The Chemo Calendar I Handed His Daughter

Treatment nine

Treatment nine fell on the third Tuesday of February. I was at my desk at the hospital in Fremont by seven that morning, and I want to say I didn’t watch the clock, but that would be a lie.

At 6:30 I thought, labs. At 7:30 I thought, he’s in the chair now.

At 10:00 I thought, the last bag’s about done, they’ll be hooking up the pump by eleven. I knew that schedule like I knew my own phone number.

At 11:40 my cell phone buzzed in my cardigan pocket. I looked down at it, and the name on the screen was Michelle.

In nine years of marriage to her father, she had never once called me. Not on a birthday, not at Christmas. Mostly she went through him.

My first thought was that something had gone wrong. I told the girl at the next desk I’d be right back, and I stepped through the door into the supply hall, where it was quiet, and I answered.

“Gail?” Her voice was thin. It didn’t sound like the woman who had stood at my kitchen table in her coat.

“Is he all right? Michelle, is he all right?”

“He’s asleep. He’s fine. They just hooked up the pump, and he’s sleeping.” I could hear her breathing, the way you breathe when you’ve been crying a while and finally stopped.

“I’m out in the parking garage,” she said. “I’m in the car. Level three, by the elevator, like you said.”

Then nothing for a long time. I stood there in the supply hall between the shelves of saline and boxes of exam gloves, and I waited.

“Gail, I need to tell you something.”

“All right.”

“I fell asleep in the chair this morning. Next to him. The nurse put a warm blanket on me.” She laughed, a wet little laugh.

“I’ve been up since four every day this week, and I fell dead asleep in a plastic chair in a cancer center.”

“Those chairs will do it,” I said.

“When I woke up, he was awake. He was just lying there looking at me. And he said, ‘Michelle, I have to tell you something, and Gail’s going to be mad at me for telling you.'”

I put my hand on the shelf. I didn’t say anything.

“He told me it was him,” she said. “He told me he was the one who said not to tell me. Back in September. He said you told him it was wrong, twice, and he made you promise anyway.”

“He shouldn’t have done that today,” I said. “Not in the chair.”

“Gail.” Her voice broke right in half. “Why didn’t you just tell me? That night. At the table. I said all that to you, in your own kitchen, and you just stood there and handed me the keys.”

What I told her

I leaned back against the shelving. Through the little window in the door, I could see a farmer in a feed cap signing his wife in at my desk.

“Because he’s your dad,” I said. “And he was scared. And if I’d told you, you’d have been mad at him instead of me, and he couldn’t afford that. He needed you to stay.”

She was crying now, not trying to hide it. I waited until she could hear me.

“He didn’t keep it from you because he didn’t want you, Michelle. He kept it from you because of your mother. He told me you drove up to Norfolk every weekend for a year. He told me what it did to you. He didn’t want to do that to you again.”

“That wasn’t his call,” she said.

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t. I told him so. He made it anyway. He’s a lineman. They decide where the danger is and then they go climb it by themselves.”

She laughed through her crying, because she knew it was true. She’d grown up with that man.

“I had no idea,” she said, very quietly. “I thought you were keeping him. Like you had him and I didn’t get any. And then I got that calendar, and I started reading your notes.”

“Pull over at mile 40,” she said. “I didn’t know what that meant. And then on the way home from eight, right at mile marker forty, he said, ‘Pull over, honey,’ and I just about drove into the ditch.”

“It’s always right there,” I said. “I don’t know why.”

“You wrote down which ginger candies. You wrote down which spots in the parking garage. You wrote down to warm up the seat belt buckle with your hand before you click it in for him.”

She took a long breath. “You were carrying him. All of it. And I walked in and said you were keeping him from me.”

“You didn’t know,” I said.

“I didn’t ask,” she said. “That’s worse.”

I didn’t argue with that, because she was right, and she knew she was right, and the kindest thing I could do was let her be right about it.