PART 2 — THE LETTER
Mike almost threw the letter out. Shaky handwriting, no return address, two years after the big freeze. He thought it was junk.
Inside was a thank-you card from the nursing home on the north side, and tucked behind it a second envelope, sealed, with a name written on the front in that same shaky hand. The name was Grant.
Two Decembers ago, when the freeze hit, every pipe in that nursing home burst at once. Forty residents, no heat, water coming through the ceilings. Mike worked forty hours straight, no sleep, and got the water back on and the building warm before anyone was harmed. Then he went home and never sent a bill, and never told a soul.
One of the old men Mike kept warm those forty hours was Grants own father, and the plumber Grant called a crawl-under-the-house man was the reason that old man lived to write one last letter.
Mike did not understand why a stranger would write Grants name. But he is a good man, so that same evening he drove the sealed envelope over to Grants house and put it in his hand.
Grant read the name on the back. Then he sat down very slowly on his own porch step and tore it open right there.
The first line said, Son, the night the pipes froze, a young man I never met kept me alive. I am told he is married into your family. I am writing so you will know the kind of man he is, in case you ever forgot to thank him.
Grants father had passed that spring. The letter had sat in a drawer at the home until a nurse found it and mailed it on.
Three weeks earlier, Grant had stood up at my granddaughters graduation party, the orthodontist with the boat he never uses, and said Mike fixes turds and I fix teeth. Everybody laughed. Mike laughed too.
Grant was not laughing on that porch step. He read his fathers last words about my son, and he wept like a child.
He came to Mikes house the next morning. He did not make a speech. He just said thank you, and he meant it, and that was the first true thing he had said to my son in ten years.