…”drove her there.”
Dale’s sunglasses were still on his hat. His phone was still lit up on the table. I could read the message from where I was sitting. It was from his mom, my aunt Deb. “Be nice to your uncle. Ask him about the night you were born.”
She’d heard him from the kitchen window.
Uncle Mike flipped another burger, then turned around.
“October 1997,” he said. “I was twenty-six, three years at the plant. A water main broke under the hospital in town. The whole place lost water pressure. They couldn’t scrub in, couldn’t run the dialysis unit, couldn’t do surgery. They were sending everyone to Springfield. Your mom was eight months along and her water broke at 1 a.m. in the middle of a thunderstorm. Your dad was on a truck route in Ohio.”
Dale had gone very still.
“She called me because I was the only one in the family awake. I was at the plant, working on that main. I left, and I drove her forty miles in my truck in the rain. You were born breech, Dale. If she’d tried to have you at home, or at the hospital in town with no water, neither of you would be here. They did an emergency C-section in Springfield twenty minutes after we pulled up.”
He set the spatula down.
“Then I drove back and finished fixing the main. Forty hours straight. That’s why the hospital’s had clean water every day since. That’s what I do, Dale. You turn on a tap and it just works. That’s the whole job. It’s supposed to be boring. If it ever isn’t, somebody’s in trouble.”
Dale looked at his phone. Then at his mom, who’d come out onto the porch with her arms crossed. Then back at Uncle Mike.
“You never told me that,” he said.
“You never asked,” Mike said. “Burger’s ready.”
Dale took off his hat. Then he did something none of us expected. He walked over, put one arm around his uncle’s shoulders, and stood there with him at the grill for a minute without saying anything.
Aunt Deb told me later she’d been waiting twenty-nine years for him to hear that story.
Dale took Uncle Mike out to dinner the next week, just the two of them. He asked him about the 2014 spill, and about the plant, and about water. Mike said he talked for three hours. He said it was the first time anyone in the family had ever found it interesting.
