Joan opened her purse and took out the folded newspaper clipping from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and she looked at her husband for a long moment before she read it out loud.
In June 2023, during the flash flooding on the north side, a city sewer and water worker had himself lowered on a rope into a storm drain to pull out a ten-year-old boy who had been swept in chasing a ball. He went into the dark and the rushing water and he came back up with the boy alive. The paper ran his photograph.
Then Joan set the clipping down in front of Richard. That boy, she said, was Nathan. Our grandson. Your grandson, Richard. Our Kevins boy. He was staying in the city that week, and he chased a ball into the street, and he would have drowned in that drain if this man you just called a sewer that smells had not gone down into it after him.
Richard had asked whether the potato salad was homemade and then mocked the one man at the barbecue who had climbed down a rope into a flooded storm drain to save his own grandson.
The dessert sat forgotten. Richard, the retired bank president, did not have anything to say.
Tony had flipped the brats and said cheers, Richard, and taken the joke, because a man who goes down into a storm drain on a rope does not need a brandy old fashioned to feel like somebody.
I am his mother. I watched Joan look at her husband like a door had finally closed on all the years she had let him talk like that. She folded the clipping back up, put it in her purse, and walked across the yard to hug my son. Richard stayed in his chair. Some men take longer than others to understand what they are looking at.