The Feud That Melted On Christmas Eve

Here is what actually occurred, since Gid tells it wrong to this day. The sign painter, a nice enough man named Roscoe who has since moved to Springfield, was up on his ladder that morning putting the new Corner Griddle letters over my mother’s old Dot’s sign, and to do it he draped a canvas tarp clean over the little wooden placard by the curb that said Owner Parking, Do Not Tow. My car sat under that tarp, invisible, while forty people gathered on the sidewalk for my ribbon cutting. Somebody, and to this day I don’t know who, called it in as an abandoned vehicle blocking a fire lane. Twenty-three-year-old Gideon Strayhorn, two months into driving for his uncle’s towing company, did not walk over and check the placard. He hooked my car and hauled it to the impound lot on the edge of the county before I had even cut the ribbon.

I found out when I turned around to wave at the crowd and my car was gone. I walked two miles to the impound lot in the good heels I’d bought special, in July heat, in a dress with my mother’s pin on the collar, and I paid forty dollars to get my own car back on the happiest day I’d had in years. By the time I got back to the diner the crowd had wandered off to lunch elsewhere. Gid tried to apologize once, a week later, and what came out of his mouth was something closer to “the placard should’ve been more visible,” which is not an apology, it is a rebuttal, and I have never forgotten the difference.

So for twenty years he got his coffee black in a to-go cup and I did not make eye contact past his collar, and Gopher Flats, being a small town with a long memory and nothing better to gossip about most Tuesdays, kept the feud alive better than either of us could have managed alone. The men at the feed store took sides the way men at feed stores do. The Methodist ladies took my side outright, on account of the heels and the July heat, and the Baptist ladies claimed to be neutral while somehow always seating Gid on the far side of the fellowship hall at potlucks. Even the elementary school got involved once, the year both our nephews landed in the same class and their teacher had to seat them alphabetically apart just to keep the peace between the two families at the Christmas pageant. Twenty years is long enough for a grudge to stop belonging to just two people and start belonging to a whole town instead.