Southern Living

by Ad Hudler

  “If I went off and did that, even if all we did was hold hands, my daddy would think he’d failed as a Christian parent. Don’t you understand that?”

  “No, Donna, I don’t,” he answered. “Your daddy’s kinda crazy when it comes to Jesus.”

  In south Selby, Frankie Kabel was known as the Plywood Prophet because of the Bible verses he painted on large sheets of wood in fluorescent green paint and displayed in the front yard, leaned up against the trunk of a weeping willow. He also moderated a Bible study group for older Christians who had lost a spouse to cancer. On Saturdays, Frankie rented a space at Happy’s Flea Market, sandwiched between a vendor of camouflage clothing and a woman selling clear plastic bags of deep-fried pork rinds. He handed out rainbow-colored vinyl bookmarks imprinted with Bible verses as he preached to passersby.

  It was a man from her father’s cancer group who helped Donna find the job at Kroger. Buddy Wright, the perishables manager at the store on J. B. McDonough Road, knew that Donna had been the main Lancôme sales associate at Dillard’s in the Selby Mall; he’d remembered her from the time he went shopping for his daughter’s birthday gift. Intending to drop by and purchase a single tube of lipstick, he left, thirty-five minutes later, toting a black Lancôme bag filled with two hundred dollars of moisturizing creams, perfumes, lip liner, a nighttime rehydrating mask … and respect for a beautiful, enthusiastic young woman who not only had a knowledge of her products but also a natural ability to sell.

  Yet Buddy also knew that Donna would no longer be wanted in a high-profile cosmetics sales job. Her scar began at the right corner of her mouth and ran across the entire cheek before stopping and turning northward, creating a perfect right angle and continuing all the way to the outside point of her right eye. The lines were remarkably straight and geometric, underscoring the wound’s presence, and people often stared because it appeared that someone with a ruler and red pen had drawn something on her face.

  Urged by her daddy to take the job, Donna agreed, because in her heart she knew she would never return to the job she loved, in that glorious, invisible cloud of perfume beneath the bright halogen lights.

  From the La-Z-Boy, Donna reached over and grabbed the compact that was sitting on the side table, on top of her father’s Bible, which appeared to be titled ible because Frankie, when he was reading scripture, liked to caress the gold embossed B with his left forefinger. With a click, she opened the compact to look in the small, round mirror.

  Each night, Donna had covered the scar with a thick, mint-green coating of NurishMasque and a bandage. Every morning, she would slowly peel it away, hoping to discover that the fault across her face had faded into her skin, as would an overnight hydrating lotion.

  After a few weeks, when the wound was not as sensitive, she began to try covering it with various foundations and concealers, even her competitors’ potions, but they just seemed to highlight the problem, turning the rose-colored line into a beige river with tiny but noticeable ripples.

  Donna set the phone on the end table and got up to go to the bathroom. She sat on the toilet, flipping through her stack of produce flash cards that showed a colored photograph of each apple and a brief description of characteristics. There were Empires, Crispins, Cortlands, Cameos, Pink Ladies, Ginger Golds, Galas, Gravensteins, and Ida Reds. Fujis were the most predictable in crispness. Granny Smiths and Empires were the best for use in salads because they were more acidic and didn’t turn brown as quickly. A useful tip for all varieties: When unloading apples, never hurriedly dump them; despite their tough appearance, they can easily bruise then break open. Be sure to remove all apples with broken skin as they will cause other apples to rot and perish.

  Donna set the cards on the floor and looked at the wall before her. There used to be a mirror in this spot. Donna had hung it so she could multitask and apply makeup when she was in a hurry, but before the accident her father had removed it and the other mirror as well and stowed them both in the hall closet behind the extra pieces of plywood that he used for his signs. She asked him about it, and he reminded her that vanity was a sin, and that neither she nor anyone had a good reason for looking at themselves in a mirror. “You gotta look on the inside,” he said. “A mirror don’t show the inside.” Donna knew that arguing with her father would do no good. When challenged about anything, he had a way of roaring up like oxygenated fire. She would have to put her makeup on in the car. And that’s what she was doing when a man named Bruce Toland, drunk and barreling down Truman Parkway, slammed his red Toyota pickup into Donna’s passengerside front door at sixty miles an hour.

