Southern Living (21 page)

“You wanna dance?” he asked Jackee.

And as she got up and walked with him to the dance floor, his friends back at the table looked at each other in confusion.
What the hell happened? He’s got the wrong one
.

“Where on earth did you get tomatoes so red and juicy this time of year?” Frankie Kabel asked his daughter.

Donna had already finished her meal, a low-fat stir-fry of broccoli, Napa cabbage, and, in a compromise to her father, sliced skirt steak. At the last minute, she realized the plates of food needed a splash of red or orange, and she hurriedly sliced the tomatoes and lightly drizzled them in olive oil. She had learned this trick from her new friend Margaret, who’d switched to her Kroger even though it was six miles out of the way. Margaret was an excellent cook, and she shared with Donna plenty of recipes for her meals
for Miss Suzanne, including a white-bean, garlic, and rosemary stew over polenta that she’d been requesting nearly every week.

“You like ’em?” Donna asked her father.

“Real good, darlin’. Real good. I s’pose they’re from South America some place.”

“No, Daddy, they’re American-grown. Outside Orlando.”

“Well, praise God.”

“They’re hydroponic tomatoes. They’re grown hangin’ up in the air without any soil.”

His fork in midair, he frowned. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“It’s a cleaner environment ’cause they’re not in the ground. And they don’t catch as many diseases that way.”

Frankie set down his forkful of tomato and took a drink of sweet tea. “It’s just not right, though, Donna,” he said. “It’s not natural. God intended fruits and vegetables to be grown in the ground.”

“Daddy …”

“Daddy nothin’,” he said, his voice growing louder and more agitated. “This is the same thing as happened last week. The same thing, and I am not gonna agree with you. They are just dead wrong to be messin’ with God’s creations like this.”

He was referring to their argument the previous Tuesday about genetically modified crops. For their nightly dinner conversation, Donna made the mistake of sharing with him the highlights of a special edition of
The Packer
that featured genetic advancements in the produce industry. And what seemed to frighten Frankie Kabel the most was her example of scientists introducing the antifreeze gene from coldwater fish into potatoes so they would become more cold-resistant.

“I’m worried about you, girl,” Frankie said. “I’m worried about your soul.”

“My soul is fine, Daddy.”

“I thought that accident of yours would push you closer to God, but it just pushed you further away.”

“How can you say that?”

“See? By that way you’re talkin’ back to me now. That’s how. You never used to do that.”

Donna threw her wadded napkin on the table. “You know what, Daddy? You know why you think the Devil’s got ahold of me? Because I’m not actin’ like a scared little puppy dog around you anymore, that’s why. And you know what? Momma might’ve acted that way around you, but I’m not goin’ to.”

Frankie quickly leaned across the table, the corner of it pushing into his large stomach. Shaking his finger at his daughter, he said, “If your momma, God rest her soul, heard you talkin’ to me like this she’d die all over again. That heart potato was a sign, Donna Louise Kabel. You are gettin’ too big for your britches. Psalm twenty-five, nine:
He guides the humble in what is right and teaches them his way
.”

“And you know what, Daddy?” Donna’s voice grew louder, as if she were yelling at someone who was rolling up his car windows as she spoke. “Genetic engineering is gonna make it so more people can have fruits and vegetables. They’re gonna cost less and taste just as good. And the more fruits and vegetables we’re gonna eat the less cancer we’re gonna have. Maybe Momma’d still be alive today if she got her antioxidants. The Southerners’ diet is killin’ us off. We gotta change it.”

“We got no control over such things, Donna.”

“She died of cancer, Daddy. Quit treatin’ her death like it was the will of God. People die of cancer, and there’s some things we can do to help prevent it.”

“Cancer is the Lord’s tool for callin’ his people home. Why don’t you think they’ve been able to find a cure? Because it’s God’s secret tool—he don’t want us to figure it out. He needed your momma. He called her home.”

