Southern Living (8 page)

“Very flattering, Randy. Thank you.”

“So what was that all about inside?”

“What?”

“Mr. Refrigerator.”

Margaret smiled. “That was Dee-wayne.”

“You know him?”

“Not really.”

“What did he want?”

“Nothing.… Nothing that’s your business, anyway.”

From the sidewalk, Randy scowled at the two men sitting in the booth beyond the window.

“Don’t be so sure of that,” he said.

When it was time to build Selby’s first cemetery in the late seventeen hundreds, founding father Reginald Flanders, who did not much like the idea of being lowered into the ground and forgotten forever, found the inspiration for Rosemont. He traveled the world in search of unusual flora that would thrive in this middle Georgia latitude, and he planted them all on these thirty-six acres that consumed four hills.

He told the
Selby Reflector
, “I want young couples to come here and proclaim their love beneath these glorious oaks as the sun sets. I want a leafy respite from the heat of the day, where a lady can take her hat off and ponder life from her bench overlooking the majestic Muscogee. I want to see families here, with picnic lunches spread out on the grass, feeling the wisdom and warmth emanating from their loved ones who lay beneath.… In essence, a cemetery in a park.”

In Margaret’s opinion, the word
majestic
was a stretch as a modifier for the river that ran the entire length of Selby. Sluggish and thick from cutting through miles of clay, it reminded her of a pot of bean soup that had been simmering and thickening for hours. Yet its heavy, tortoise pace, which mirrored the speed of the people who lived here, comforted her.

Margaret had never lived so close to a river and was surprised at what a wonderful meditation tool it was. Watching the water flow eastward, she would let a thought bubble to the surface of her mind, and then she would set it into the current and imagine watching it float away, ridding herself of item after item that crowded and clambered in her mind until she was empty and calm. Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, or perhaps even farther away now, were nuggets of anger and grief with Ruth Pinaldi’s name on them. Margaret mused that psychics might say she was polluting the environment with toxic waste.

Margaret parked her car at the cemetery entrance, grabbed her journal and began the walk to her favorite concrete bench at river’s edge. She had just forty minutes before dark, when the resident pack of wild dogs that lived beneath an old magnolia tree would awaken and claim the cemetery’s cobblestone streets as their own.

Margaret passed the Victorian gazebo where Robert E. Lee reassured Selbyites more than a century earlier that their sacrifices would not be made in vain. Beyond this lay row upon row of Confederate soldier graves, the identical, arch-shaped headstones so dense and plentiful they reminded Margaret of magnified, white beard stubble. It had rained earlier in the day, and the water gathered in holes and puddles in the red clay, making it look as if the earth were covered in fresh wounds.

Finally at her destination, Margaret sat down to write:

I
n a span of ninety minutes, Koquita paged Donna eleven times. It got to the point that whenever Donna heard the electronic
ping
that preceded every announcement she would roll her eyes, drop whatever produce she had in her hand, and start walking toward the line of registers.

“What is it now, Koquita?” she asked.

“Don’t get ugly with me, girl. What’s this?” she asked, holding up a bag. Donna squinted, trying to distinguish the mass of green beyond the wrinkles of clear plastic.

“Sunflower sprouts. I already told you that yesterday.”

“I thought you said it was watercress. Looks like watercress to me.”

Donna opened the bag and looked inside. “No,” she said. “Sunflower sprouts are puffier, see? And smell it—smells like a sunflower seed.”

“I ain’t smelling nothin’, girl. What’s the code?”

“Four nine six.”

Carefully, because of her inch-long orange fingernails with tiny rhinestones glued on in the shape of a
K
, Koquita keyed in the numbers.

On the way back to her section, Donna recognized two girls who graduated from Southeast High a year after she did, Class of ’97. One of them was Raymie Sisson, who was on the junior varsity cheerleading squad with Donna her sophomore year. They were picking out snack food in aisle twelve, Donna’s usual path from produce to the front of the store.

“Great,” she sarcastically whispered to herself. The last thing Donna wanted was for anyone under thirty to see her in this uniform. She hated her Kroger uniform; she hated everything about it. She hated the polyester knit that rubbed against her skin like the nylon scratchie she used to wash the dishes at night. She hated the flared pants with the elastic waist. She hated the brown-colored smock that buttoned down the front and the white accents on the lapels that were so wide they reminded Donna of aircraft wings on the F-16 fighters that landed at Robins Air Force Base east of town.

Donna detoured through frozen foods, undetected, and returned to her work. She had been packaging broccoli rabe in green foam trays with cellophane and decided that she would take some home that night. Donna had been trying to get her father to sample and embrace the new vegetables and fruits she was discovering at work.

“What kinda dessert is this?” he’d asked the night before.

“They’re prunes, Daddy.”

“I know what they are,” he said. “What about some cobbler? Or some cookies and ice cream?”

“Daddy, you’re overweight. You shouldn’t be eatin’ like that. Besides,
prunes slow down the aging process in the brain, and they got lots of antioxidants.”

Frankie Kabel leaned forward, toward Donna, who sat across the rectangular oak table. “Food ain’t supposed to make ya live longer, Donna,” he said. “It’s just supposed to make ya live.”

Since her mother’s death five years ago, Donna’s father had gained four to six pounds a year. Donna, who learned to cook from her mother, prepared every meal for her father, and it seemed to her now that he was using this food to help him remember something he had lost, and instead of burying his nose in a perfumed hanky, he held on to his wife through the flavor of glistening brown gravy with a hint of nutmeg. Since his wife’s death, Frankie always wanted the same Sunday-dinner foods every night of the week, and he would stuff himself with cheese-and-squash casserole and stewed okra with tomatoes and smothered chicken and biscuits with butter, stuff himself until he was overcome with the fuzzy, warm dizziness of a carbohydrate overload, and he had to lean back and close his eyes and rest his hands on his belly as if it were a shelf. And then, after a minute or so, with the taste of his wife’s food in his mouth, he would take one deep breath and slowly open his eyes as if returning from a dream, and Donna would see a look of bewilderment and disappointment on his face, and she would feel guilty, albeit briefly, because she was not whom he wanted to see sitting at the other side of the table.

