Queen of the Cookbooks

by Ashton Lee

  “I’ve got my fingers crossed.”

  “Good luck to you.”

  Becca had no sooner turned around than she bumped into Periwinkle and Parker Place, still making their rounds of the food tents.

  “Too many people have recognized me,” Periwinkle said, giving Becca a nudge. “And they all keep asking why I just didn’t go ahead and have a Twinkle tent. But I just know they would’ve voted for my food even if I told them not to. I’m stickin’ to my guns on that.”

  “You’ve never seen so much finger-pointing and gasping in your life as we’ve walked around today tasting this and that,” Mr. Place added. “ ‘Oh, you work down at The Twinkle, don’tcha?’ and ‘I just love your pies and your crème brûlée,’ and that sorta thing. All these wonderful folks have made us feel like rock stars, if you’ll pardon the comparison.”

  Becca laughed and patted Periwinkle’s hand. “What a wonderful predicament! To be the only restaurant game in town. But look at it this way—it’s when they stop recognizing you that you’ll have to start worrying.”

  “You got yourself a point there,” Periwinkle said. “But you know what? My taste buds have already told me there are some really talented cooks sellin’ their food out here today. I may have to schmooze some of ’em and get their recipes. That Chicken on the Sofa lady, for instance. I wish I could talk the way she does—you know, sorta elegant and slow the way Martha Stewart does. Be sure and try her dish, Becca. Why, if I put that on The Twinkle menu, I bet it’d outsell our tomato aspics by a country mile, Parker.”

  “That would be saying something,” Becca added.

  Mr. Place looked down and patted his stomach a couple of times. “I’m getting near as full as a tick, and we still have some more tents to sample. You about ready to move on, Peri?”

  “Full speed ahead. We’ll catch up with you later, Becca.”

  As they walked away, Becca realized she, too, was getting uncomfortably full even before she had finished her sampling. First, she had overindulged at the Tuminello family’s The Spaghetti Is Ready tent. “Won’t you try our spaghetti with a little kick? We don’t mind telling you our secret is red pepper flakes and a little cayenne. If you like spicy, you’ll like us,” the jolly, overfed Valerie Tuminello had told her as she walked by.

  Then she had eaten one too many Dijon deviled eggs at the Appetizing Appetizers tent, which belonged to the enthusiastic and diminutive Mrs. Penny Murphy. “Mine aren’t your average, boring deviled eggs,” Mrs. Murphy had insisted. “No, sir. You just try one. Bet you’ll have two if you do. Maybe even three or four after that. My family just gobbles ’em up whenever I fix ’em.”

  Stuffed to the gills or not, Becca intended to find room to give that Chicken on the Sofa a try. Beyond that, she was enjoying all the activity going on around her. The adults were laughing and chatting, eating and drinking, and occasionally bumping into one another while politely excusing themselves. The children were slurping up slices of watermelon and spitting out the seeds right and left, or tugging at their parents’ sleeves and begging them to buy a taste of this and that, “pretty please”; a few were even waving tiny American flags that the library had been giving out free all day. Here and there, the most hyperactive of the children could be seen running amok with sparklers, brandishing them high above their heads as if they had captured blazing comets out of the sky.

  In short, her fellow Chericoans were doing everything people should be doing during a celebration like the Fourth of July.

  * * *

  Maura Beth had assigned ballot box duty to Marydell Crumpton and her newest front desk clerk, Helen Porter. The voting precinct, so to speak, had been set up on a small table with a red, white, and blue tablecloth halfway between the food tents and the front door of the library. Maura Beth would have had her oldest clerk, Emma Frost, involved as well, but her husband Leonard’s Alzheimer’s was requiring more and more of her time, and Emma had asked for the Fourth off—despite the Grand Opening. Voting for Best Appetizer, Best Entrée, Best Dessert, and the Queen of the Cookbooks title, itself, had been going on all day, but there was the annoying little matter of Bit Sessions and Gwen Beetles to expunge from the results before proceeding any further.

