course and doing crosswords while they splashed in the pool with their families.
That June, following a routine scan, the hospital called Ersel back in for an extra test. Nobody thought much of it—they were too busy preparing for the big high school graduation party the family was throwing for Sue and Ersel’s eldest grandchild. The day of the event, Ersel arrived at Katy’s house with poster-sized photos of his grandson playing basketball. As the crowd gradually swelled, Ersel made the rounds like the local mayor—cracking jokes, talking sports, and asking after everyone’s relatives. At some point, Marcus made a brief appearance, which struck Sue as strange. “He was in and out in a flash, and something about it gave me an awful feeling,” she recalled. But Ersel didn’t seem to notice. Around 11 p.m., when the party had dwindled to family and close friends, he lit some Chinese lanterns he’d brought back from South Carolina and stood mesmerized as the glowing orbs drifted into the night sky.
Copyright © 2025 by Mariah Blake. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
