PART 2 — THE DISCHARGE
Tyler pulled off his ball cap, unfolded a hospital discharge paper soft from a year in his wallet, and held it out to Chase.
Last August, he said, I was twenty years old and three weeks into my first job on a highway crew. I did not hear the truck. Seventy miles an hour, straight through the cones, right at me. I froze.
A flagger grabbed me and threw me clear. The mirror that would have hit my head caught him in the ribs instead. He cracked three of them keeping me on my feet. The discharge paper is mine. I walked out of that hospital without a scratch because he took the hit for me.
The man Chase said a traffic cone could replace had broken his own ribs to throw a boy he barely knew out of the path of a truck.
I have carried this paper for a year, Tyler said, waiting to meet his family and say thank you. Then he looked at Bobby. Tonight your sister brought me to this cookout, Chase, and I walked in and saw the man who saved my life flipping the burgers.
The yard went silent. Chase, in his boat shoes, set his Coors Light down on the deck rail.
Bobby just flipped another burger and said anybody on the crew would have done it. But Tyler shook his head and said the whole crew froze. Only Bobby moved.
My son holds a stick with a sign on it, his son-in-law had joked. One August afternoon that man stepped in front of a truck so a stranger could go home. That is what the paddle is for.