When the tiramisu came, Mike handed his baby to his wife, stood up, and introduced the woman nobody in our family knew, Mrs. Reyes, and her two little girls in matching dresses, and said she had something to say to Uncle Frank, and Mrs. Reyes stood slowly and reached into her purse.
She did not pull out papers. She pulled out a photograph, worn, of a car half-swallowed by brown water, and she held it up with a shaking hand.
Two years ago, she told the table, a flash flood took her car into a wash outside Phoenix with her and her two babies trapped inside, water rising, and the fire trucks were still minutes away when a tow truck came off the freeway, and a man waded in chest-deep and broke her window and carried her girls out one at a time and then came back for her. He never gave his name. He just made sure they were breathing and slipped off before the news cameras came.
My son did not make his living off other peoples bad days, he spent one of those bad days walking into a flood to carry a mother and two little girls out of drowning water, and then he drove off without so much as telling them who he was.
She had spent two years looking for him, Mrs. Reyes said, and she found him only last month, through the tow company logs, and when she called to thank him, my Mike invited her to his own daughters baptism, because, he said, he wanted his little Sophia baptized in a room with the girls he pulled out of that wash, all of them alive, all of them grown a little.
Uncle Frank, three divorces and a boat lot, did not have a joke about hauling junk anymore. He sat there with his wine forgotten while Mrs. Reyes walked her two daughters over and had them hug the man who saved them, right there by the tiramisu.
Mike, my son, just held those little girls and got shy about it, said it was nothing, said anybody would have. But not anybody did. Anybody was on the freeway that day driving past. My son was the one who stopped. He still pulls people out of ditches at three in the morning in the heat, because somebody has got to, and Lake Havasu Frank finally understands that the somebody is a better man than he ever gave him credit for.