PART 2 — THE LADDER
When the birthday cake came out, the gray-haired lady at the end of the table leaned across and set a small framed picture right in front of Kyles plate. Doctor, she said, that is my father on the ladder. And the man carrying him is the reason he lived another four years.
In August of 2022, she said, a house caught fire on Harrison Boulevard. Her ninety-year-old father was trapped on the second floor, too old and too frightened to get himself out.
A house painter working next door smelled the smoke, climbed his own ladder up to the second-floor window, and carried a ninety-year-old man down over his shoulder, rung by rung, as the fire spread behind them.
The man Kyle mocked for slapping paint on garages had climbed a ladder into a burning house and carried a ninety-year-old man down over his shoulder.
Someone took that photograph from the street, she said, the painter on the ladder with her father on his back. She had it framed. Her father lived four more years because of that man, and she had brought the picture to meet him.
She had come as a friend Kyles wife brought from church, and she had listened to Kyle mock a house painter until the word garages brought the tears up, because her fathers life had been saved off a ladder leaned against one.
Kyle, the dentist who tells everybody he basically owns the town, who said he does one root canal and makes Jakes whole summer, could not meet her eyes.
Jake just filled my water glass and said he was only glad the old gentleman made it. He had never once mentioned it in four years.
Twenty-two years on ladders with paint in his hair, and my son also carried a stranger out of a burning house on his back and climbed back down through the smoke.
Somebody has got to paint the trim, Kyle had laughed. Somebody also has to climb the ladder into the fire. That is my son, and I have never been prouder to share a birthday with anyone alive.