“A moment or a breakdown?”
“Yes.”
“Should we?—”
“Shhh, she’s moving.”
Callie’s now at another box, pulling out more old records. She finds something, reads it, and the laughing turns into something between crying and cackling. It’s the sound of someone whose worldview is crumbling and doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Rita, who was in the church the whole time because of course she was, trots over and tries to eat whatever Callie’s holding.
“No, Rita, this is evidence,” we hear Callie say through the window. “Evidence that our families are idiots. Thirty years of idiocy over expired mayo and a counting error. EXPIRED MAYO, RITA. Can you believe it?”
“Expired mayo?” Boone whispers.
“A counting error?” Wyatt adds.
“Our entire feud is based on expired mayo and bad math?” I process this information. “That’s the most Cedar Ridge thing I’ve ever heard.”
Callie’s still talking to Rita, who’s chewing what looks an old receipt. “The bull that destroyed your grandfather’s fence? Sick from bad feed. Not sabotage. Just sick. The mayo? Past date by three months. Not poison. Just disgusting. The score that started it all? Someone counted wrong. SOMEONE COUNTED WRONG, RITA.”
Rita bleats and continues eating paper.
“We’ve been fighting for thirty years over a MATHEMATICAL ERROR AND FOOD POISONING,” Callie shouts at the ceiling. “Our families have based their entire identities on someone’s inability to add and someone else’s inability to check expiration dates!”
The church secretary appears in the doorway. “Everything alright, dear?”
“Everything’s perfect. I’ve just discovered my entire family’s identity is based on a lie, expired condiments, and bad arithmetic. My life is a joke and the punchline is mayo. How’s your day going?”
The woman retreats, disturbed. And probably planning to lock her office door.
Callie goes back to the files, pulling out more papers, each one possibly confirming that our families’ blood feud is less Shakespearean tragedy and more administrative fuck-up.
“Thirty years,” she mutters, reading another paper. “Thirty years of hate over someone mixing up twenty-seven and twenty-nine. THE WINNER WON BECAUSE NOBODY COULD COUNT.”
“We should go in,” I say.
“She needs space to process,” Wyatt argues.
“She needs to know we know,” I counter. “That we’re witnessing this revelation too.”
“Know what?”
“That it’s all bullshit. That it’s always been bullshit. That we’ve been letting grade-school math errors and expired dairy products keep our families feuding.”
Before we can decide, Callie starts packing up the papers, shoving them into a folder with the determination of someone who’s made a decision. She turns to leave and freezes, seeing us in the window.
Busted.
For a moment, nobody moves. We’re three grown men crouched outside a church window, and she’s a grown woman clutching evidence that our family feud is based on lies.
Then she flips us off, but she’s almost smiling while doing it, which feels like progress. Or at least not retreat.
We scramble backto the truck and follow Callie to the library as if we each didn’t know the other was there. She emerges twenty minutes later with another box. Through my binoculars, I can see it’s labeled “Thompson Family Archives” in what looks like is typical mom handwriting. Her mom’s handwriting?
She sits in her truck going through the box, and we watch from across the street. From what we can see, she pulls out a stack of photos first, flipping through them slowly. Her shoulders are shaking now.
Then she sets on the dashboard what appears to be a recipe box, the old flip-top kind people used before the internet. She’s rifling through the cards one by one. Some make her smile and shake her head, like she’s remembering.
