The Chemo Calendar I Handed His Daughter

Right around 40, every single time, the nausea came over him on the way home. It didn’t matter what the nurses gave him or how he sat.

I learned to slow down around 38 and start looking for a field approach to pull into.

He would open the door and lean out, and I would rub his back through his coat, and the trucks would go by and rock the car.

Then he’d sit back and say, “Well, that’s done,” like he’d finished splitting a cord of wood.

The cold was the other thing nobody warned us about. One of the drugs, oxaliplatin, makes cold feel like needles for days afterward.

Cold air on his face, a cold doorknob, a sip of cold water. It closed his throat like a fist.

In a Nebraska winter, that is a hard thing to live with. I bought him a pair of insulated work gloves at the farm store and made him wear them to open the refrigerator. He grumbled about it, and he wore them.

I kept a thermos of warm water in the car, and a pouch of those lemon ginger candies in the side pocket of his bag.

He liked the lemon ones. The plain ones, he said, tasted like chewing on a fence post.

That was what I had been carrying since October, along with the vacation hours I was burning at work. By the end of January I had used ninety-six of them.

The Facebook post

The first scan was supposed to be in March. Les was waiting on that scan. He kept saying, “After the scan, Gail. After the scan, I’ll call her.”

He didn’t get to wait that long.

His cousin Donna, who lives in Wisner and means well about everything, put up a post on her Facebook page in the third week of January.

She wrote, “Keeping my cousin Les in our prayers through his chemo.”

She meant it kindly. Donna just didn’t know that Michelle didn’t know, because why would anyone think a man’s own daughter wouldn’t know?

Michelle sells houses in Omaha. She read it on her phone while she was sitting at an open house on a Saturday afternoon, waiting for somebody to come look at a split level in Millard.

She told me later that she sat down on the stairs of that stranger’s house and read it four times.

Then she closed up the open house an hour early, and she did not call her father, and she did not call me.

Instead she spent the week cleaning out her calendar. February is the slow month in real estate, and she told her broker she’d be working remote.

Then she packed a suitcase and drove up on Sunday without telling anyone she was coming.

I heard the car in the driveway at about six. I looked out the kitchen window and saw her getting out of her white Explorer, and my stomach dropped right down into my shoes.

Les heard it too. He said, “Is that…” and didn’t finish. He didn’t have to.