Hot Dish

by Brockway, Connie

  Again, Jenn could only stare.

  “It says in the program they’ll announce the winner at noon. I wonder if they’ll have a little crown for it.” She giggled and then, catching Jenn’s expression, tched. “Oh, Jenn, I was kidding. What happened to your sense of humor? Come on. It’ll be fun. Let’s go, shall we?”

  “I’m not done with ‘the pageant thing,”’ Jenn said. “I have to have my head carved out of butter and then go appear on some local television show.”

  “A butter head?” Nina giggled again until she realized Jenn wasn’t joking. She abruptly sobered. “Oh. Well. Then we’ll see you afterward at the car, shall we? Bye!”

  She gave a quick wave and stepped off the curb, her face lighting up. It dawned on Jenn that her mom liked the state fair. And her dad was at Machinery Hill? Looking at tractors? Holy crap. Her parents really had gone off the deep end.

  Well, that was sad and everything if it was true, but the bottom line was that her parents had had their shot. Jenn wanted her shot, too. And she’d been that close to getting it….

  Across the street, she spotted Ken Holmberg, one of Fawn Creek’s councilmen, pumping the hand of some old Swede (she knew he was a Swede because as a Swede, and thus not being the sort to leave anything to conjecture, he was wearing a T-shirt that said: don’t kiss me. i’m swedish).

  Though he couldn’t have been much more than thirty-five, Ken looked older, like a gnome out of a kid’s Scandinavian fairy tale book: short, stocky, the middle of his flat face adorned by an improbably upturned nose, his pink scalp peeking through a neat little oiled comb-over of brown hair. Not only had Ken been one of the judges for the Miss Fawn Creek pageant, but as one of the biggest employers of the town—he owned a hockey stick manufacturing plant—he’d been instrumental in convincing the Fawn Creek council to sponsor her bid for Buttercupdom. Not because he liked her—he didn’t—but because … Well, maybe Heidi wasn’t so off base where Ken was concerned. But she was way off base with her Carol Ekkelstahl conspiracy theory.

  Sure, Minnesotans were a tight-knit group, but they also prided themselves on their virtue. Especially simple, uncomplicated virtues like honesty and integrity, things you could paint black and white. Now, if you were talking about exceeding the daily fish possession limits or illegally tiling a field, that was a different matter. But some things just weren’t done. Small-town pageant fixing being primary among them.

  Jenn picked up her pink satin skirt and waded through the crowds across the street to tap Ken on the shoulder. He turned around, a politician’s beam stamped on his face. Upon seeing her, his smile vanished. “Jenn, I can’t tell you how disappointed I am.”

  “Me, too, Mr. Holmberg,” Jenn agreed earnestly. “That’s why I was wondering … Do you think … That is …” Spit it out! “I think it might be a good idea to ask for a recount of the judges’ score cards just to make sure, you know … to see who won. I … I mean—”

  “There was no mistake, Jenn. You lost,” Ken said tersely. “And if I was you, I’d be thankful you weren’t publicly disqualified.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Oh, fer crying out loud, Jenn”—he clicked his tongue—”you don’t live on a dairy farm.”

  “Dairy farm?”

  “It says right there in the application you filled out, right there in black and white, that the competition was open to women seventeen to twenty-one whose families lived on, operated, or were otherwise substantially associated with working dairy farms.”

  “But … my parents rent out their pasture to a dairy farmer,” she said, utterly confused. “That counts, doesn’t it?”

  “No,” he answered slowly, looking at her closely, as though he couldn’t believe she could be so dim-witted. “It don’t.”

  “But I thought … I didn’t know!” she said. “I’m not from a farm. I’m from a city! There were cows in that pasture all the time. I swear it. Why doesn’t that qualify as ‘substantially associated?’ I don’t get it!”

  “No, you sure don’t,” he said. “Maybe you shoulda asked someone.”

  Who? Who in that entire town could she go to for advice? Even Heidi’s input had come too late to do anything but hurt. She stared at Ken, dumbfounded and near to tears. She shouldn’t have applied. She shouldn’t have run for the title. She should have known. She should have found out.

  She couldn’t be more of an outsider had she been born on another planet.