  “Helen, you have my permission to take the box into my office and remove all ballots cast for those two ladies,” she was explaining in hushed tones. “It will look fishy if you do it out here in front of everyone. We don’t want anyone to think the contest is rigged. Marydell, I want you to stay here at the table and tell everyone that voting will resume in fifteen minutes or so. You don’t have to go into detail.”

  “What if they press me? I was thinking I could tell them some mischievous child had dropped a cricket in there just to play a joke, and we needed to deal with the little fiend,” Marydell said, halfway serious about the suggestion.

  Helen looked completely baffled. “Which one is the fiend?”

  “The cricket, of course,” Marydell answered, shifting her eyes back and forth. “But it really doesn’t matter one bit, Helen, since we’ve made both of them up out of whole cloth. Honestly.”

  “You sure do things differently here in Cherico.”

  Maura Beth thought it all over and broke out in a smile. “That’s not half-bad, Marydell. Yes, let’s go with that.”

  Helen still seemed all at sea, being the new kid on the block. “We go with cricket removal?”

  “More or less,” Maura Beth said. “Everyone’s having such a good time with the food and the library tours, I believe they’ll just shrug it off as par for the course. And, yes, you’re right, Helen, we definitely do things differently here in our little town. You’ll get used to it. I know I had to. Now, I just embrace it all and consider myself a true Chericoan.”

  And with that, Helen was off to the races.

  Shortly after, Periwinkle Place sidled up to the table, chewing her customary wad of gum a mile a minute, and patted Maura Beth on the back. “You should be proud of yourself. Everybody seems to be havin’ a real good time inside and out. Hey, I even learned somethin’ today when I went into that book processing room or whatever it is, and I got to beep that scanner a few times on those bar codes. That was fun. I was like a little kid with a new toy at Christmas. There’s a lot more to libraries than people think, and you’ve found lotsa ways to show it.”

  “Couldn’t have put it better myself,” Maura Beth said, turning her way. “Where’s your talented, handsome pastry man?”

  “Parker’s over there finishing up with the desserts. He says he’s decided he’s only gonna vote on the sweets since that’s his bailiwick. By the way, I’ve finally eaten more than my fill of everything, so I’m ready to do my duty and vote. Where do I do that?”

  Maura Beth decided to give their little white lie a trial run. “Can you come back in about fifteen minutes? A cricket somehow jumped into the ballot box slot when no one was looking, and we’re right in the middle of extracting it. As far as I know, it’s not registered to vote, so we’re not violating its civil rights.”

  “You are somethin’ else, girl. But the crickets have been out in droves this summer. We even found one on the floor of the kitchen down at The Twinkle. We figured it crawled up through the drain. So we had to have the drains flushed. Maybe I shouldn’t mention that too loud, but it’s kinda like one a’ those old-fashioned science fiction movies where gigantic insects take over the world. Well, I guess I can come back a little later to vote. When are the polls gonna close?”

  “Four o’clock. That’ll give us a good hour to tally the results, and then Councilman Sparks will do his cheesy politician thing and announce the winners in our mini-auditorium at five.”

  Periwinkle’s laugh was prolonged. “Now, please don’t tell me you’re still at war with him?”

  “Not so much anymore. It’s just that . . . well, Durden Sparks will be Durden Sparks no matter what. You should have been here this morning when he took full credit for his new library. He’s always running for office
.”

  “Yes, that didn’t set too well with my sister,” Marydell added from behind the table. “Mamie’s all about being the center of attention, as you all know. But she and I did match Durden’s generous donation, so I think we deserved at least a mention of some kind.”

  “I agree with you, of course. Where is your sister, by the way?” Maura Beth wanted to know. “I haven’t seen her since the ribbon cutting.”

  “She went home fretting—said she had a headache. But I think Durden got to her with all that speechifying. And she used to think the world of him. If you want my opinion, I think she’s always had this secret crush on him. But now I think she doesn’t like the fact that you’ve gotten so chummy with him lately. And to be honest with you, I think it still bothers her that I work for you at the front desk. She says it’s so plebian for a Crumpton to be doing such work, but as I told you when you hired me, it’s such a relief to get out of the house and get away from her bossiness. That just hasn’t dawned on her yet, but despite everything, I don’t have the heart to tell her the truth. Imagine that—me wanting to spare her feelings.”