Finished with wrapping the rabe, Donna carried it out to the display case and saw Mr. Tom standing in front of the apple case, his hands on his hips with a furrowed-brow look of concern on his face.

“Mr. Tom,” Donna said.

“Hey, Donna. We’ve got a little problem here.”

“Sir?”

“These bananas … they’re too close to the Fujis. We’ve got to get them farther away. That banana gas is going to ripen those things in a few days, and we’ll have all that waste.”

“Oh, Mr. Tom, I am so sorry.”

“That’s okay, but you’ve got to isolate your bananas, Donna. They really should go on an end cap. Here,” he said, beginning to roll up the sleeves of his blue shirt. “Let me help you move them.”

“Oh, no, sir, I can do this.”

“It’ll be my pleasure. There’s something I want to talk to you about, anyway.”

The store manager, Tom Green, had been transferred from a Kansas City Kroger two weeks after Donna started work. Aghast at the condition of the perishables sections of his new store, he quickly fired the produce and meat managers, which left Donna all alone with no boss. So three or four times a day, Mr. Tom, as his new Southern employees called him, would breeze through and stop to check on Donna, the smell of his Polo cologne lingering in the air until she would break open a carton of fennel bulbs or ripe bananas. In snippets of conversation he’d learned of her job at Lancôme and noted the sadness and regret and reluctance she’d carried with her to Kroger.

“I want to talk to you about Adrian,” he said, gently placing bunches of bananas into a box on the stock cart.

“Yes, sir?”

“You’ve got to exercise more patience with him, Donna.”

Though she would never divulge this to Mr. Tom, Donna remembered Adrian Braswell from Trafalgar Weaver Middle School. Of course they were not friends, and he most likely would not remember her, but Adrian Braswell was one of those hard-to-forget people Donna always saw and stared at from afar. A five-foot-tall African American, Adrian had one arm that was half the length of the other, and instead of a hand there appeared to be a flesh-colored mandible, two thick, Snickers bar–sized stubs that he worked like a hand puppet. A small, limp pinky finger hung on the underside, dangling like a piece of jewelry. Adrian was a roving stock clerk at Kroger, and because Donna was short-handed in produce Mr. Tom had placed him there to help her out.

“He dropped a whole flat of kumquats today,” Donna said. “They were rollin’ around this place like marbles.”

“No harm done, though, right?”

“And it took him two hours to refresh those nectarines.”

“Donna, the boy has one arm. Would you cut him some slack?”

“It’s just not very efficient havin’ him around, Mr. Tom. I feel like I have to baby-sit him.”

“Just try harder. That’s all I’m asking. Okay?”

“Yes, sir,” she answered. “I’m gonna try. But, Lord, does that boy try my patience.”

“Good … Oh, I forgot to tell you. I took a message for you today.”

“Sir?”

“Somehow the call came through to my office. Jackee called and said she’d pick you up at ten. Outside the store. Do I have the name right, Jackee?”

“Yes, sir. Jackee Satterly. That’s my best friend.”

“Donna, please don’t call me ‘sir.’ I’m forty this year and I feel really, really old.”

“Forty’s not old.”

“Forty’s old.”

The bananas safely segregated, Donna retrieved her purse and sweater from her locker in the employee lounge then went to wait outside. She was leaning against the Coke machine when Tom Green came out of the store, carrying his dinner for the evening in a crinkly, tan Kroger bag—some Fritos and an Italian deluxe sandwich with extra mayo from the deli.

Donna watched him as he walked to his silver Mazda pickup truck with Missouri tags. While Robbie was a stalk of broccoli, bulky floret muscles atop a lean sinewy torso, Donna thought Mr. Tom was more the shape and texture of a ripe Bartlett pear. He wore the same two striped ties over and over again, alternating each day, and neither of them appeared to be silk. His brown hair,
starting to thin on the crown of his head, made it look from afar as if he wore a flesh-colored yarmulke. And, Donna thought, he really should drop the mustache—some guys needed to realize they just didn’t have the follicle density necessary for attractive, full facial hair.

Still, he was one of the kindest men she’d ever encountered. Donna noted how Tom Green would carry out the twenty-five-pound bags of dog food to senior citizens’ cars, and when he found money in the parking lot he always put it in the March of Dimes box at the customer service counter. When Louise in deli lost the end of her index finger in the slicer, it was Mr. Green who, in the midst of the bloody chaos, remembered to find the tip among the fleshy sheets of honey-glazed ham and set it in a plastic cup of ice he quickly scooped from the fish case … and then drove Louise to the emergency room in his truck.

“Good night, Mr. Tom!” Donna yelled out, across the parking lot.

He turned to the voice. “Donna? You need a ride somewhere?”

“Oh, no, sir,” she yelled back. “That’s my red Camaro over there. I’m just waitin’ for Jackee. We’re goin’ over to Rio Cantina for a margarita. We go every Friday. Here she comes now.”

“Okay, then.”

Jackee pulled up in her blue Geo Prizm. Donna heard the engine’s cooling fan click on as she opened the door and sank into the velour seat.

“Okay, okay,” Jackee said, shifting the car into park and clicking on the dome light. “Let me see.”

Donna turned toward Jackee and lifted her chin toward the light.

“Turn a little that way,” Jackee said, pointing to the windshield. “I think you’re right,” she said. “I think it’s gettin’ better.”