…”Hi, Jenna!”
Then he threw his arms around her knees.
The woman was crying too hard to talk for a minute. When she finally did, the whole backyard was listening.
“Last February, at 2 a.m., my son stopped breathing in the back seat of my car. He was nine months old. He’d choked on a piece of a toy. I pulled into the first lit-up building I saw. It was a gas station on Route 30. Your daughter was behind the counter.”
My father put his beer down.
“She came over the counter,” the woman said. “She didn’t call anyone first. She took him out of my arms and turned him over and did back blows, and then chest thrusts, and she got it out. She held him until he cried. Then she called the ambulance, and she rode with us. She was still wearing her name tag from the gas station.”
Jenna was staring at the ground. She’d never told us. I found out later she’d never told anybody. She’d been six months into the paramedic program, working nights to pay for it.
“He was in the hospital for three days,” the woman said. “He’s fine now. Better than fine. He just started talking last month. I’ve been teaching him to say her name for six weeks. I found out about the party from her instructor. I wanted his first words to be for her.”
Everyone was crying. The uncles who’d laughed at my dad’s toast were wiping their faces with napkins.
My dad walked across the lawn very slowly. He looked at the little boy hugging his daughter’s legs. Then he looked at Jenna. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Jenna shrugged, the way she always does. “You’d have just said I drove the van.”
My father didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he did something I’ve never seen him do. He picked up the microphone from the grill table, where my uncle had left it, and he said, “I’d like to try that toast again.”
“To my daughter Jenna,” he said. “Two years of school, two years of night shifts, and one night on the floor of a gas station that she never even mentioned. I’m sorry I ever made a joke about it. I’ll never do it again.”
Jenna works for the county EMS now. Dad has a bumper sticker on his car that says “My daughter saves lives.” He introduces her to everyone as “my daughter, the paramedic.” The little boy, whose name is Leo, sends her a drawing every month. The last one was an ambulance. He spelled her name right.
