Hot Dish

by Brockway, Connie

  She nodded, still looking a little smug, a great deal superior, and far too close-lipped. “We were in the same senior class in high school.”

  Dunk would have pegged Jenn Lind as being at least five years younger than his nurse. “She’s not the ideal woman?” he asked, only mildly engaged. What did little Jenny do, a few members of the football team? Big deal.

  “Depends on your definition of ideal,” she said, then added tellingly, “or woman.”

  Now this sounded interesting.

  “Huh. Well, well, well,” he said, recalling what the guy in the Ramsey Workhouse had said about Jenn’s soon-to-be employer, Dwight Davies, and his absolute brand of morality. There might be something useful here.

  “Not that I’d say anything bad about her. She was just a kid. We were all just kids.” She blushed.

  His nurse had clearly convinced herself that whatever bit of dirt she had on Jenn Lind couldn’t be used for malicious purposes. And from that blush, it looked like maybe because Jenn had something on her, too. But then, who didn’t like to gossip a little—especially about celebrities? Especially about celebrities you actually knew. Gave a girl a little cachet.

  He gave her his best confiding smile. “Interesting, isn’t it? There’s what the general public thinks it knows, what the media are sure they know, and then there’s what people who really know know.” He shook his head. “And when it all comes down to it, most of the things we are so worried about other people finding out don’t make any difference to anyone anyway.”

  “Well,” she said gruffly, “‘course, it don’t matter to me. But not everyone’s so open-minded.”

  More intriguing by the minute. “You know, maybe I’ll have that sponge bath after all, Miss—” He gave her his best insurance salesman smile. “Heck. I don’t even know your name.”

  “Ekkelstahl,” she said. “Karin Ekkelstahl.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  10:40 a.m.

  Back on Main Street

  Fawn Creek, Minnesota

  “Thanks for the ride,” Steve said, tossing his battered duffel bag into the back seat of her Subaru. The Food Faire owner had arrived a short while ago and pushed open a passage through the snow blocking the parking lot entrance, releasing her car from captivity.

  “No problem. Climb in,” she said. His face was ruddy with cold, and though he hadn’t complained, his feet in those cloth shoes must have been aching with cold. Jenn, slipping in behind the steering wheel, turned the engine over and flipped on the floor heaters full blast.

  Since Steve’s rental car’s axle had been whacked out of alignment when he’d driven it over the curb and consequently he was without a ride, it only made sense that she should offer him one, especially since they had the same destination. Besides, she wanted to see his face when he got an eyeful of “Minnesota’s most unique and historic north woods bed-and-breakfast experience.” Even odds she’d end up driving him the twenty miles to the reservation hotel and she didn’t want to make that drive at night.

  She was feeling a lot more kindhearted toward the world in general since finding out the butter head was gone. At least now she wouldn’t have to listen to people comparing Old Current Jenn with Young Butter Head Jenn. Besides, she was honest enough with herself to admit that she’d been crushing on Steve Jaax for twenty-some years and she wanted to see if time had diminished his charms. So far, nope.

  Steve got in and at once slipped his feet out of his deck shoes and wiggled his stocking-covered toes in the blast of warm air. He beamed at her. “Look at that snow. There’s got to be a couple feet out there, right? And that guy … Ken? He said we’re expecting some ‘weather’, like that meant something dire, and when I asked him about it, he admitted more snow was being predicted and that we might even end up being cut off from civilization. Which is completely cool. This is so wilderness. You must love it here.”

  Her head snapped around to see if he was kidding. He wasn’t. He was staring out at the streets like a kid looking at the Christmas display windows on Madison Avenue.

  She’d replayed the hours in the State Fair Dairy Federation freezer so many times in her head, it had never occurred to her that something so important to her could be insignificant to someone else. Which was what ego was all about, she supposed. But those hours had been a turning point not only in her life but in Steve Jaax’s life, too. Or so he’d claimed. It was part of the Jaax-verse—the Descent into Post-Fabulousa Hell and the Return with the Butter Prize.

