Old Scores

"So what actually happened with the milk?" Sol asked on Monday morning, wiping the counter with the deliberate casualness that always preceded her most uncomfortable questions. "I've worked here almost a year and I still hear two different versions of The Incident, and both sound like they're being delivered by lawyers in court."

Dani froze, towel in hand.

"It was an entirely justified reaction to provocation."

"Sure," Sol said, with the disbelief of someone who'd heard that line twenty times already. "Tell me your version. In full. I'm not in a hurry."

***

It happened eleven months ago, in Roast & Co.'s second week of business, when the milk supplier — shared by both cafés, because a small town only has so many nearby dairy farms — mixed up the orders and delivered the entire week's supply to Theo's door instead of Dani's.

Dani, finding out an hour before opening with not a drop of milk for her morning lattes, banged on Roast & Co.'s door demanding the return of what was rightfully hers.

Theo, unaware of the supplier's mix-up and seeing on his doorstep, after eight straight days of open hostility, the neighbor demanding he hand over milk, reasonably concluded she was either joking or losing her mind, and politely but firmly refused.

What happened next — the version depended on the narrator. According to Dani, Theo "smirked triumphantly and slammed the door in my face." According to Theo, he "calmly explained the situation and offered to sort it out with the supplier together," and Dani "turned and left without hearing a single word."

The only verifiable fact: that morning Dani opened without milk, lost half her regulars to the chain café down the block, and by evening was already writing the first provocative chalkboard line in the history of their war.

The supplier, for what it's worth, apologized three days later, and the apology drowned in a war whose original cause both of them seemed to have long forgotten, fighting on now mostly out of momentum.

***

"Wait," Sol said, when Dani finished the story, "so this entire war started because of a milk supplier's mistake, and not because either of you actually did anything wrong?"

Dani opened her mouth to object, then closed it again, because spoken aloud in someone else's voice, the event sounded far more absurd than she'd allowed herself to admit in a whole year.

"Well," she said finally, "he was still arrogant about it."

"In your version. In his version, you didn't let him finish talking."

"Whose side are you even on, Sol?"

"Common sense's," Sol said, taking the empty cup. "Which seems to have left this street about eleven months ago."

***

Later that same day, running into Theo in the shared hallway — both carrying boxes in opposite directions, forced to press against different walls for a second to pass — Dani said, unexpectedly, even to herself:

"I was just telling Sol the whole milk story. Start to finish."

Theo froze, box in his hands, his face turning careful for a second.

"And?"

"And it sounds unbelievably stupid, saying it out loud right now," she admitted, with an honesty that had been coming easier to her lately, to her own unease. "Like we built an entire war on one misunderstood conversation."

Theo allowed himself something close to a genuinely gentle smile — one that had nothing to do with their usual sparring.

"I've been thinking about that too," he said quietly. "Especially after Friday."

"Let's not," Dani said quickly, feeling herself flush for no clear reason.

"Fine," he agreed, far too easily for a man who clearly had no intention of forgetting this conversation. "We won't."

They went their separate ways down the hallway, and both, without meaning to, walked a little slower than necessary, as if parting had become harder than it should be for enemies.