“…flashlight,” the waiter finished. “She was the ship’s cook. Twenty-three years old, six months pregnant with me. She held the flashlight in that engine room for six hours while you stood in freezing water and turned that engine over by hand. She said you cut your hand open on the flywheel and wrapped it in a dish towel and never stopped working.”
My father slowly turned his left hand over on the tablecloth. The scar ran across his palm like a white river. I had asked him about it a hundred times as a kid. He always said, “Old engine bit me.” Now the whole back room of that steakhouse was looking at it.
The waiter’s voice shook. “My mom’s name is Teresa Novak. She told me that when the engine caught, you looked at her belly and said, ‘Okay, kiddo. Now you get to be born on dry land.’ I was. Three months later. She named me Leo.”
Nobody said anything. Brent had stopped smiling halfway through, and his face was stuck somewhere between a grin and something else. My father stood up, which takes him a moment these days, and he put his scarred hand on the young man’s shoulder. “How’s your mother?” he asked. “Is she well?” The waiter nodded and wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. “She’s good, sir. She lives in Manitowoc. She still keeps that dish towel.”
Brent cleared his throat. For once he didn’t check his watch. “Leonard,” he said quietly, “two hundred people?” My father shrugged. “Two hundred and one, apparently.”
When the check came, the waiter wouldn’t let us pay. My father left the biggest tip I have ever seen him leave, and on the back of the receipt he wrote his phone number and five words: Tell Teresa I said thanks. On the drive home, Brent sat in the back seat with my sister and didn’t say a single word about his agency the whole way.
