The Feud That Melted On Christmas Eve

He fixed the cable. Then he didn’t start the engine right away. He just sat there with his hands on the wheel, snow packing up the windshield faster than the wipers could clear it, and he said, “I owe you an actual one. Not the placard thing. An actual sorry.”

“Twenty years is a long wait for two words,” I said, but I said it soft, because the truth is some part of me had been waiting on those two words since I was twenty-six years old in ruined heels, and now that they were finally here I didn’t much feel like being cruel about the wait.

“I know it’s late,” he said.

“You towed a choir bus tonight and didn’t even charge Mrs. Okafor,” I said. “I think the town already forgave you for the tow truck thing sometime around the Bush administration. I was the one holding out.”

“Why’d you hold out, then?”

I thought about it honestly, maybe for the first time, instead of just reciting the old injury the way I had for twenty years. “Because letting it go meant admitting I’d spent two decades mad at a scared twenty-three-year-old for one bad afternoon,” I said. “And admitting that felt worse than just staying mad.”

He laughed at that, short and surprised, like he hadn’t expected me to be as stubborn about my grudge as he’d been about his shop full of broken glass. “We’re a real pair,” he said.

“We are that,” I said.

“I was twenty-three and scared of my uncle and I didn’t check the placard because I didn’t want to be the guy who took forty-five minutes on a five-minute call,” he said. “And then when I tried to say sorry I said something defensive instead because admitting I’d ruined your day felt worse than just being wrong about it. I’ve thought about that morning more than you’d believe, Tillie. I kept the pieces of your old sign, the Dot’s one, the one that got cracked in the parking lot scramble that day. I never told you that. It’s been in my shop twenty years.”