PART 2 — THE SECOND PHOTO
The boys mother put her hand on his arm. There is one more photo, she said. Swipe left.
The first photo had already silenced the table, a minivan half sunk in a canal off Route 60, and a soaking-wet man standing on the bank. That man was my son Ray. Blake had zoomed in and gone pale.
The second photo was the boy. Fifteen now, grinning, alive. Two years ago he had been fourteen, strapped in the back of that van when it went off the road into the water.
Ray had been driving his tow truck down Route 60 when he saw the van go in. He did not wait for anyone. He went into that canal in his work boots, broke a window, and pulled the boy out as the van filled and sank.
The man Blake mocked for driving a tow truck had gone into a canal after a drowning boy while everyone else was still reaching for their phones.
The boy, a teenager named Tyler, had gone pale the minute he walked into the fish fry and saw Ray. His mother had brought him along with one of my nephews, never dreaming the man who saved her son would be the one frying the catfish.
For ten years Blake, my sisters husband, the plastic surgeon with the white Porsche parked across two spaces, had mocked Ray at every family event. I do one nose job and make more than your truck is worth, he had said that very afternoon.
Blake looked at the second photo, at the living boy, and the color drained out of his face a second time.
Ray just kept frying catfish. When the boy finally came over, Ray put a hand on his shoulder and said he was glad to see him grown so tall. That was all. He had never told the family a word about it.
Tylers mother hugged my son in front of everyone. You can laugh at his truck, she said to the whole yard, but that truck and that man are why I still have my boy.
Twenty-two years driving a tow truck, and my son pulled a whole future out of a canal off Route 60 and never once asked for the credit.