Chapter 18 #2
She looks directly at my brothers and me. The crowd follows her gaze.
This is it. This is the moment.
Jesse straightens his tie one more time. Wyatt cracks his knuckles, a nervous habit he claims he doesn’t have. I just remain upright.
“So if we’re done worshiping old grudges,” she says into the mic, “I’d like to worship something worthwhile.”
We push through the crowd, which parts like the Red Sea. People literally jump out of our way. Someone drops what I’m pretty sure is their fourth funnel cake of the day. The diabetes rate in Cedar Ridge is about to spike from stress eating.
“What are you boys doing?” our father demands, trying to block our path. He’s using his broad shoulders, the ones that usually intimidate cattle, but we’re not cattle.
“Something we should have done weeks ago,” Jesse says, stepping around him with the grace of someone who’s been dodging his father’s disappointment for years.
“You disgrace this family!”
“The family disgraced itself thirty years ago,” Wyatt says calmly. “We’re just redeeming it. Getting our family name out of the mud.”
“If you take another step toward that stage—”
“You’ll what?” I ask. “Disown us? Ground us? We’re grown men, Dad. You can’t send us to our rooms for falling in love.”
Oh my god.
“LOVE?” He says it like it’s a curse word. “With a Thompson?”
“With Callie,” Jesse corrects. “Her last name doesn’t define her any more than ours defines us.”
We reach the stage. Callie’s looking down at us with an expression I can’t quite read. Hope mixed with terror mixed with nausea and stress. The crowd has formed a circle around us, phones out, recording everything. We’re going to be on every social media platform by dinner.
“We’ve been idiots,” Jesse announces to the crowd, because apparently, we’re all making speeches today. His voice is clear and confident, the voice of someone who’s made a decision and won’t be swayed.
“The good kind of idiots,” I add, because someone needs to maintain our brand and also because humor is my coping mechanism.
“We choose her,” Wyatt says simply, and somehow that’s the one that makes the crowd really gasp.
“All three of you?” someone shouts from the back.
“All three of us,” Jesse confirms. “You got a problem with that?”
“I mean... logistically...” someone else starts.
“Nobody asked about logistics!” I shout. “We’re declaring our love, not filing a tax return! The logistics are our business!”
Callie laughs into the microphone, and the sound echoes across the fairgrounds. It’s not a nervous laugh or a polite laugh. It’s a real laugh, the kind that says “fuck it, we’re doing this.”
“These three idiots are mine,” she says. “And I’m theirs. And if anyone has a problem with that, you can take it up with Rita.”
Rita, losing her bow, spots the mayor’s sandwich and is making moves toward it.
The crowd’s now divided into clear camps.
There’s cheering from the younger folks, the ones who’ve been waiting for something, anything, interesting to happen in Cedar Ridge since the traveling circus incident we don’t talk about.
There’s booing from the traditionalists, the ones who think change is a four-letter word and progress is what happens to other towns.
And there’s confused murmuring from the middle-aged folks who can’t decide if they’re scandalized or entertained.
“This is disgusting!” Madison shouts from somewhere in the crowd. She pushes her way forward, and her hair is doing that thing where it’s so perfect, it looks like she just stepped out of a salon, which she probably did. “Jesse’s mine!”
“Madison, you photoshopped your face onto a picture of his mother.” Callie shoots back into the mic. “That’s weird. Maybe illegal. Definitely grounds for a restraining order.”
“It was artistic expression.”
“Okay, Maddy.”
The crowd “ooohs” like this is a rap battle. Someone actually starts beatboxing but their friend smacks them.
“You can’t be with all three of them!” Madison continues, now at the foot of the stage, looking up with the righteous indignation of someone who’s never been told no. “It’s not natural!”
“Neither is your nose job but we don’t mention that!” Callie responds. “Or your hair extensions! Or that thing you do with your—”
“OKAY,” the mayor interrupts, finally recovering from his shock. “Let’s keep this civil!”
“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.”
She hands the microphone to her dad, who holds it like it might explode, which given the day’s revelations isn’t impossible. Then she looks at my brothers and me, really looks at us, and makes a decision.
She jumps off the stage.
It’s not graceful. It’s not choreographed. She just launches herself into space, trusting we’ll catch her, which we do because even in a shitshow like this, we’re coordinated when it comes to Callie Thompson.
Jesse catches her first, and he kisses her like the whole town isn’t watching, like we haven’t just destroyed—or restored—both our families’ reputations in under twenty minutes.
It’s the kind of kiss that makes married people remember when they weren’t married, makes single people question their choices, and makes teenagers uncomfortable and jealous.
When Jesse finally lets her breathe, Wyatt pulls her to him.
His kiss is different, like he’s trying to memorize the moment, to store it somewhere safe for dark times that may someday come.
Someone in the crowd whistles. Someone else yells, “Get a room!” Someone else responds, “They probably have three rooms!” which gets a mix of laughs and groans.