Free Southern Living by Ad Hudler

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 actually have two man friends!
    RANDY: Randy is the type of man I’ve always thought I should/would be attracted to. Smart—brilliant, really—and confident with a passion for excellence that rivals my mother’s. (They say girls marry their fathers, but since I don’t know mine I guess I’m destined to marry my mother.) I enjoy his company, but is it smart to date someone at work even though he’s not my
direct supervisor? He seems to have no concern for appearance or rules. I suppose that’s one thing I like about him
.
    DEWAYNE: His wonderful scent. Smells like warm peach scones. How and why can one of the natives be attracted to me?
    At Waffle House I kept fighting the urge to lean into him as you would lean into the shade of a cabana in the desert
.
    Does he drive a truck?

Eight
    Dear Chatter: To the lady who wanted to stop her gums from bleedin’: All you gotta do is rub some kaolin clay and baby oil on those gums every night. Also stop eatin’ potato chips and carrots because there’s somethin’ in potato chips and carrots that makes your gums bleed. Thank you.
    Dear Chatter: This is to the person who is messin’ with my husband. I know it. God knows it. You know it. And I am gonna leave it in the hands of the Lord. But I say unto you, “Woe to you.”
    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?