The Feud That Melted On Christmas Eve

“Didn’t know you still had it in you,” he said, meaning the mothering, I think, or maybe the kindness in general, and I said, “I save it for people who don’t get my car impounded,” and that was as close to a laugh as either of us had shared since the Clinton administration.

By five o’clock we had eleven people in the diner. By six we had nineteen, including Odell Rasmussen, who’d abandoned his Christmas tree flatbed a half mile out and walked the rest of the way in with three trees still strapped down and frost in his mustache, and an elderly couple, the Whitfields, whose Buick had died entirely and who arrived wrapped in the emergency blankets Gid kept behind his seat, looking more delighted by the adventure than scared, the way people do sometimes when they’ve been married fifty years and figure they’ve survived worse.

I fed every one of them. Chicken and dumplings, then when that ran low, grilled cheese and tomato soup and every dinner roll I had in the freezer, and when the bread ran out too, Odell went back out to his flatbed in the whiteout and came back with a box of candy canes he’d meant to sell at the tree lot, and we called that dessert and nobody complained.

Somewhere around seven, Gid radioed in, on the walkie he’d finally dug out of the glove box once his phone died too, that he had a real situation out past the Lutheran church. The First Baptist youth choir van, nine teenagers and their director, Mrs. Okafor, had slid clean off Route KK trying to make it home from their Christmas Eve caroling run at the county nursing home, and the van wasn’t going anywhere without a proper tow. Delilah pulled all nine of them and Mrs. Okafor in two trips, and they came through my door singing, because apparently that is what a Baptist youth choir does even when they are half frozen and their van is sitting in a ditch, and for a solid twenty minutes the Corner Griddle sounded better than the church itself. The Whitfields cried a little. Odell knew every word to Go Tell It on the Mountain and sang louder than any of the actual teenagers. Even I caught myself humming along over the coffee pot, and I am not, as a rule, a Christmas Eve hummer.