Free Southern Living by Ad Hudler Page A

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,