  Donna opened the bathroom cabinet and reached for the handheld mirror she kept hidden beneath the pile of clean towels. She squinted as she looked at herself, trying to make the scar disappear. Donna tried to remember what kind of lighting grocery stores had. Fluorescent, wasn’t it? That cool, gray light was generally so unforgiving to most skin tones, but wasn’t it better at filling in the shadows of the face? Surely the brown uniform would help … it was one of her better colors. (The trainer at the Lancôme school in Charlotte had said that Donna, with her dark-brown hair and skin reminiscent of creamy, white eggplant, was a perfect example of someone with “summer coloring.”) Donna was certain a hair net was mandatory on the job.… If only she could wear her hair down! That extra vertical line created by hair meeting flesh could be a helpful distraction. (Donna had frequently made this tactful suggestion to women who had prominent noses. “Your hair is so pretty,” she would say. “Don’t hide it behind your head!”)

  Wait! How about a completely different look? What if she increased the width or color of liner on the tops of her eyes? For her most needy clients, after all, those with a truly challenging facial feature, Donna would always try to create some sort of distraction on the face, in hopes of drawing people’s eyes away from the unsightly mole or overbite … or huge scar that could make someone want to stay home and eat potato chips all day in front of the TV.

  “Lord, give me strength,” Donna whispered, her breath fogging the lower half of the mirror.

  Five

  Dear Chatter: To all the people who broke the hair-bow chain letter we sent: I just wanna say thanks for ruinin’ my little girl’s day. We were countin’ on those hair bows.

  Dear Chatter: I don’t know what’s going on but my dog dropped dead in my driveway, and he wasn’t old—he was a pup. Whoever hit him is gonna have to answer to God because your soul is in danger.

  In these days of transition, from insular, family-owned newspaper to “real” newspaper, as Randy Whitestone put it, he called frequent impromptu meetings in the newsroom to share his vision. There was a steel trash can beside the sports editor’s desk, and he would turn this upside down, step on top, and speak to his people.

  “Okay, two big changes to announce today,” he said, rolling up one of his shirt sleeves. “First, from this moment forward, there will be no such thing at the Reflector as an off-the-record comment. If a source or public official offers you a nugget off the record, and if you agree to it, you immediately incriminate yourself as a puppet of that politician, and you are guilty of hiding the truth from your readers. Remember, we are the only institution empowered to seek truth and provide enlightenment for the common man, and you should never, ever take this responsibility lightly. Any reporter who accepts an off-the-record comment is lazy. And my advice to you is that you get off your fat ass and find that information in another way.

  “Second, there has been a change in legal counsel for the Reflector. Thanks to the questionable wisdom of the previous owners, this newspaper actually shared the same attorney not only with the police department and Perry County, whom we frequently cover in controversial issues, but also this city’s two largest employers, who also happen to be unbridled industrial polluters. We need independent counsel to be a strong voice, and that’s why I’ve retained a kick-ass Atlanta firm named Boyes, Hersch and Howard.

  “Oh, and one more thing. If I get one more
anonymous complaint about the sports department having to take down their SI swimsuit calendars I’m going to take away the watercoolers. There’s this thing called sexual harassment, people. Hello? Welcome to the twenty-first century? We cannot have anything in the work environment that makes either gender feel uncomfortable or threatened.

  “Okay, any questions? None? Great. Until next time.”

  Later, Margaret stopped by Randy’s office before going home.

  “Hey,” he said. “Come on in. Shut the door.”

  “I really admire the changes you’re making and the things you’re standing up for,” Margaret said. “But they don’t make you very popular, you know that.”

  “It’s not my job to be liked, Margaret. If I’m reviled it means I’m doing my job well.”

  Margaret leaned against the doorjamb and crossed her arms. “Don’t take this badly, but when you’re up on that trash can you remind me of one of those toothless prophets on the street corner … the ones who hand out leaflets as they yell out to passersby?”

