PART 2 — THE CLIPPING
Chads grandmother unfolded a newspaper clipping so old and soot-stained the creases had almost worn through. The headline was about a house fire in Westbrook, and an elderly couple who got out alive.
That is our house, the old man said, and that is us. Two Novembers ago we hired a chimney sweep. While he was up there working, he smelled smoke inside the walls that we could not smell at all. He broke our door down, got us both out into the yard, and minutes later the whole roof went up in flames.
The fire chief told us later, the old woman said, that if that young man had not trusted his nose, we would have died in our sleep that night.
The man Chadwick mocked for crawling down chimneys like Santa had smelled a fire in the walls that no one else could, and carried his own grandparents out before the roof came down.
We saved this clipping, the old man said, and we always wondered if we would ever meet him to say thank you. Then he looked at Kevin. Chadwick, your friend the chimney sweep. That is the man who saved your grandparents.
Chadwick, who called himself the real doctor in the family, could not say a word.
Kevin just bounced the baby on his knee and said he was only doing his job, that a smell like that you do not ignore. But his mother knew, and now the whole table knew.
My son scrapes the ash, the cardiologist had joked. One November he smelled a fire through a brick wall and saved two lives. That is the man on the roof.