PART 2 — THE RECEIPT
Mrs. Whitfield pulled a crumpled grocery receipt out of her wallet and smoothed it against the table. It was dated the night of the big ice storm, two Januarys ago.
My other daughter lives here in Albany, she said to Preston. That night the power went out across the whole city. Her baby, my grandson, was out of formula and down to his last dose of a medicine he cannot miss. Every store was dark and locked.
Every store but one. A grocery on Central Avenue, lit up by a generator, with one man on the overnight shift who had decided to keep the doors open so the families in the neighborhood could get what they needed. He found the formula himself and would not take a dollar for it.
The man Preston mocked for stacking soup cans at midnight had kept a whole neighborhood fed through a blackout, and one of the babies he helped was Prestons own nephew.
I have carried this receipt for a year and a half, Mrs. Whitfield said, because I wanted to thank the man who did that. Then she looked at Tommy. Tonight your father introduced you, and I knew your face at once.
Preston, who had brought wine that cost more than Tommys car, stared at his plate.
Tommy just passed the ham and said it was nothing, that he only flipped a switch on a generator. But his mother and I knew better, and so now did everyone at that table.
My son faces the cereal boxes at midnight, the lobbyist had joked. On the coldest night of the year, he kept the lights on for a sick baby. That is the graveyard shift.