  “Which reminds me,” he said. “I have something I want to show you. You are not gonna believe this. Shut the door.”

  Randy reached beneath his desk and brought out a wrinkled paper sack, and from this he pulled an eighteen-inch-tall Jesus flocked in blood-red felt, standing with head bowed, looking at a large heart he held in his hands.

  “Is this rich or what? And look!” he said, turning it around. “It’s a piggy bank!”

  Margaret quickly looked out the large office window to see if anyone else in the newsroom had witnessed the unveiling.

  “I am so jealous,” she said. “Where did you get it?”

  “A friend from Philly bought it at an Urban Outfitters. He also sent me this Jesus action figure—like a GI Joe?—and when you push a button on his back the arm goes up and down … like he’s blessing you.”

  “This is most sacrilegious, Randy Whitestone,” she feigned in a parental tone. “You need to ask yourself: What would Jesus do?”

  “Okay, I’ll ask him right now. Jesus, what would you do?”

  Randy bent down to the figure and pretended to hear a message that was being whispered to him.

  “He wants fifty cents,” Randy said. “Jesus is hungry.” He dug into his front pocket for some change. “Excuse me while I feed Jesus.”

  Margaret was laughing so hard she fell backward into a chair and hugged her midsection to help restrain the spasms in her diaphragm. “You are awful!” she said, finally catching her breath.

  “It’s hard not to rebel,” Randy said. “Everywhere I go there’s a prayer before a meeting, and it’s always ‘In Jesus’ name.’ I was at a Chamber of Commerce seminar on diversity in the workplace, and they schlepped up some Baptist minister before it began … and what did he do? He prayed to Jesus. I looked over at these two Japanese guys and shrugged my shoulders.”

  Margaret nodded. “I’m not comfortable with the religiosity in this place either. I know there are good Christians, but I’ve mainly been exposed to the very worst.”

  Randy looked at her, quizzically.

  “My mother was a hell-raising abortion provider,” she said.“The Christians I remember are the ones who would spit in my face when I went in to work every day. And even then—”

  “Holy shit,” Randy interrupted. “I can’t believe I didn’t connect the two of you before. You’re Ruth Pinaldi’s daughter. Margaret, I used to be the medical writer at the Inquirer. I came to Buffalo when that asshole tried to gun her down in front of her clinic.”

  “You were in Buffalo?”

  Margaret instantly began probing her memory for clips of Randy during that awful day four years ago, when Leo Rush of Marion, Indiana, stepped out of his rusty white Dodge Caravan and began walking briskly toward Ruth Pinaldi as she pulled into her parking spot. Suddenly, he yanked the crinkly tan Walgreens bag off his black revolver and opened fire. Ruth, the world soon would learn, was a better shot, and in the time it took Leo to pierce the back door of the Mercedes with three bullets, she managed to pull her own forty-four from the console between the front seats and, crouching behind the open door of her car like a gangster, render him impotent for the rest of his life. The wounds on the car remained to this day. Ruth preferred to leave them as an intimidating reminder to the picketers who visited her clinic almost daily. Even now, when Margaret stopped or started quickly, she could hear the bullets rolling around in the metallic guts of the door, like marbles in an old biscuit tin.

  “I respected the hell out of your mom,” Randy said.

  “You remind me a lot of her,” Margaret said.

  “With testosterone.”

  “My mother had plenty of testosterone.”

  Randy picked up the red-velvet Jesus. “I’m going to keep him in the passenger seat of my car. I’ll buckle him up and he’ll protect me from these moronic drivers.”

  He held it at arm’s length to take it all in. “I think Elvis would have bought one of these, don’t you?”

  Six

  Dear Chatter: This is to the jogger who jogs every night around six o’clock going west on Thomasville Road: You need to be joggin’ south, so when you get hit by my car you will be closer to the cemetery.

  Dear Chatter: To explain something to our new Yankee residents: If you’ve got the name Bubba it does not mean you’re stupid. Bubba comes from Brother, which is the word we use for Junior. If you’ve got the name Trey it means you’re the third. Trey’s a French word that means three. Guess they didn’t teach you that in New Jersey.