  And now he was telling her she’d lost because she didn’t wade through cow manure on her way to the school bus? And someone had actually seen it as their Christian duty to rat her out?

  “Luckily”—Ken leaned forward to emphasize his point—”luckily, the judges got wind of it before the media found out. We might just’ve ducked ourselves one helluva scandal.”

  Her future was on the line and he was worried about a scandal? “Revealed where? In The Cow Quarterly?”

  Ken snapped back, his pink scalp turning scarlet. “You don’t take any of this seriously. You don’t take us seriously. Maybe it’s best you didn’t win. We wouldn’t want the Minnesota Dairy Farmers’ Federation’s very first competition tainted by fraud and … and mockery!”

  Her lips started to tremble and she bit them.

  “Fer chrissakes, Jenn,” Ken said, irritated. Minnesotans were always irritated at displays of emotion. The whole “nice” trick was an illusion to keep outsiders off balance. “Don’t cry. You’re not the only one disappointed. I thought you were a shoo-in. You look like a young Inger Stevens and I swear my great-grandpa Olson would climb out of his grave for a taste of your lefse.”

  Her lefse. Perfect griddled circles of the thinnest, tenderest, buff-colored potato goodness known to man. “I must have used forty pounds of potatoes getting that recipe right,” she whispered. While the other candidates had relied on beauty queen standards like baton twirling and aria singing for the talent portion of the competition, Jenn had laid out an authentic, table-groaning smorgasbord. The plump lady judge had actually teared up at the sight.

  “No one is saying you can’t cook,” Ken said impatiently. “But the bottom line is this, Jenn: you lied. You aren’t who you said you were. What you said you were.”

  No. She wasn’t. She wasn’t Inger Stevens and she wasn’t Grandma Olson. She wasn’t even Scandinavian. She’d learned most of her cooking skills from Tina, their Jamaican housekeeper. The rest she’d purloined from a bunch of old Swedes cooking for Lutheran weddings, anniversaries and funerals. She hadn’t been born in Fawn Creek, and her mom hadn’t spent the last ten years promising her that if she did well in school and stayed off the chocolate she might someday grow up to be Miss Fawn Creek. No, her mom had told her different stories with different happy endings and none of them had come true either!

  What difference did that make? She was still the best-qualified Buttercup Queen in the whole damn state and she’d given up so much, too much, to get here only to be betrayed by a bunch of holier-than-thou small-town snobs. The unfairness of it boiled up and erupted.

  “Here!” She snatched the rhinestone tiara off her head and thrust it in Ken’s chest. “You can have your Miss Fawn Creek crown. I don’t want it!”

  He didn’t take it. “Well, you got it. A deal is a deal. You signed on the dotted line saying you’d represent Fawn Creek for the next year.”

  They couldn’t hold her to that. She was leaving! Okay, maybe she wasn’t going to Chapel Hill, but she was going somewhere and it wasn’t back to Fawn Creek. “What about the ‘scandal?”’

  “There’s no rules about Miss Fawn Creek living on a farm. Only the Buttercup Queen.”

  “Well … well … what if I just won’t do it?” she demanded, desperation creeping into her voice.

  “In that case, I’m real afraid we’ll have to sue your folks for everything the town spent sponsoring you. Your folks got money to fight a law suit, Jenn?” he asked. “That pretty pink dress you’re wearing cost four hundred dollars.

&n
bsp; “Look,” he went on in the manner of a man who had decided against all provocation to be reasonable, “we already have your schedule for the year. There’s Vern’s Farm Implements the first Saturday of every other month. And we got you signed up for two SuperSmart Food Store grand openings, and you’ll be pulling the bingo balls at the regional dairyman’s convention in Karfart, Wisconsin. That’s not that much. Just weekend stuff. I don’t expect there’s much for a city kid like you to do up there most weekends anyway.”

  Except she’d have to be there during all those weekends. It was enough to keep her in Minnesota. She knew when she was beaten. She had no idea if Ken could sue her parents or not. It didn’t matter; she couldn’t take the chance.

