Eli opened the envelope slowly, then he stood up and asked for the microphone Rhonda had just set down. He did not look angry. He looked like a man about to keep a promise to a dying mans wife.
Mr Feldman, ninety-one, lifted a hand and said he wanted to speak first.
He told the ballroom that two years ago his wife of sixty-four years was dying at home, and that she could not get to the store anymore, and that every single week a young man from the Publix deli on Hallandale Beach Boulevard drove her groceries to the house on his own time, after his shift, and sat with her at the kitchen table while she ate, because she was lonely and her children lived far away.
That young man was Eli.
The envelope was a letter Mrs Feldman had written before she passed. Mr Feldman had been carrying it for a year, waiting for a night the whole family was together. He asked Eli to read it.
Eli read it. His voice only shook once. She had written that in her last months a stranger from the deli counter had treated her like his own grandmother, that he never once let her feel like a burden, and that she wanted her family to know his name and never forget it.
Some of us close on penthouses, and some of us sit with the dying so they do not eat alone.
The ballroom was very quiet. Rhonda, who had taken the microphone twenty minutes earlier to call my son the help, sat down without a word and did not pick it up again all night.
Mr Feldman was not finished. He told the room that he had changed something in his affairs that spring, quietly, and that a scholarship fund at the synagogue now carried his wifes name, and that he had asked Eli to help him choose each year who receives it, because Eli knows which people in this town are quietly carrying the most.
My son put the letter in his jacket pocket, next to his heart. Then he knelt back down by the wheelchair and thanked the old man, and the two of them talked until the band packed up.
Eli still runs the deli counter at the Publix. He always will. He is the richest man I know.