  “Love it?” she asked. “Were you listening to anything I said in that freezer?”

  He looked over at her, still all smiles. “You’re kidding, right? Of course not.”

  She felt her jaw loosen at the comers. The crush lost some of its patina.

  “Hey, don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I was in a really bad place, having just come from a worse place. I was possibly a little tanked, and let’s be honest here, you were a high school girl complaining about high school. Hey. That’s gotta be a first.”

  Her brows lowered in a frown as she pulled out of the Food Faire parking lot and headed down the main street.

  “Come on,” he continued reasonably. “If you’d been stuck in that freezer with some high school jock whining about how the football coach didn’t put him on the A squad, would you have remembered the particulars of the conversation twenty years later?”

  It was the reasonable part she disliked the most. That and the fact that even though what he said was insulting, or maybe mortifying, he still managed to be inexplicably charming saying it. He was so artless. He wasn’t condemning her whining. He was simply stating a fact.

  At the same time, she didn’t doubt for a second that if she’d trumped the false modesty of his earlier remark, “You remember me!” by pretending she hadn’t, he would have been shocked. Not that she hadn’t remembered him, but that she would have lied about it. Because he simply wouldn’t have believed she could have forgotten him. After all, who could forget having met Steve Jaax? It didn’t matter that he would have been right. It was still irritating.

  “Well,” she said, trying to sound as casual as him, “I told you that I didn’t like this town and this town didn’t like me. So, no, I don’t love it here.”

  “Oh, yeah. The Great Buttercup Betrayal. See?” he said, clearly pleased with himself. “I do remember some things.”

  “Wow. I’m flattered.” He made it sound silly. It hadn’t been silly. It had hurt and they had betrayed her and it had taken a long time to get over it. Like, maybe, never.

  “Look, Jenn—I can call you Jenn, right?—look, Jenn, I had my thing going on. I thought I was about to fall off the end of the world and never be heard from again. Creative-wise, I felt done. But then you started talking and I finally started really looking at you. Seeing you. You took my breath away.”

  Okay, this was more like it.

  “But not in any creepy pedophile sort of way,” he explained. “You were just a kid.”

  She thought Jaax might have protested too much. She hadn’t been that much of a kid. And she definitely had been good-looking, and from the few and far between society bits about Jaax’s love life that landed in Flyover Land, he appeared to like young women. Stunning young women.

  But then she looked at his face and realized that self-delusion was one character flaw he didn’t own. He hadn’t been attracted to her like that.

  “Anyway, I started to get into it, really into it,” he said, “for the first time in a couple years. I was trying to figure out some way to visually articulate who you were at that second, that instant, and there was the butter and the light coming in on it and I saw it. Not only your face but a whole body of work, form borrowed from dusk, movement revealed through a quixotic combination of light absorbed and refracted.”

  His voice had gone deep and vibrant and Jenn remembered what Bob Reynolds had said about Jaax being damn near poetic when it came to his art. Bob was right. Little goose bumps were lifting on her skin
—

  “So,” he said, abruptly coming out of tortured artist mode and slapping his thigh, “you say you don’t love the town. How come?”

  The abrupt transition made her head spin.

  “It seems like a real nice town,” he said. “The people have been friendly and accommodating. Everyone has a smile. So what’s your problem?”

  Problem? She had a problem? Fine, she’d lay it out straight. “It’s an incestuous little burg, like a lot of little isolated towns. Gossipy, with a chip as big as Lake Superior on its collective shoulder, smug, morally superior, adulterous….”

  She glanced over at him. He was frowning at her in perplexity.

  “I hate to point this out, but for someone who’s supposed to be the Next Big Thing in Charming Lifestyle Hostesses, you’re kinda light on the ‘charm,’ aren’t you?” he asked.

