The Chemo Calendar I Handed His Daughter

What I said at the table

“I’m staying,” Michelle said. “I’ve got a month. I’m taking the guest room, and I’m going to be here, and nobody is going to keep me out of this anymore.”

I set the spoon down on the spoon rest. I wiped my hands on the dish towel.

And I walked over to the cupboard by the phone, and I opened the door, and I took down the calendar.

I unhooked the calendar from its nail and carried it to the table. I laid it down in front of Michelle, open to February, and I smoothed the page flat with both hands.

Fourteen treatments, every other Tuesday. Seven boxes crossed off in my handwriting. Seven still empty.

Then I took the car keys off the hook by the back door, the keys to our silver sedan, and I set them right on top of the calendar.

Michelle looked down at them. She looked up at me. “What is this?”

“Treatment eight is a week from Tuesday,” I said. “Labs are at 6:30 in the morning. You’ll want to leave here by 5:15, because the roads can be slick before the plows get out.”

She didn’t pick the keys up. She looked at them like they might bite her.

“Take Highway 79 down, not the interstate,” I said. “It’s a few minutes longer, but it’s smoother, and it’s easier on his stomach. He’ll be fine going down. It’s coming home that’s hard.”

“Bring his gloves. They’re the brown ones on the bench by the door. After a treatment, cold feels like needles in his fingers and his throat for days. Keep warm water in the thermos, never cold, not even cool.”

“And the parking garage fills up by seven. Go straight to level three and look for the spots by the elevator. If you get one, he only has to walk forty feet.”

Michelle’s face had gone pink across the cheekbones. She picked up the keys. She held them in her fist so tight I could see the teeth of them pressing into her palm.

“Fine,” she said. “I can drive my own father to Lincoln, Gail. I’ve driven worse.”

“I know you have,” I said. And I meant it, because I knew about her mother, and she didn’t know that I knew.

I went back to the stove. I asked if anybody wanted chicken and noodles. Nobody did. Michelle took her suitcase down the hall to the guest room and shut the door.

Les looked at me from that recliner for a long, long time. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to.

I knew what he was asking me, and I gave him a little nod, and that was the whole conversation.

In bed that night

He tried again after the lights were out. He lay on his back with the covers up to his chin, because he was always cold that winter, and he said, “Gail, I’ll tell her in the morning.”

“No, you won’t,” I said.

“She thinks you hid it from her. That isn’t right. That’s on me, and I’m going to put it where it goes.”

I rolled over and put my hand on his chest, right below the port, where I could feel his heart going under my palm. It was going fast for a man lying still.

“Les. If you tell her tomorrow, she’ll be hurt at you instead of me. And she’ll go home hurt. And then she’ll drive up for every treatment hurt, if she comes at all, and you’ll spend the next seven treatments trying to fix it.”

“And if you don’t tell her, she’ll be mad at me for a while. I can live with that. I’ve got a job to go back to. You need her more than you need me to be right.”

He was quiet so long I thought he’d fallen asleep. Then he said, “You’re a stubborn woman, you know that.”

“I married a lineman,” I said. “I learned it somewhere.”

He laughed, just a little, and then he coughed, and then he put his hand over mine on his chest, and we lay there like that until I heard him breathing slow.