Melissa pulled a folded clipping from the Omaha World-Herald out of her purse, and the tears were already coming before she read it.
Dad, she said, you said somebody has to read the little dials. Let me tell you what Greg smelled in February.
On his route, Melissa said, a gas meter reader smelled gas outside a little brick house, and he did not just mark it and move on. He pounded on that door until his knuckles bled, and he got an elderly couple and their two grandchildren out of the house two minutes before the basement exploded. Dad, that was Grandma and Grandpa. That was your own mother and father. And the grandkids were Ashley and me, home for the weekend. Cousin Greg, the one you mock every single holiday, is the reason any of us are alive.
The table had gone silent. Greg had set down the carving knife.
Ron reminds everyone he went to Harvard, and the nephew he mocked pounded his knuckles bloody to pull Rons own parents and children out of a house two minutes before it blew.
Melissa had carried that clipping since February, unable to understand how her father could keep belittling the man who had saved his whole family, and tonight she finally could not hold it in.
I am Gregs mother. He carved the turkey and said happy Thanksgiving, Ron, and took the joke, because a man who runs toward a gas leak does not need an investment banker to tell him what he is worth. Ron set down his chardonnay and looked at his daughter crying across the table, and the word Harvard did not come up again.