  “I’m a lot more charming when I’m not up here. This town tends to bring out the worst in me,” she said, perversely pleased he’d called her the Next Big Thing. If Steve Jaax had heard of her, her little star must really be on the rise. “Besides, you asked. I’m just telling you the truth. Small towns pretty much suck.”

  “So why do you hate this town?”

  He still wasn’t listening. She’d just explained. And she didn’t hate Fawn Creek…. Oh, sure, she said as much to Nat all the time but that was just reflex. Her feelings toward Fawn Creek were perhaps a little bitter from the experience of having lived here, but for the most part impartial and objective. Fawn Creek had its good points, foremost being they understood a good thing when they had it, and second most, they knew when to be uncommunicative. Of course, that was as much a matter of genetics as discretion….

  “It’s not like I have a personal relationship with this town, Steve. I never did. Another point you might not recall from the conversation in the freezer is that I only lived here a couple years. As soon as I could, I bolted. But in the public’s mind, Fawn Creek is my hometown, and since that fits in a lot better with my image as Martha of the Midwest and it lends Fawn Creek a little reflected glory, we both go with it. But we both know the truth.”

  “And that is?” he asked curiously. Jenn had to admit, Steve knew how to listen.

  “I’m not one of them.”

  “So if you’re not one of them and they don’t think of you as one of them, why are you their grand marshal?”

  “You’re being coy again.”

  “No,” he denied. “I’m not.”

  “Okay. For their part, whether or not I’m a native daughter, I draw crowds. So they’re willing to go along with the charade, hoping that the crowds include some entrepreneur looking to invest in a dying town a hundred miles from nowhere.

  “For my part, it’s called making my new bosses happy. I have a new show coming out on a new network and the people that decide things there decided this would be good for my image.

  “You must’ve heard of Dwight Davies and his new cable network, American Media Services? That’s who I work for and, yeah, I know,” she said, catching his eye as they came up to the stop sign that marked the literal edge of town. “He’s not the most tolerant man in the world but—”

  “I’d quit,” Steve said. “I wouldn’t work for him. A few years ago, he fired an entire department in a company he purchased because the women had posed nude for a calendar, even though the proceeds were donated to breast cancer research.”

  She’d been about to pull away from the stop sign but instead she rotated in her seat. “That’s not true.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I hear things. I’m connected.” He pointed out the front of the car. “Shouldn’t we get going? I mean we’re just stopped here.”

  “So what? It’s not like we’re causing a traffic jam. And if Davies had done that, he’d be sued a thousand times over,” she protested.

  “He’s an asshole, not an idiot. There’s ways around these things,” he said. “Davies is the worst kind of bigot, the kind that masks his bigotry under a mantle of concern. He’s the kind who convinces people that it’s their duty not to tolerate the things he dislikes for the good of their children, their neighborhood, their community, or their country.”

  He was right. Davies was exactly that sort of bigot but she couldn’t see him firing a bunch of women who’d flashed their breasts in the name of cancer research. “Well, I don’t believe it. About the calendar,” she said, aware she sounded touchy.

  “No one looks at the devil while they’re sitting at his dining table.” He didn’t so much say this as intone it.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I made it up. Just now. Good, huh?”

  A stripped-down tan Dodge pickup traveling toward them from the opposite direction slowed as it passed. The middle-aged woman behind the wheel cranked down her window. “Okay, then?” she called out.

  It was Leona Unger. Jenn opened her own window and the cold air rushed in. “Fine, Mrs. Unger, thanks.”

  “That Jenny Hallesby? Up early, eh? Say hi to your folks for—say.” Leona Unger’s head, well insulated by what Jenn suspected was one of her son’s fur caps, poked out the window. “Is that Steve Jaax there next to you? Well! This is a pleasure, Mr. Jaax. A real pleasure.”

  Steve leaned forward over Jenn’s lap, ducking his head down so he could see Mrs. Unger. “Thank you. Likewise, Miss—”

  “Leona Unger.” She was blushing like a schoolgirl and Steve had all but crawled over Jenn in order to suck up a little more adoration.