  “You’d think she’d have gotten over my hiring you by now, but I don’t know what I’d do without you—and Renette and Emma and Helen. Because, really, it wasn’t all that long ago that I was doing front desk duty myself in that dark old dungeon on Shadow Alley we used to call a library.”

  Periwinkle chucked her on the arm playfully. “You wore many hats, girl. Same as I still do down at The Twinkle, and so does my Parker.”

  As if on cue, Mr. Place sauntered up and joined them, raving about the last of the dessert he was devouring on his paper plate while gesticulating with a plastic fork. “This is something else, ladies. You’ve got to try it.”

  “What is it?” Maura Beth asked.

  His angular, mahogany-tinged features lit up. “Pigeon peas cake from that Hola, Amigos! tent. I even asked that delightful young woman if she’d share the recipe with me. But she shook her head pretty emphatically and said it was a family secret. Now, that’s something I can fully appreciate. You never want to give away the franchise in this cutthroat business. Next thing you know, somebody’s making hay off your pet recipe and swears they invented it.”

  “Ah, yes. Ana Estrella, Cherico’s newest citizen. She’ll be doing PR for Spurs ’R’ Us. In fact, I think she’s already doing it by entering the competition. I certainly think they hired the right person for the job.”

  “Looks to me like she’s doing quite well out there today. I had to stand in line for my slice.” Then he screwed up his face as if reconsidering. “But, you know, I’d also have to say the same thing about the lady with the no-sugar-added cherry cake. She had a few takers, too, and she got me to thinking—I really ought to offer at least one no-sugar-added dessert down at The Twinkle. Lotsa diabetes running around these days. We ought to cater to that market, too.”

  “Just as long as you don’t cut back on your tried-and-true treats,” Periwinkle added. “We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. As you say, we send Barry out in the delivery van every day with orders for your grasshopper pie and all the other goodies you’ve become famous for.”

  “Which is why it would’ve been wrong for us to put up a food tent. We needed to give some other folks a shot at winning.”

  Maura Beth pointed to her watch. “Well, it won’t be too long before we reveal the winners.”

  “Speaking of which, I’m ready to vote right now,” Mr. Place said. “I know something new under the sun when I taste it.”

  Maura Beth and Marydell exchanged amused glances, and Maura Beth said, “The ballot box will be back in a few minutes if you can wait around. There’s an unexpected glitch we have to take care of first.”

  Periwinkle leaned in to her husband, chuckling under her breath. “Somethin’ about crickets runnin’ amok, I hear.”

  He drew back as he swallowed the last of his cake. “You don’t say? Well, I guess they have to celebrate the Fourth, too.”

  * * *

  Maura Beth was especially proud of the new library’s mini-auditorium. Draped in red, white, and blue bunting throughout and seating up to four hundred people with a stage as well, it was the perfect setting for the announcement of the food tent winners. There was standing room only as Councilman Sparks tested the microphone on the stage just after five o’clock with Maura Beth standing beside him waiting to hand out the awards.

  “Uh, one and a two and a three,” Councilman Sparks said in imitation of Lawrence Welk’s trademark phrase.

  Maura Beth was caught off guard but managed a smile. “An unexpected touch of humor this afternoon, I see.”

  He backed away from the mike and lowered his voice, speaking out of the side of his mouth. “Why not? Isn’t this a happy occasion? Haven’t you . . . I mean, haven’t we gotten what we wanted?”

  The slip wasn’t lost on Maura Beth. It reminded her once again that she had forced the man’s hand behind the scenes where the construction of the new library was concerned; but if he still held a grudge of any kind, he was just going to have to deal with it. There were rows and rows of smiling, chatting Chericoans seated in front of them to provide proof that this much-needed addition to the town’s infrastructure was a huge hit. She had stood her ground and risen to the task of dealing with a good ole boy politician who had had it in for her from the very beginning. Still, her instincts were to be gracious and say nothing about the past.