  She gazed dully at him, the fifty-two weeks ahead rolling out like an endless row of corn into a perpetually distant horizon. No scholarship. No Chapel Hill. No mild February breezes, no bougainvillea, no clambakes. No friends. Instead, a year of servitude to Fawn Creek and the Minnesota Dairy Farmers, being bused from tiny town to tinier town extolling the virtues of butter and udders.

  She’d wasted the last six months for nothing. She’d dieted. She’d learned everything there was about dairy production. She’d haunted the Lutheran church basement like a freak. She’d given up trips back to Raleigh to go to regional contests. She’d backed out of her last opportunity to spend a vacation with Tess—

  “There. I knew you’d see sense,” Ken said. He started to turn.

  “Wait!”

  He stopped, looking around at her with renewed annoyance.

  “I have to know. Who told the judges I didn’t live on a farm?”

  He vacillated a second before reaching into his jacket’s inner pocket and withdrawing a folded piece of paper. He handed it to her and walked away. She read:

  Dear Judges,

  As president of the Fawn Creek High, I, Karin Ekkelstahl, along with the other elected officials, regret to inform you that one of the contestants under consideration—

  Heidi had been right, after all. Jenn had been narced out by the Fawn Creek Student Council but it might as well have been the whole damn high school.

  Man, she hated that town.

  But not nearly as much, she thought, as they hated her.

  Chapter Three

  12:30 p.m.

  The Beer Stube

  Steve Jaax, whose sculptures would one day be represented in eight separate Fortune 500 companies’ art collections, was on the lam and he liked it. Had he not been on the lam he would not now be leaning against the peeling exterior of one of the Minnesota State Fair’s most popular venues, the Beer Stube, watching carnies load people into the sky ride’s caged buckets to be sent flying along a cable high above the fairgrounds.

  Steve liked that, too, since he was sort of flying himself. On the sticky surface of the table in front of him sat his fifth—sixth?—Leinenkugel’s, which he was nursing with profound care since he didn’t have the cash for a sixth—seventh? His cup was half empty. Or, he thought philosophically, half full. Either way, there was barely enough left in his plastic cup to tide him over until his date with destiny—destiny being a hundred-pound block of frozen butter.

  So, deciding atypically to exercise a little moderation, Steve amused himself by walking a small, shiny key across the backs of his knuckles, impressing himself with his dexterity. The key he liked, too, even though it filled him with a pleasant sort of melancholy. A man had died for that key…. Well, not strictly speaking but a man he had known (though only for a few months) and liked (as much as one can like someone you’ve only spent ten hours with) had died somewhere (where was unimportant) sometime after sending him that key.

  As he fiddled with the key, he looked around at his fellow man with a woozy affection completely uncomplicated by any feelings of commonality. He not only liked them—he loved them, all of them: the clutch of gum-smacking teenage girls shrink-wrapped into their jeans; the tattooed giant feeding curly fries to a petulant-looking toddler with the wariness of a marine biologist offering chum to a shark; the preppy-looking guy in a yellow Lacoste shirt who had just lifted a wallet from the back pocket of a fat woman screeching at her equally fat spouse to get her some cheese curds; and especially the young chick in a pink ball gown with an immense bang curling out and over her forehead like a cresting tsunami on a Japanese woodcut.

  She was trying to convince the guy dispensing beer that she was twenty-one and had left her ID at home in her … what? Glass slipper?

  Steve snorted and the key fell. He lunged after it. By the time he fished it out of the dirt at his feet, the toddler had begun screaming and the girl was forgotten.

  He righted himself. He wasn’t sure yet exactly what he was going to do with the key but he definitely had to do something with it and fast because without a doubt his days on the lam were numbered. The key, and the note accompanying it, had caught up with him at his rented PO box a couple days ago after following him around the country for the last six weeks. The contents of the note had been brief:

  Done the deed. Your statue is safe and tucked away in—sit down, dude, ‘cause you’re gonna fall over laughing—a mausoleum crypt. All you got to do to get her back is stick this key in the lock. Check this out. I bought the vault under your wife’s name. Not Fabulousa, the one on her passport. She don’t know anything about it! Thought you’d appreciate that.

  Course, if you ever lose the key you’re gonna have to prove to the cemetery guys that you’re her in order to get a new one, so don’t lose the key.

