Free Cheating for the Chicken Man by Priscilla Cummings Page B

little kid. Plus she still found the whole conversation weird. It was something else her brother probably wouldn’t talk about again. Another subject off limits and unspoken, another brick in the wall he was building between them.
    But now Mr. Rutkowski had mentioned the word
cancer
, and Kate couldn’t help but think of her father’s diagnosis of kidney disease, then kidney cancer and his last days struggling to breathe. Could there actually be something to J.T.’s puzzling comment?
See all that dust
flying around?
    She would never forget.
Never
. For nearly two years, Kate’s father had gone to the clinic three times a week for kidney dialysis. During the summer, Kate often went with him to keep him company and help him in and out of the county van. Sometimes, when he was on the machine that cleaned his blood, she read to him from the newspaper because he liked to keep up with the news. If he’d already seen the paper, then she’d get an old
Nation
al Geographic
from the basket at the clinic to read to him. She always went for the animal stories first: saving koala bears from the modern-day threats of highways and dogs,a beauty pageant for camels in Abu Dhabi, the zebras’ epic migration as they followed the rains.
    The dialysis took nearly four hours, so they also spent a chunk of time just sitting together. Kate always brought her journal. Writing in her journal that summer was when Kate discovered how suffering taught her to see the details . . .
    I know it
hurts, but Dad lean
s his head back and
repeats Kerry’s corn
y joke to Lisa, the
nurse. “Why do we ke
ep the refrigerator
door closed?” he ask
s as Lisa sticks a n
eedle into the gigan
tic, ropy vein calle
d a fistula on my da
d’s arm. “I give up,
” Lisa says. Dad tel
ls her, “Because the
salad is dressing!”
Lisa smiles and the
n slips another need
le into Dad’s arm. T
he needles are attac
hed to long tubes th
at carry Dad’s blood
to the machine and
then return it witho
ut the bad stuff tha
t has been building
up because Dad’s kid
neys don’t work righ
t.
    My dad never comp
lains. He never gets
impatient the way I
do. In my head, I c
an be somewhere else
when I’m writing. B
ut after I put the p
en away, I keep an e
ye on the clock and
get up to walk the c
linic hallways, avoi
ding the lines borde
ring the squares of
tile just for someth
ing to do.
    After the
van brings us home,
my dad stretches ba
ck in his La-Z-Boy,
and I pull the afgha
n up over his knees.
“Thanks, Katie Bug,
” he says, and tries
to squeeze my hand.
No one except for m
y dad ever calls me
Katie Bug, and I fee
l like crying, but n
ot in front of him.
I wish he could have
a banana, because h
e loves bananas. But
he can’t eat them a
nymore. They contain
a lot of potassium,
and that’s bad for
people with kidney p
roblems. Still, I wo
nder how much harm o
ne single banana wou
ld do. When my eyes
mist up, I turn the
TV on to CNN and rus
h to the kitchen to
measure out a small
glass of orangejui
ce instead.
    â€œWe don’t have all the answers,” a doctor had once told Kate while he tried to explain the kidney cancer and why her father had only a couple months to live. “I’m so sorry. There’s nothing more we can do.”
    So
unfair
, people said.
    Bad luck
, others concluded as the illness took its toll.
    After her father passed away, some people from church said,
I
t was his time
. Others tried to comfort Kate’s family by saying it was all part of
God’s plan
. But Kate could not accept that explanation. Despite the kindness and all the meals and prayers, the cancer had driven a wedge into her beliefs.
    *
    â€œKate! Over here!” Jess called out in the noisy cafeteria.
    When Kate finally made it through the lunchtime crowd, she saw that Jess had saved her a seat next to Olivia and across from two other girls Kate knew from middle school. Samantha