  Councilman Sparks returned to the mike, cleared his throat, and continued in his usual, schmoozing style. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. If you’re like me, you’ve stuffed yourselves on some mighty good food that was offered out there today in those food tents. I know I had some tough choices to make, but then, that’s always the case with me when it comes to eating. I guess I’m one of the lucky ones who don’t put on weight too easily—one of those metabolisms, you know.”

  There were a few groans in the audience, perhaps from those who struggled mightily with their caloric intake on a daily basis, and Councilman Sparks realized almost instantly that he had struck a nerve. Best to move on.

  “At any rate, the results of our food tent competition have been tallied now, and we have our winners in the Best Appetizer, Best Entrée, Best Dessert, and overall Queen of the Cookbooks categories. There’s some big prize money on the line here, I’ve been told. So, how’re we doing out there with the suspense, ladies and gentlemen?”

  The level of audience buzzing only increased, and someone even shouted, “Don’t give us indigestion, Councilman. Get on with it!”

  He laughed as if he’d just heard the funniest joke in the world, even though he had had better days at the podium; but he finally took a sheet of paper out of his jacket pocket and thumped it for effect. The man would have played to an audience if he had been sleepwalking. “Message received loud and clear. I just thought a little build-up would be nice, the way they do on television.” He referred quickly to the sheet and began. “So, our big winner in the Best Appetizer category is . . . oh, well, whaddaya know? It’s Mrs. Marzetta Frieze for her cheese balls. Did I pronounce it right? Is it Mar-zetta? And does your last name rhyme with freeze?”

  A startling, high-pitched scream managed to fill the auditorium even as Councilman Sparks was speaking, as Marzetta popped up out of her seat and raced to the stage as if someone had set her on fire. There, Councilman Sparks shook her hand and offered his congratulations, after which Maura Beth handed her an envelope, and said, “Now, Marzetta, don’t spend it all in the same place, as they say.”

  “I thought your MRS. FRIEZE’S CHEEZE BALLZ sign was pretty darn clever. Smart marketing, and I’ve seen my share of it,” Councilman Sparks added. “What do they call it—alliteration?”

  Then came the torrent of words that only Maura Beth was prepared to expect. Unfortunately, it would have been very bad form to forbid Marzetta to ramble as she did. There was nothing left but to grin and bear it.

  “Yes, yo
u pronounced my name perfect, sir. Marzetta it is, and when I was little, I used to think my mama and daddy were playin’ the worst trick in the world on me with that name, but then I kinda liked it as I got older ’cause there wudd’n anyone else with a name as close to crazy as mine. But, anyway, I just knew if I took a few chances that I would win—I mean, what’s investing in a box of toothpicks these days? And my mama—may she rest in peace—would be so proud I took the bull by the horns ’cause that was her recipe I fixed, and I guess all of you know I wasn’t shy about giving out samples, but I figured why not get everybody hooked and coming back for more. But, anyway, I live out in the country and don’t come into town all that much except to shop for groceries at The Cherico Market ’cause you can’t live on cheese balls and cheese balls alone, you know, and I do thank each and every one of you for voting for me today and also for coming out in the first place because it was really hot out there. But the air conditioning here inside this new library sure feels mighty good, doesn’t it?” As if to convince everyone of this vital truth, she actually stopped to fan her face with her hand, and said, “I didn’t see anybody doin’ this.”

  Having fortunately been given the merest hint of an opening, Maura Beth lost no time in running with it, and said, “No, I think everyone was very comfortable in the library today. So, let’s give Marzetta another big hand, shall we, folks? And then to relieve everyone’s suspense, let’s move on to the Best Entrée category, shall we, Councilman Sparks?”

  He took her cue and referred once again to the list of winners, as Marzetta returned to her seat, brandishing her envelope above her head. “And in the Best Entrée category, our winner is . . . Mrs. Aleitha Larken for her . . . uh, Chicken on the Sofa. Am I reading that right?”

  “That’s right,” Maura Beth whispered. “I tried it, and it was absolutely delicious. She would have gotten my vote.”

  Again there was vigorous applause as the elegant Aleitha sashayed to the stage to receive her prize envelope. Then someone in the audience shouted, “We want a speech!”