  Don’t bother trying to get hold of me for a while cause I’m going to be out of touch. Which you might think of doing, too, dickhead. If this letter can find you, no one else is going to have any problemo. Including the guys she’s hired to find you and that statue.

  Stay cool.

  A second letter postdated a few days after the package, had shown up today. It had been even briefer.

  Don’t know who you are but we found your name and this address in Tim Greer’s wallet and thought you might want to know that Tim’s dead. His appendix burst. His funeral’s over.

  The note hadn’t been signed. Poor ole Timmy. Best thief he’d ever befriended. And that bit using Fabulousa’s real name for the crypt? Sweet.

  He hoped Tim had had a chance to spend the money he’d paid him to rob Fabulousa’s brownstone. He hoped he’d been coining from a great meal, great sex, a great drunk, or all three when the Grim Reaper had caught up with him.

  He decided he loved Dead Tim, and even though he recognized he was getting a little maudlin, he didn’t care. Because thanks to Dead Tim, whom he loved, there was at least one piece of him Fabulousa was not going to get her little, taloned fists around, no matter what the judges overseeing their divorce said. You can’t award property no longer in your possession, can you?

  Every single art critic in New York agreed that Muse in the House was Steve Jaax’s seminal work. Some had even declared it “the vanguard of neorealistic sculpture in America.” No divorce court judge—who was not coincidentally also banging his ex—was going to give his vanguard to that soulless bitch just because she’d posed for it. He’d rather cut off his arm and give it to her…. Okay, maybe his left arm but it was still an arm.

  Which led back to the question of what to do with the key because while Steve didn’t think the NYPD would waste their time chasing after a sculptor who had jumped bail, if Fabulousa had hired private investigators to find him, find him they would. Fabulousa would hire only the best. And after the settlement she’d gotten out of him, she could damn well afford to.

  “Hey, mister, buy us a beer and you can keep the extra.”

  Steve looked up into the faces of three nervous, acne-riddled pubescent males whose names he would never know, those being Eric Erickson, Jimmy Turvold, and Ned Soderberg.

  “Piss off,” he said kindly.

  “Come on, man,” said the stocky redhead. “Don’t you want a free beer?”

  Well, yes. As a matter of fact,
he did. “How old are you boys?” Steve asked.

  “Fo—seventeen.”

  Maybe thirteen. “Right. Why don’t you guys go home and raid your old man’s liquor cabinet?”

  “Jaax! Jaax, you better not be drunk!”

  Steve looked up into the scowling face of a neckless, balding man broiling in a navy blue polyester sports jacket two sizes too small. The kids slunk away. “Hi, Carl.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Nope.”

  “You are. Damn it. I told the committee this was a mistake,” Carl muttered. “You show up with an art magazine no one’s ever heard of with an article in it about a sculptor named Steve Jaax and say you’re him and Ruth Dalquist thinks a famous artist wants to carve our butter. We shoulda done like the Dairy Association does and gotten a volunteer to carve this stuff, but no, we gotta do better than the Dairy Association. And does Ruth ever think to ask why a New York sculptor is willing to carve butter at the Minnesota State Fair for a couple hundred bucks a day? Nope. But I do. And I don’t like any of the answers I come up with.”

  “You came up with answers?” Steve asked, interested. A man with answers in a world full of questions. He might love Carl, too. “Cool. Let’s hear ‘em.”

  Carl held up his left fist. His stubby index finger shot up. “One, you’ve hit the bottle and are on the downward slide.”

  “Plausible,” Steve agreed, nodding encouragingly.

  “Two”—Carl’s middle finger shot up, joining the first one—”you aren’t Steve Jaax at all. You just look like Steve Jaax—that picture in that article is pretty fuzzy—and figure since this is just a state fair you can produce any old piece of crap and we won’t know the difference. Well, let me tell you, mister, we will.”

  “You take your butter seriously,” Steve said seriously.

  “Damn straight,” Carl said. “Now, frankly, I don’t give a damn who you are as long as you deliver. But if those butter heads don’t look like those girls, you’re not getting a red penny and I will sue your ass—after I beat the crap out of you.”