  It’s a contemporary painting,” said the salesclerk. “You’re probably gonna want a more contemporary frame. Like maybe this white one.”

  “I don’t think so,” the customer replied, her tone drawing raised eyebrows from the women within earshot. “I have a clear vision of what I want here.”

  She wore no makeup, and her long, blond hair was pulled back in a high ponytail. Though very pregnant, the woman wore metallic-purple running tights and an oversized white T-shirt with “Bay Area AIDS Walk 1992” printed on the back.

  “I’m looking for a juxtaposition,” she said. “I want a frame with that Old South look. You know … chunky and gold. Very overdone and over the top.”

  “Ma’am?” she asked.

  “Exaggerated,” explained the woman. “Like Liberace.”

  Suzanne Parley, waiting in line behind the woman, could not take her eyes off the painting, which was leaning against the cash register on the counter. Rendered in blues and earth tones, it was an oil of a human baby suckling a pig’s teat. The newborn, naked and male, had mud on his face and stomach. Milk dribbled down his chin. Most of the patrons who had walked into the store immediately spotted the painting then looked away, as if they’d caught someone in an embarrassing act and wanted to preserve her dignity.

  “Okay. So how ’bout this one?” the salesclerk asked.

  “Yes, I like that. But do you have one that’s even more voluminous?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Fatter? Even more gold-y.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She turned and pulled from the wall another L-shaped gilded frame sample, then gently set it on the top corner of the painting. Suzanne had this very frame on the oil of the hydrangeas in her master bedroom, and she was surprised that this very woman who had thrown out more than a hundred thousand dollars of exquisite window treatments would want such a beautiful frame.

  “How’s this?”

  “Perfect,” said the customer. “Fabulous. That’s exactly what I need.”

  As she wrote up the order, the clerk leaned to the left, to address Suzanne, who still stood behind the woman. “I’ll be right with you, Miss Suzanne,” she said.

  “Oh, no, that’s okay,” Suzanne said. “I’m not in a hurry.”

  The owner of the pig painting turned to Suzanne. “Don’t you live in Red Hill Plantation?” she asked. “Black Lexus sedan?”

  Suzanne smiled. “There’s lots of black Lexus sedans in R
ed Hill.”

  “I think you’re my neighbor,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’m Jodi Armbuster … at twenty-four eleven?”

  “Well, we sure are neighbors!” Suzanne looked at Jodi’s purse—or was it a purse? It appeared to be a black canvas backpack from L.L. Bean or some other outdoor catalog. On the strap was an elastic sleeve that held a cell phone, and on the side a net pouch occupied by a half-full bottle of Evian. Suzanne was almost certain it was the same kind of bag she’d seen Melanie Griffith carrying in a photograph in People.

  “I haven’t seen you over there,” Suzanne said.

  “We’re still at the La Quinta out on the interstate. The house is a war zone right now.”

  “Oh, I know what it’s like to redecorate.”

  “We’re trying to get everything done by Thanksgiving. I’m really sorry about all that mess out front. We basically had to perform an abortion on the house.”

  “I see …”

  “We needed more room.”

  “Do you have more children?”

  “No,” she answered. “Just one hellish, out-of-control art collection. We needed storage space.… Do you have any kids?”

  “Oh, no,” Suzanne said. “Boone keeps me too busy for kids. You know how men are.”

  Suzanne moved aside so another woman could go before her. “Did y’all find a good decorator?” she asked Jodi.

  “Actually, I’m an interior designer. I’m doing it all myself.”

  Suzanne unconsciously leaned back and looked at Jodi, noting the absence of makeup and the freckles and sun spots that blemished her overtanned skin. She noted that Jodi didn’t even wear a diamond, just a simple gold band, and then recalled her car, a royal-blue Volvo station wagon that had to be at least seven years old.

  “I’ll bet you save some money that way,” she said.

  “I’m sorry … I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m Suzanne Parley.”