Abruptly, Donna pushed herself back from the table, her chair leaving two black skid marks on the white linoleum, then stormed into the living room. She sank into the couch but got up after a
few seconds to walk across the room and turn on the light in the bleached-oak china cabinet that held her mother’s collection of Hallmark Precious Moments figurines. Frankie had built and given it to her for their twenty-fifth anniversary.

Donna opened the glass door and reached inside for the porcelain girl in overalls holding a violet umbrella and standing in a puddle up to her ankles. She picked it up and wound the silver knob on her back. The tinkling notes of “Singin’ in the Rain” poured forth. Donna carried it with her to the couch and held it in her cupped hands as if it were an injured bird. In the background, she could hear her father mumbling in prayer at the kitchen table.

“All I want is someone to hug me and say everything’s gonna be all right,” she said, crying. “Is that askin’ too much?”

Donna squatted down to pull out a carton of green bananas from beneath the display case, and when she rose again to her feet, the heavy Del Monte box in her hands, she saw him again—Question Man, the name she’d given this new shopper because he asked her something every single visit: How can I tell if a pineapple is ripe? How do I grill an eggplant? This time he was holding two bell peppers, a red and a green.

Seeing he had Donna’s attention, he held them in the air as if they were torches. “Okay, so what’s the difference here?”

Donna stole a glance of herself in the mirror behind the cucumbers and green onions. She wished she at least would have put on some blush that day.

“Hey,” Donna greeted him. “Bet you didn’t know they’re the same pepper. They come from the same momma.”

“But they’re different colors.”

“The red ones used to be green ones,” she explained. “But they got left on the vine longer so they could ripen. And the longer somethin’s on the vine the sweeter it gets. That’s just a fact with produce. Same with tomatoes and melons. I’d buy the red one
even though it costs more; I don’t think the green ones are fit for a horse. They give a lot of people gas.”

He favored Armani suits and Jerry Garcia ties, and Donna had mistaken him for a lawyer until he came in one time wearing surgical scrubs that were nearly the color of her uniform. She thought he looked like Matthew McConaughey with darker hair, and his voice, soft and buzzing, reminded her of the skin of a peach or the fine hairs on an okra pod. What intrigued Donna most was how he always seemed to look at her scarred cheek for a moment or two and then just keep right on talking. And he returned again and again, always connecting with her through the fruits and vegetables.

Bagging three red peppers, he said, “You did something different in here, didn’t you?”

“I sure did,” she answered. “I moved things around quite a bit.”

“It looks really nice. Like something you’d see in Atlanta.”

Donna watched him walk away, toward dairy. She knew he always bought a quart of refrigerated, vanilla-flavored soy milk and then went on to meats, where Sabrina usually sold him some variety of fish, usually a salmon or grouper fillet—and always just enough for one.

Warmed by the compliment, Donna stood back and surveyed her work from the previous day. Even she had to admit that, in recent weeks, she had lifted the produce department to a new level. Warren Jalowski, the perishables manager who had been uncomfortable with Donna’s drive and barrage of daily ideas, had been promoted to manager of a store in Montgomery, and the day he left Donna worked through the night, completing a vision she’d been forming in her mind for months. Somewhere along the way, she had realized that a produce section, like a woman’s face, should be considered as a whole, and the beauty lay in the harmony of its parts. There was a code to be cracked—arranging these creations of God into an uplifting, glorious scene while still following the practical rules of produce care and merchandising. And finally, at
seven
A.M
., her arms and face dusted and smudged with the dirt of thirteen states and seven countries, Donna went to wash up in the bathroom. When she returned she found Mr. Tom standing before her pièce de résistance, the corner of the main refrigerated case that she had transformed into a scene from a Tuscan marketplace. Large overturned baskets lined the top of the case, their contents spilling downward, toward the customer, each with a vegetable that contrasted perfectly with its neighbor, purple eggplant next to the orange-and-green turban squash, green cabbage intermingling with yellow summer squash, carrots with the greens attached, red stalks of rhubarb, artichokes and radicchio and Brussels sprouts and yellow wax beans, all lying in a state which straddled that fence that separates natural chaos and man-made order.

