Old Mrs. Pemberton pulled herself up on her cane, opened her beaded purse, and took out a folded handwritten letter, and she read it to the whole ballroom in a thin, steady voice.
Son, she said to Mr. Pemberton, you said somebody has to keep the dead company. Let me tell you who kept me alive.
Last November, she said, on the coldest night of the year, I went to the cemetery to sit with your father, and I am old, and I fell, and I could not get up. I lay on the frozen ground by his grave and I was ready to go. And a groundskeeper found me, hours after closing, and he wrapped me in his own coat and carried me a quarter mile to his truck and ran the heater and saved my life. This letter is the one I wrote him and never had the courage to send. His name is Reggie.
The ballroom had gone silent. Reggie had loosened his tie and gone very still.
Mr. Pemberton wore cufflinks shaped like gavels and mocked the man who dug graves, and that man had carried his own mother off the frozen ground where she had lain down to die.
Mrs. Pemberton said she had come to her grandsons wedding with that letter in her purse, praying she would one day meet the groundskeeper again, and when her son stood up to mock a man named Reggie who worked at Riverview, she knew God had answered her.
I am Reggies daddy. He said congratulations to the couple, Mr. Pemberton, and took the joke, because a man who carries a widow a quarter mile through the cold does not need a Philadelphia lawyer to tell him what he is worth. Mr. Pemberton crossed that ballroom to his mother, and then to my son, and the gavels on his cuffs did not matter one bit.