The Feud That Melted On Christmas Eve

I looked over at Gid Strayhorn, who had once cost me my own ribbon cutting and then spent two decades keeping the pieces of my mother’s broken sign safe in the back of his shop rather than throwing them out, and I decided, right there, standing behind my own counter on the strangest Christmas Eve of my life, that maybe twenty years was long enough to hold a grudge against a man who apparently never stopped trying to fix what he broke, he just needed a blizzard’s worth of nerve to hand it back.

I cut him a slice of pie. Cherry, his favorite, which I remembered from high school and have been pretending not to remember for twenty years. He ate the whole thing without saying a word, which from Gid Strayhorn is close enough to a love letter.

The roads opened around six the next morning. Every one of those twenty-six travelers made it to wherever they were headed for Christmas Day, the Trudeaus to Dexfield, the Whitfields home to their own tree, Odell to sell what trees he had left. Sheriff Osgood came by around noon to hear the whole story and laughed so hard at the sign reveal that he had to sit down in a booth.

It has been eight months since that Christmas Eve. Gid still drives Delilah. I still run the Corner Griddle, under Dot’s restored sign now instead of the Corner Griddle one, because once I had my mother’s name glowing pink behind my counter again I couldn’t bring myself to cover it back up. He eats pie here three, sometimes four times a week now, and pays full price, and I have started making a second pot of decaf around four o’clock because that’s when he generally shows up, which I would deny under oath if anybody in this town asked me directly, and everybody has.