James Hannaham - Delicious Foods

At first, in that roasting heat and that motherfucking unbreathable humidity, Darlene did dream ’bout stopping work and tearing open a Sangria melon with her bare hands, biting the red part off real slow and letting the juice drip down her cheeks and onto her neck and chest, sticking her face in and wetting it just to get cool. But on account a How’s comments she ain’t want him to know, ’cause it seem racist against herself to want so bad to stop work and eat a watermelon. This man How wouldn’t never cut that shit out, though.

You know you want that, right? How told her. He mocked her with a exaggerated grin. All you people want is some watermelon.

Fuck it, How, she spat. It’s one hundred degrees out here and we’re slinging around these twenty-pound fruits all dainty like they already belong to some white lady in the Garden District? If I want to stop and eat one myself, who cares if people call me a nigger just for wanting what anybody in their right mind would want? If eating and resting and surviving makes you a nigger, then sign me up!

The guy behind her on the chain goes, I hear that, and grunted and lobbed a Carolina Cross her way. Word.

It socked her in the gut and made her stumble backward a couple steps and then drop to one knee, but she held fast, like letting go even one a them suckers would splatter the last of her willpower all over the dirt. As she got up the strength to heave that damn monster up to the guy in the school bus, she feeling a intense need to hang with me again, so she could smoke and smoke and smoke until I filled up her empty insides with smoke, and we could do a spiral dance together up into that heavenly ballroom full of drugs way above the planet Earth.

Darlene clutched at the bedclothes in her sleep that morning, mashing them into the shape of a blanket and winding up in the middle of the bed, sweating. The clock said 6:05 a.m. when she awoke, and Nat hadn’t come home. At 6:06, nothing; 6:10, 6:14, 6:59, still no husband, and she felt certain she knew what that meant. Her mind told her, An alive Nat would have called. Darlene’s internal organs seemed to shift positions; her lungs fell to her hips, her heart pulsed through her stomach. For the first time she allowed herself to think, He’s not alive. He offered to go to the store and get the Tylenol and now he’s not alive. If I hadn’t had a headache he would have stayed home safe. If I hadn’t worn those tight shoes that I know give me migraines I wouldn’t have asked for the Tylenol and he would’ve come back last night. If I hadn’t already taken a sedative, thinking it could substitute for Tylenol, I wouldn’t have fallen asleep.

They had gotten used to occasional threats and crank calls from their political opponents over the years, but after Nat spoke out in the local media against David Duke, the former Klansman who became a member of the House of Representatives, the Mount Hope Grocery got on the radar of a host of malicious detractors. In the past few weeks, Nat and Darlene had found a multitude of college-ruled-paper scraps shoved into their mailbox or underneath their door, covered in epithets. They both heard unpleasant words shouted from cars and endured a disturbing incident with the local police when two uniformed officers entered the store. The first fired his pistol into the ceiling apropos of nothing while the second bought a package of beef jerky from the terrified part-time clerk on duty. Sometimes the phone would ring, and on the other line somebody would breathe or bark a threat: We gonna string you up, nigger. Make your ass a human piñata.

Once Darlene picked up the phone, and after several moments of silence, she heard a radio crackling in the background. Finally, a raspy voice asked, Connie? That you? Hello, is Connie there?

Darlene let out an audible breath and told the caller, You’ve got the wrong number, ma’am, in a bright, relieved tone.

I’m glad you’re happy about it, the voice said before the receiver banged down.

Most of the customers who weighed in felt that the police had not addressed the threats to Mount Hope particularly seriously, but you couldn’t call the police on the police. Sparkplug had a routine in which he would imagine making the call himself: Hello, police of the police? We got some officers that’s breaking the law — all over my back. Send us a cop fast, but send another cop to watch the first cop.

From the moment Darlene woke up, Nat’s absence burned pinholes in the fabric of her life. She very much considered Nat’s life and her own the same life — it had never occurred to her that marriage could represent anything less. If she ever thought about death, she prayed that the two of them would die in a car crash together at age eighty-three, or drift off into senility as their many grandchildren stood beside their king-size bed, massaging the balls of their thumbs and feeding them black cherry — flavored gelatin. She hadn’t thought very carefully about how big a risk it is to love anybody, or how much the choices made by the one you love can increase that risk.

Darlene ordered herself to rise; she tossed the sheets back, letting them crinkle across the mattress. On a normal morning, Nat would’ve calmly entered the room by now, set her coffee on a coaster on the nightstand, made the bed as she showered, whistling as he glided from room to room. She tiptoed into the hallway, thinking that she would discover him there; he would make an excuse about getting a slow start, she would blush at her foolish worry, and they would kiss. He did not appear, and yet the sound of his whistling entered her mind along with a knife of sheer dread that sharpened itself on her rib cage. For a while Nat had favored that Tavares song “It Only Takes a Minute,” but sometimes he’d whistle a gospel tune, or something a little more somber that sounded like “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Sometimes he would whistle through his teeth, other times he wet his lips and puckered them. The notes of the songs would repeat in her memory, like breezes drifting around the corners when she didn’t expect them, sometimes warm and loving, other times merely annoying.

By that time Nat would normally have filled the house with the smoky aroma of country bacon. Eddie would probably have gotten up with him to set the table and pour juice into their jam-jar glasses before Nat walked him to what they called day care — really just the home of a caring local matron. But when she peeked into Eddie’s room, she saw him still asleep. Darlene shivered at this realization and attempted to warm herself as she walked down the hallway to the phone. When she called Mount Hope, the other end rang interminably. She dialed the number of every person on her list of people to call in the entire town of Ovis and several of the nearby towns, but she couldn’t get an answer anywhere; perhaps nobody got up that early. The fear of bad news kept her from journeying down to the store herself. She would wait at home, at least for a while longer. Eddie woke up, distressed to be late, asking for his father. Darlene told him that he’d stubbed his toe and driven himself to the hospital.

How could he drive with a stubbed toe? Eddie demanded to know.

He stubbed the left one and stepped on the gas with the right, she said.

Eddie quieted down, and her own lie calmed her enough to dismiss her fear as irrational. Maybe some version of her lie had actually happened. Sometimes, she knew, if she dwelled on it too closely, she could fear every moment she spent apart from Nat — not knowing what danger he might face in those murky parts of his life she did not share.

That afternoon, when she’d decided to figure everything out once and for all, the police paid a visit just after Eddie came home for lunch from playing down the street.