Miss Tasha turned her phone around and pressed play. It was a doorbell camera video. Smoke pouring from a duplex, and a man in an ice cream truck uniform running in and coming back out with a little girl under each arm, just before the front windows blew out.
Brandon, she said, you called it the Popsicle truck. Those are my daughters.
In July 2023, Miss Tasha said, her two little girls were home when a fire started in the back bedroom, and the ice cream man on the route saw the smoke, jumped out, and carried both of them out before the fire trucks even turned the corner. She had moved to Greenville and joined the church that spring, and she had been trying to find the man ever since, to thank him. She found him at the homecoming picnic, handing out Push-Pops to the children, and one of those children was hers.
The picnic tables had gone silent.
Brandon said somebody has to play that music, and the man playing it had run into a burning house for two little girls who are alive because of him.
Jerome had not told a soul. Thirty-eight years old, same white truck, same route since 2012, and he had carried two children out of a fire and gone back to selling Push-Pops like it was nothing.
I am Jeromes mama. He handed out the ice cream and said God bless you, Brandon, and took the joke, because a man who has run into a fire does not get burned by a cousin at a church picnic. Miss Tashas girls ran to Jerome and hugged his legs, and Brandon watched them do it, and he put his sweet tea down and had nothing left to say.