  Jenn stuck an elbow in his chest. “Down, boy.”

  “I saw your picture in the Crier,” Leona was saying. “So I went online and Googled your work. It was somet’ink. I t’ink I like Lantern Dance best, though.”

  “Really?” Steve asked, settling in to the conversation like it was going to last. It wasn’t. “Why is that?”

  Leona’s face screwed up in thought. Fawn Creekians did not give social answers when questioned. “Way it moves and expands out, like an osprey opening its wings—sorta disturbing you, ya know?” He nodded. “And the way you used—oops.”

  Thank God, another car had shown up and slid to a halt behind Mrs. Unger. In the summer, Mrs. Unger would have waved the Ford around her and no one would have thought twice about it. But the banks of snow pushed up by the plow made it impossible to move around her. “Best go,” Mrs. Unger said. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Jaax. Real pleasure. We don’t get celebrities up here.”

  Steve met Jenn’s cold look and gingerly eased back into his own seat as Leona took off. “I’m sure she meant ‘artists.”’

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “You married?” His question came out of nowhere.

  “Nope.”

  “Ever been?”

  “Once.” She provided the classic answers to the questions no one was ever rude enough to ask. “It didn’t last too long. We were young, and it didn’t take.”

  “Bull,” Steve announced calmly. “Someone screwed it up. Whose fault was it?”

  “No one’s.”

  “Bull.”

  She glanced at him. He looked perfectly composed, absolutely confident. “There has to be a fault?”

  “Always,” he said. “For example, I’ve been married three times. The last two times the breakups were completely my fault.”

  “That’s a lot of divorces, Steve. You don’t look too torn up about them.” But then, she hadn’t been torn up either. Maybe she and Steve shared a similar inability for lasting romantic love. Not that her love life had ever been all that romantic. Sex had been nice, though.

  She missed sex.

  She’d decided soon after her divorce that serious romantic entanglements only complicated her ability to focus on her goals, and hookups, as well as being personally unappealing, could be anathema for a career like hers, one based on a wholesome image.

  Oh, she dated. Once or twice per guy but nothing serious. Not “sex serious.” Consequently, her sex lif
e had never been what you’d call “great,” more like “barely adequate.” Then, when Dwight Davies’s people had started looking at her a few years ago, she’d cut herself off completely.

  Still, she really did miss sex, even though she knew it wasn’t safe in more ways than she could count.

  “I’m not,” Steve was saying. “If I was going to be torn up about it, I wouldn’t have screwed it up, would I?”

  “Is everything simple in your world?” That would be nice.

  “Things are simple in everyone’s world, Jenn. People complicate them to make themselves feel better. I was a dick. My wives divorced me. They were right to divorce me. I would have divorced me.”

  “Did you know you were going to be a dick when you got married?” she asked, curious in spite of herself.

  “No!” He looked offended.

  “But you guessed,” she said slyly.

  “Maybe.”

  “So why did you get married?”

  “I wanted kids. A home.” His eyes were straight ahead and his bloodhoundy face looked melancholy but with a familiar sadness, like he’d gotten used to it a long time ago. Like a chronic cough or arthritis.

  “Do you have any kids?” she asked gently.

  “No.” He smiled without looking at her, eyes straight ahead. “I said I wanted a home with kids, not to make a bunch of broken homes with kids. How ‘bout you? Any little princesses around?”

  “No.”

  “Never found Mr. Right Genes?”

  “Never found the time. Never even had the time to think about when would be a good time.” Then she added softly, “Now I suppose the time’s passed.”

  How could that have happened? How could she be forty and still feel like she was just starting out, that there was so much more to be done, accomplished, tied up, before she turned her attention to other matters?

  She couldn’t remember a time she hadn’t put things on the back burner and focused on the future and making sure it was secure before she started populating it with things like a dog and a garden and writing that book on Scandinavian cookery and learning how to relax. And thinking about kids.