The thing about small towns is that everyone knows your name — and your family’s name, and your grandfather’s grudges, and the particular shade of bitterness your people have carried for three generations.
Nora Callahan had grown up knowing two things as absolute truth: that the Callahans made the best bourbon peach jam in Harrow County, and that the Vance family across town were not to be trusted, spoken to, or acknowledged except with the smallest possible nod of the head if you happened to pass one in the grocery store.
She had never asked why. You didn’t ask why in families like hers. The feud simply was, the way the mountains simply were, the way the creek behind their property simply was. It had been there longer than she had.
It was the Saturday of the Harrow County Harvest Festival, and Nora was helping her mother unload mason jars from the back of their pickup when she dropped her phone.
It skittered across the pavement and stopped at the toe of a pair of brown leather boots. She looked up, already framing an apology, and forgot every word she had ever known.
He was tall — not imposingly so, but enough that she had to tilt her chin. Dark hair that curled slightly at the ends, like it couldn’t quite decide what it wanted to do. A faded flannel shirt rolled to the elbows. A jaw that could have been carved out of the same limestone that built half the old buildings on Main Street. And eyes — brown and warm, the color of the creek in October when the leaves have all come down.
He was already crouching to pick up her phone before she had finished cataloguing any of this.
“Here you go,” he said, holding it out. There was a small half-smile on his face, like he’d caught her staring and was too polite to say so. “Screen’s fine, I think.”
“Thank you,” Nora said. Just those two words. She was twenty-four years old and had been speaking in full sentences her entire life, and that was all she could produce.
“No problem.” He stood, and for a moment neither of them moved. The festival crowd swirled around them — children with funnel cake, couples in flannels, someone’s golden retriever straining at a leash — and the two of them stood in the middle of it like a stone in a river.
“I’m Eli,” he said finally.
“Nora.”
He smiled fully then, and it did something unfair to her chest.
“You selling jam?” he asked, nodding toward the pickup where her mother was watching with an expression Nora could feel on the back of her neck.
“Jam, preserves, and a hot sauce that’ll make you question your life choices.” She didn’t know where that came from. His smile widened.
“I’ll have to stop by your booth, then.”
“You should,” she said.
He held her gaze for one beat longer than a stranger would, then gave a small nod and disappeared into the crowd. Nora turned back to the truck. Her mother was holding a mason jar and staring at her with something between concern and volcanic displeasure.
“Was that a Vance?”
Nora blinked. “What?”
“That boy. Eli Vance. Gerald Vance’s youngest.” Her mother set the jar down with a deliberate clink. “I’d recognize those Vance eyes anywhere.”
He came by the booth at half past noon.
Nora saw him coming from twenty feet away and did not examine the fact that she had been watching for him. He bought a jar of the peach jam — “Just to be polite,” he said, and she said, “Sure,” and they both knew that wasn’t entirely the reason — and then he lingered, leaning one hip against the corner of the table while she helped other customers, and when there was a lull he said:
“Walk with me?”
They walked.
The festival spread around them in amber and gold, pumpkins stacked at every corner, the distant sound of a bluegrass trio working through something that might have been “Wagon Wheel.” They talked in the easy, slightly disbelieving way that people talk when a conversation feels too good to be accidental.
He was an electrician. She was an elementary school teacher. He’d spent two years in Asheville before coming back to Harrow, and she understood that completely — she’d left for college and come back too, pulled by something she couldn’t name. He liked old movies. She liked old movies. He’d read East of Eden three times. She’d read it twice and felt slightly competitive about this.
At some point they sat down on the steps of the old courthouse, and the afternoon went long and golden around them, and Nora thought: I could talk to this person until the sun goes down.
She also thought: This is going to be a problem.
The problem arrived at four-fifteen in the shape of both their fathers.
Tom Callahan and Gerald Vance had apparently run into each other near the livestock pens — as they did every year at the festival, and every year managed to have some version of the same argument — and had tracked their respective children to the courthouse steps by some parental radar that Nora found deeply inconvenient.
“Nora.” Her father’s voice was flat.
“Dad.”
Gerald Vance looked at his son with an expression that contained multitudes, none of them particularly warm. “Eli. Your mother’s looking for you.”
Eli stood up slowly. He looked at Nora with an expression she couldn’t fully read — apology and determination in equal measure, she thought — and then he looked at both fathers.
“I know what you’re about to say,” he said, addressing them both. His voice was calm. Nora’s heart was doing something percussive and unreasonable. “And I’d like to ask, with all respect — does either one of you actually know what you’re fighting about?”
Silence.
Tom Callahan opened his mouth. Gerald Vance opened his mouth. Both of them closed their mouths.
It was, Nora would think later, the most extraordinary thing she had ever witnessed — two men who had been furious at each other for thirty years, suddenly unable to produce the reason for it.
“My grandfather,” her father started.
“And mine,” Gerald said.
They looked at each other. Something complicated moved across both their faces.
“Some business thing,” her father muttered.
“A property line,” Gerald said. “I think. Or — it might’ve been a truck.”
“A truck?” Nora said.
Neither man answered her.
Eli looked at her, and she looked at him, and the absurdity of it settled between them like the most solid thing in the world.
“A truck,” he said quietly. Just to her. There was something in his voice that was trying very hard not to laugh, and she felt the same thing rising in her own chest. “Thirty years.”
“Approximately,” she said.
He offered her his hand.
She was aware that both fathers were watching. She was aware that this was a small town and that they would be talked about and that nothing about this would be simple. She was aware that two people standing on courthouse steps at a harvest festival, holding hands in front of their horrified fathers, was objectively the most Romeo and Juliet thing she had ever done — and she had her opinions about how that story ended.
This one, she decided, was going to end differently.
She took his hand.
The Callahans and the Vances did not immediately become one big happy family. That would be too easy, and nothing real is ever that easy. There were dinners that were awkward and phone calls that were stilted and one memorable Thanksgiving where her uncle Frank had to be gently redirected from a monologue about the property line situation of 1987.
But Tom Callahan and Gerald Vance did eventually sit down together, in Gerald’s workshop on a Wednesday evening in November, and have a conversation neither of them had ever had — which was the one where they admitted, slowly and with great difficulty, that they had no idea what they were actually angry about anymore.
The conversation lasted three hours. By the end of it, they had not resolved everything. But they had shared a bottle of bourbon and agreed that the whole thing had probably, at some point, stopped being about the truck.
Nora found out about this from Eli, who found out from his father, who had mentioned it with characteristic understatement as “a fairly decent evening, all told.”
“Fairly decent,” she repeated.
“High praise,” Eli said. He was sitting across from her at the small table in her kitchen, and she had made coffee, and outside the November dark had come early the way it does in the mountains. “From my father, that’s basically a standing ovation.”
She looked at him across the table — at this person she had known for two months and somehow felt like she had been looking for without knowing it — and thought about star-crossed lovers and ancient grudges and the extraordinary stubbornness of the human heart.
“I’m glad you picked up my phone,” she said.
Eli smiled, and it did the same unfair thing to her chest that it had done the first time.
“Me too,” he said.
Outside, the mountains stood the way they always had — patient and indifferent and entirely unmoved by the small, stubborn, renewable miracle of two people choosing each other anyway.
Feature Photo by Orhan Pergel
The Confusing Middle 