The Feud That Melted On Christmas Eve

We are not the kind of people who announce things, so I will only tell you that Gopher Flats has already started a betting pool at the feed store about whether the Corner Griddle will need a new sign out front by next Christmas, one with both our names on it, and for the first time in twenty years I have stopped being entirely sure they’ll lose their money.

He drove the float in this year’s Fourth of July parade too, the same route where our banner once ended up wrapped around a fire hydrant, except this time I rode next to him in Delilah’s passenger seat, waving at a town that whooped louder for the two of us than they did for the actual fire truck behind us. Mrs. Okafor’s choir sang from the church steps as we passed. Sheriff Osgood, who has never once let me forget the sign reveal, blew his siren the whole way down Main Street just to be dramatic about it.

Every December since, the town’s put together what Odell started calling the Gopher Flats Christmas Eve Rescue, Gid’s tow truck and my diner both standing by from noon to midnight in case the weather turns mean again. Last year it didn’t storm at all and we still opened up anyway, just in case, and ate an entire cherry pie between the two of us waiting for a blizzard that never came, and I have never once minded the wait.

Twenty years I held that grudge like it was the last good thing I owned. Turns out the thing worth holding onto was never the grudge at all. It was always him, being stubborn and clumsy and quietly decent underneath it, same as he’d been trying to tell me since he was twenty-three years old and too scared to say the word sorry right the first time.

He said it right eventually. I happened to be there, in a dead tow truck, in the middle of the worst storm Gopher Flats had seen in a decade, to finally hear it.