Mr Holloway pulled himself up on his cane, steadied himself, and reached into his jacket. The whole party by the grill went quiet. My Uncle Ramon, still holding his margarita, stopped mid-laugh.
Mr Holloway did not pull out a paper. He pulled out a photograph of himself with his wife and three children, and he held it up with a shaking hand.
He told the party that last year he was part of a logging crew in the East Texas pine woods when a tree came down wrong. It pinned him to the ground across the chest, and the men around him could not budge it, and he felt his own ribs giving way, and he knew the ambulance was forty minutes out on roads that slow.
One man got under that trunk with his bare hands and lifted it. Not with a machine. With his back and his legs and everything he had, long enough for the others to drag Mr Holloway clear. The doctors said another two minutes under that weight and he would not have made it home to the family in the photograph.
That man was Mateo.
Somebody has to make the toothpicks, Ramon had said. He did not know those same hands had lifted a pine tree off a dying man.
Mr Holloway told the party he had driven four hours from East Texas, on a leg that still does not work right, for one reason. To stand up at this grill and tell everyone that while Ramon counts his three restaurants on the River Walk, the man he just called a tree cutter gave five children their father back.
Then he looked at Ramon and said, you have a lot to be proud of, sir. But you are not the biggest man at this party. Not today.
Ramon set his margarita down on the table. He did not make another toast. The mariachis came back and nobody asked him to speak again.
Mateo just passed the tortillas and said, salud, Tio, like nothing had happened. Then he went and sat with Mr Holloway for the rest of the afternoon, two quiet men who understood each other without saying much at all.