“See?” she said to Mr. Tom, pointing to an article on page twenty-six of
The Packer
. “It says here, ‘The spill effect from bushel baskets gives a fresh feel and movement without the need for laborious fruit hand stacking.’ And I just didn’t do it by looks either. I mixed the more popular items … like the yellow squash, which is almost all water with hardly any nutritional value … with the ones they won’t buy … like this vitamin-rich acorn squash … because maybe they’ll try somethin’ foreign if it’s lyin’ next to somethin’ they’re comfortable with. That’s human nature, don’t you think?”

That afternoon, Donna found a note in her mailbox in the break room, handwritten on a piece of paper with the blue Woolite logo on top.

A
Danielle Steele paperback in one hand, a cream-and-sugar sandwich in the other, Harriet sat at the table in the
Reflector
newsroom, her chin lifted high so she could see through her cat-eye glasses. They were plastic frames, cloudy gray with a thread of Dijon swirling throughout, and what younger female reporters mistook for expensive, trendy eyewear from an Atlanta boutique was actually the result of five decades of cautious, thrifty living. Harriet had changed these lenses seventeen times.

“Do you mind if I join you, Harriet?” Margaret asked.

She looked up and smiled. “Course I don’t mind—I’ve been missin’ you. They’ve got you off runnin’ all over Selby.”

Margaret sat down and began pulling the contents from her paper bag—a hunk of extra-sharp cheddar cheese, an orange, eleven blanched green beans, a heel of sourdough bread, and a piece of sweet-potato pie Dewayne had baked the night before. Dewayne worked ten straight days at the station, where he slept and took all his meals, then got seven days off. And though he never stayed the night, most of that time was spent at Margaret’s house. He cooked for her and she for him, each eating things they’d never sampled—pork-and-rice casserole for Margaret, and kashi and seared, rare tuna steaks for Dewayne. He taught her how to stew collards and make pimiento-cheese-and-Wonder-Bread sandwiches. When she was at work for the day, Dewayne would clatter around the house with his bulky red toolbox, replacing rotten wood on the porch, planing the bottom of a swollen door, hanging wire shelves in the closet so Margaret no longer had to store her clothes in the plastic milk crates on the floor. “It looks like you’re not plannin’ on stickin’ around here for long,” he had said.

Harriet wiped the corner of her mouth with a paper napkin. “I sure did feel sorry for that poor man and his family,” Harriet said. “The rocking-chair man?”

Under pressure from Randy, Margaret had started her series of profiles on local natives, and the most recent was the life of Bernie Pinshew, who, Randy thought, best illustrated Selby’s recent transition from an insular mom-and-pop economy to one owned and run by anonymous corporate accountants in the windowed high-rises of another city.

A Selby native, Bernie lost his job as gate guard at the region’s Budweiser distributor when it was bought out by an Atlanta company. The new owners quickly installed a computerized I.D. scanner and electronic gate, replacing Bernie and his outhouse-size, white wooden structure, where he sat all day with a little fan and radio tuned to Peach Country 105.6 FM. But what Randy liked
even more was what transpired during the course of reporting the story. “This man’s life is a country-western song if I’ve ever heard one,” he said.

On her fourth day of shadowing him, Margaret was scheduled to tag along with Bernie to interviews at the Delco battery plant and a new Kroger distribution center on the south side of town. Yet she knew something was wrong when she drove up to the house in south Selby and noticed his metallic gold Ford pickup truck missing from beneath the rusty carport. His wife, Melinda, answered the door, crying, and Margaret quickly discovered that Bernie had landed in jail. Evidently, he’d been driving up and down I-75, snatching the rocking chairs from the fronts of Cracker Barrel restaurants and successfully selling them to the housewives of Red Hill Plantation.