How she sat at the kitchen table, feeling like she was getting re-baptized, drowning in the sunlight. Reminded him of that morning after church when her hair was still baptism-wet. “Do you remember when I was eating pineapple and started to cry because I was alive and some people weren't?” She said. At home, her husband unhinged the creaky door to his sleepiest blanket-voice. The sauce was goopy pudding-thick and red-yellow but Exie thought it tasted purple. Locked the doors, opened the jar, stuck her tongue in and licked. She bought the sauce and went to her car. Exie had never met either of her grandmothers but she liked to think that they were like Eula. Her favorite jar was Eula's Egg Sauce. The drawing of Eula was sweet-smiley and big-busted. Weird, local homemade sauces in the condiment aisle. A long, crinkly-packaged stripey jumprope on a crooked rack in the cereal aisle. She was drawn to the dusty items no one else seemed to love. Songs about trusting Jesus and boys driving around with girls and first kisses on front porches. Exie roamed the aisles of the 24-hour grocery store when she got lonely touching things and gently placing cans and paper cartons in her little basket, only to make a loop and put them back on the shelves.
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