The Feud That Melted On Christmas Eve

I did not cry in that tow truck, but it was close, and the only reason I’m willing to admit that now is because everything that came after made up for it.

We got Delilah running and hauled Odell’s last two trees and one more stranded sedan back to the diner, and by ten o’clock the wind had finally started to lay down the way it does out here once it’s dumped everything it means to dump, and the Corner Griddle had twenty-six stranded travelers, one very happy nursing baby, three unsold Christmas trees propped by the register, and enough candy cane wrappers on the floor to embarrass a kindergarten class.

That’s when Gid asked if he could run home for something. I said fine, mostly because I didn’t think Delilah could make it another two blocks without dying entirely, and I was wrong, because twenty minutes later he came back through my door carrying a rectangle wrapped in a moving blanket, snow melting off his shoulders, grinning like a man about to either apologize wonderfully or ruin Christmas permanently.

It was the old Dot’s sign. Restored. He’d had the cracked glass replaced sometime this fall, he admitted, quietly, like he’d been planning to give it back for months and lost his nerve every single time, and he’d rewired the neon himself in his shop on slow Tuesday nights. He’d never worked out how to hand it over without it turning into a whole scene. A blizzard, it turned out, made an excellent excuse.

We plugged it in behind the counter, right next to my mother’s photograph, and the whole diner, all twenty-six strangers and Odell and the Whitfields and the Trudeaus with their baby finally asleep in a booth, watched Dot’s old sign glow up pink and warm for the first time in twenty years, and somebody started singing Silent Night, badly, and everybody joined in anyway.