The Chemo Calendar I Handed His Daughter

The kitchen table, again

When I pulled into the driveway at a quarter to six, the silver sedan was already home and the kitchen light was on.

Les was in the recliner, the way he always was on a treatment night, and Michelle wasn’t in the guest room.

She was in the kitchen with her coat off, standing by the table like she was trying to decide something. Then she pulled out a chair and sat down.

“Dad,” she said, over her shoulder. “Can you come sit at the table? Just for a minute.”

He came. It took him a while, with the pump on his belt and his legs the way they were on treatment days, but he came, and he lowered himself into his chair at the head of the table, and he put his hands flat on the wood.

I set my purse on the counter and sat down across from her. The calendar was still on its nail inside the cupboard door.

Michelle got up and went and took it down, and she laid it in the middle of the table, open to February.

Les looked at it. He looked at me. And then he looked at his daughter, and he said the thing a man that age does not find easy to say, especially to his own grown child.

“I was the one who said not to tell you. Gail wanted to tell you in September. I said no. I made her keep it. That was me, Michelle. All of it was me, and I let her take it.”

“I know, Dad,” she said. “You told me today.”

“I’m telling you again in front of her,” he said. “Because she ought to hear me say it.”

He reached across the table and put his hand on top of mine. His fingers were cold even inside the kitchen, the way they were all that winter.

Then he reached over with the other hand and put it on top of Michelle’s.

Nobody made a speech. Les isn’t a speech man. He just sat there with his hands on both of us and his eyes wet, and after a minute he said, “Well. That’s done.”

Michelle looked at me across the table. “I’m sorry, Gail,” she said. “For what I said. In your house. I’m sorry.”

“I know you are,” I said. “You’re here now. That’s what matters to him.”

“It matters to me too,” she said. “I want you to know that.”

I nodded. I didn’t trust myself to say anything else.