The Chemo Calendar I Handed His Daughter

The rest of the calendar

Michelle’s month was up at the end of February. She went back to Omaha because she had a living to make and the spring market was coming. But she did not give the keys back.

Every other Monday night after that, she drove up from Omaha after work and slept in the guest room.

Every other Tuesday at 5:15, she drove her father to Lincoln. Treatments ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen. She never missed one.

I went to work on those Tuesdays, and it felt strange at first, like I’d left the stove on.

Then it started to feel like what it was, which was rest. I hadn’t known how tired I was until somebody else picked up the other end.

Some Tuesdays I rode along anyway, in the back seat, because I wanted to and because Michelle asked me to.

She said she liked having two of us in the chairs. She said he talked more when we were both there.

He did, too. He told stories I’d never heard, about the ice storm of ’97 and the time a bull got loose in a substation down by Scribner. Michelle laughed in places I’d never heard her laugh.

The nurses got used to us. They’d see Michelle coming off the elevator on level three with his bag and me behind her with the thermos, and one of them, a tall gal named Lori, started calling us the pit crew.

The candies

It was around treatment twelve that I noticed it. I was the one unpacking his bag that night, because Michelle had a showing in Elkhorn and had to head straight back after she dropped him off.

In the side pocket of his bag, where I had always tucked a handful of lemon ginger candies, there was a whole new bag of them.

Not the plain ones. The lemon ones, the exact brand, from the drugstore in Fremont.

There was a little slip of paper rubber-banded around it, torn off a real estate notepad with her company’s name across the top.

In her neat handwriting it said, “Lemon. Not plain. Plain tastes like a fence post.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed with that bag of candy in my lap, and I’ll tell you the truth, it undid me more than anything else that whole winter had.

She’d been listening. All that time she was asking the room things sideways and taking pictures of my calendar in the guest room, she’d been listening, and she’d been learning him.

When I told Les, he got up out of his recliner and came down the hall to look at it, like he didn’t believe me.

He stood there in the bedroom door in his socks, holding that slip of paper.

“She always was a good kid,” he said. And then he didn’t say anything for a while, and neither did I.