“Civil?” Callie turns on him. “This town hasn’t been civil in years! We’ve been shooting at each other over mayonnaise! That’s not civil, that’s backward country shit!”
“And you know what else isn’t traditional?” Callie continues, a glint in her eye that makes my stomach drop. She turns to her father with a grin that promises devastation. “Dad, don’t you want to introduce your date?”
Hank Thompson goes from red to white to red again, cycling through colors like a confused traffic light. His mouth opens and closes, but no sound comes out. He looks like a fish that’s just realized it’s not in water anymore.
“Ladies and gentlemen, my father has been secretly dating someone for months. Would you like to know who?”
The crowd leans forward collectively.
Mrs. Delaney stands up from her seat near the stage. She’s wearing a red dress that definitely isn’t church appropriate with a neckline that suggests things and a length that confirms them. She looks like a different person. A person who might actually have feelings instead of just gossip.
“Plot twist!” someone shouts. I think it’s the teenager who runs the Cedar Ridge Instagram account. He’s got his phone up, livestreaming.
“Hank Thompson and I are together,” Mrs. Delaney announces, her voice carrying the same authority she uses to spread gossip, except now she IS the gossip. “We’ve been seeing each other for three months.”
The crowd erupts. This isn’t just an eruption. It’s the complete destruction of everything we thought we knew. People are screaming, laughing, crying, praying. Someone’s having what looks like a religious experience or possibly a stroke.
“The town gossip and the town grump?” someone shouts.
“It’s like a Hallmark movie but weird!” another person adds.
“This explains why she stopped posting about the Thompsons!” someone else realizes.
Mr. Thompson climbs onto the stage, looking like he wants to die but also like he’s decided if he’s going to die, he might as well die honest. His boots are heavy on the stage, each step sounding like a gavel pronouncing his determination.
“Fine,” he says, taking the mic from Callie. His voice is gruff, but there’s something else there. Something that might be... happiness? “We’re together. We watch movies. We eat pie. She makes me laugh, which I didn’t think was possible anymore. Hadn’t laughed in twelve years, not since...”
He trails off, but everyone knows.
“We eat the good kind of pie,” Mrs. Delaney adds, climbing up beside him. She takes his hand, right there in front of everyone, and Mr. Thompson doesn’t pull away. “And for the record, I knew about the mayo the whole time.”
“WHAT?” This comes from about fifty people simultaneously.
“Callie’s mom told me. We were best friends. Met every Tuesday for coffee while these idiots were at the cattle auction. We laughed about the feud for YEARS while you all hated each other over nothing.”
The crowd’s beyond eruption now. We’ve entered some new state of matter that’s part chaos, part celebration, part collective nervous breakdown. Physics doesn’t apply here anymore. Social rules are dead. Everything is possible and nothing makes sense.
“So let me get this straight,” someone yells. “The feud was fake, the Thompson girl is dating three McCoys, and Hank Thompson is dating the woman who live-tweeted his daughter’s first period?”
“That was news!” Mrs. Delaney defends.
“I WAS TWELVE!” Callie shouts.
“It was a different time! Facebook was new! We didn’t understand privacy settings yet! Or boundaries! Or basic human decency!”
“You posted photos!”
“Okay, that was too much, I admit it. In my defense, I was day-drinking. Your mother was there. She took some of the photos.”
“MOM TOOK THE PHOTOS?”
“She had a better camera!”
This is it. This is how the old Cedar Ridge ends.
Callie looks at her creation,the complete destruction of thirty years of Cedar Ridge tradition happening in real-time, and she starts laughing. Not polite laughing, not nervous laughing, but full body, might-pee-herself, tears-streaming-down-her-face laughing. The microphone picks it all up and broadcasts it across the fairgrounds, and somehow her laughter is infectious. People in the crowd start laughing too, because what else can you do when everything you believed turns out to be built on expired mayo and drunk math?
“You know what?” she says into the mic, wiping tears from her eyes. “Fuck it. Just... fuck it all.”
