The Chemo Calendar I Handed His Daughter

The bell

Treatment fourteen fell on the last Tuesday in April. The last one. The calendar was almost all crossed off by then, half of it in my handwriting and half of it in Michelle’s.

Les had said for months he didn’t want any fuss. He said he wasn’t going to ring that bell they’ve got by the nurses’ station, the brass one on the wall with the little plaque.

He said it was for little kids and people on the news.

I took the day off. Michelle drove up Monday night like always. At 5:15 Tuesday morning, the three of us went out to the silver sedan together, and nobody had to decide who held his elbow.

It was raining that morning, a soft April rain, the kind that turns the road ditches green overnight. A few farmers had been out planting along 79 the week before.

Les sat in the front and watched the black fields go by and said the ground would be in good shape.

We sat with him through the whole infusion. When the last bag ran dry and the pump was clipped to his belt for the final time, Lori came over, and she didn’t say anything about the bell. She just looked at him with her eyebrows up.

Les sat there for a minute. Then he said, “Oh, all right,” and he pushed himself up out of that chair, and he walked over to the bell on the wall by himself.

He stood in front of it and he looked back at us. He didn’t say a word.

He just held out his hand to the side, and then the other hand to the other side, like a man waiting for somebody to take hold.

Michelle got up and took his right hand. I got up and took his left.

And the three of us stood there in front of that brass bell, Michelle on one side and me on the other, and Les reached up and rang it three times.

The nurses clapped. A woman in one of the other chairs, with a scarf over her head, clapped too, and she was crying, and I was crying, and so was Michelle.

Les wasn’t. Les was grinning like a man who had just got the power back on in a whole county.

The parking garage

It was still raining when we came down the elevator to level three. Les was tired but steady, and he said he could make it to the car fine, and for once he did, all forty feet of it.

Michelle got him settled in the passenger seat. She checked that his gloves were on, and she put the warm thermos in the cup holder, and she shut his door gently, the way you shut a door on a sleeping baby.

The rain was coming in sideways through the open side of the garage, out where the ramp turned.

I had left my umbrella on the hook at home, of all the mornings to do it. I said I’d make a dash for the back door.

“Don’t be silly,” Michelle said. She opened hers, a big plain black one she kept in her bag for showings, and held it out over both of us.

We stood there for a second under it, the two of us, with the rain drumming on the concrete and Les watching us through the windshield with that same grin still on his face.

“Thank you,” Michelle said. “For handing me the keys. I don’t think I’d have ever really known him, this part of him, if you hadn’t.”

“Thank you for taking them,” I said. “I didn’t know how tired I was.”

She laughed a little. She shifted the umbrella so it was more over me than over her, and her shoulder started getting wet, and she didn’t move it back.

And that is how we walked around to our doors, two women in a parking garage in Lincoln, sharing one umbrella.