The Feud That Melted On Christmas Eve

“Tillie.” He never called me Ottilie, not since we were kids, and hearing my own nickname in his voice after all that silence nearly made me drop the phone into the fryer. “I got six cars in the ditch between the county line and the Lutheran church and my radio’s dead and Sheriff Osgood’s stuck on a call clear over in Dexfield. I need somewhere warm to bring people. Can you stay open?”

There is a version of this story where I told him to try the Casey’s in Dexfield. I thought about it. I want you to know I thought about it hard, for a full two seconds, while the wind rattled my front windows like it wanted in too.

“Bring them,” I said instead. “I’ll have the coffee on.”

That was how it started. Not with an apology. Not with mistletoe, thank you very much, whatever anybody in this town has told you since. It started with six strangers and a feud nobody had the luxury of keeping up anymore, because there was a blizzard on, and Gopher Flats takes care of its own, even the ones who showed up towed behind Gid Strayhorn’s truck.

The first load was a young couple, the Trudeaus, driving from Kansas City to her folks’ place in Dexfield with a baby not four months old strapped in the back. The husband had oversteered on black ice and put them nose-first into a ditch so deep Gid needed the winch and twenty minutes of language I made him take outside. I had that baby wrapped in a tablecloth and fed a bottle I warmed on the griddle before her mother even got her coat off, and I watched something shift in Gid’s face watching me do it, like he’d forgotten I was capable of tenderness toward anything, him included.