Hot Dish

by Brockway, Connie

  Because she hadn’t asked for anything from them since she’d asked them to make her Miss Fawn Creek. Because that had been a debacle. Because she didn’t want to owe anyone here anything. Because, damn it, it still hurt. She cared and that was all that mattered.

  “I just can’t ask.”

  “You’d rather freeze or take your chances on the road?” he asked, eyeing her uncertainly, as though he expected her to start frothing at the mouth.

  She was stubborn and oversensitive. She wasn’t an idiot.

  “Hell, no,” she said. “We’re going to break in to one of these stores.”

  She chose Smelka’s because they were right in front of it and because she knew Greta was too damn cheap to ever have installed anything like a security system. Also, Steve hadn’t had anything to eat all day except half a cookie and a spoonful of risotto. They parked the truck—actually, they simply got out of the truck and left it where it stood. At once, the wind tore the breath from Jenn’s lungs and thrust icy hands down her collar. She squinted into the snow, shielding her eyes against the gritty blasts.

  The temperature was dropping, and the wet flakes froze as they fell, turning into pellets. She blinked at Steve, who’d covered his bare ears with his hands and was looking around, again more interested than alarmed. She had to give him credit; he wasn’t a whiner.

  “Come on!” she called over the wind and jerked his sleeve in the direction of the café. Together, they scrambled over the drift separating them from Smelka’s door. Hoping for a little small-town credulity, she pulled on the handle. It didn’t open. They just didn’t make small towns they way they used to.

  She looked the door over, hoping to spot an easy way in. Crap, she thought, heading back toward the truck.

  “Where are you going?” Steve hollered.

  “Back to the truck,” she shouted without turning, “to look in the glove compartment for something to pick the lock with—”

  Crash!

  She spun around. Steve was standing where she’d left him, shaking pieces of glass off his sleeve. The restaurant’s door window was missing. “It’s open now,” he said, carefully reaching in over the rim of broken glass and unlatching the door. He opened it and waited for her to duck inside before following her in.

  “I better find something to cover that window,” Steve said, flipping on the lights. “We’ll probably be here all night.”

  His naïveté was charming.

  “Steve,” she said, “there’s probably been a half a dozen calls about us to the sheriff’s office already. Nothing in a small town goes unnoticed, unreported, or ungossiped about. Not even if it happens in a snowstorm in the dead of night. We’ll be here until Einer has finished pulling people out of the ditch, goes back to his office, and finds the answering machine filled to capacity with reports about the break-in at Smelka’s.”

  He gave her the credit of assuming she knew what she was talking about. “How long will that be?”

  “Long enough.” She peered out the window at the two-story brick storefronts on the other side of the street. She wasn’t sure which ones, if any, housed tenants on their top levels anymore. All of them were dark. Of course, that didn’t mean anything. You couldn’t maintain your dignity with your nose pressed to the window that was backlit. And people in towns like Fawn Creek did a lot of nose pressing.

  “Let’s leave the overhead lights off, okay? I wouldn’t want anyone who saw the lights risking life and limb investigating—that would be our lives and our limbs—and if someone sees us moving around in here, they just might show up with a twelve gauge.”

  “You’re kidding,” Steve said, again looking delighted. The whole damn town just seemed to tickle the hell out of him. “That’s sweet.”

  “You are a very odd man,” Jenn said. “Kill the lights.”

  He switched them off.

  “And while you’re looking for something to cover that broken window, what say I cook up a little something for you to eat?”

  In reply, he simply looked at her, the light from the neon sign in the window bathing his face in blissful blue light. If her ex-husband had looked at her with half as much reverence, they might still be married.

  “That would be wonderful.”

  She moved behind the lunch counter, where she did a quick visual inventory before heading for the pair of doors at the end of the grill area. She pulled open the first door and poked her head inside the walk-in, which was more of a root cellar than a refrigerator. Potato sausage, kielbasa, and a string of homemade wieners hung from hooks on the near wall while the shelves at the back held cartons of eggs, gallons of milk and cream, and a couple big blocks of butter. Beneath the shelves, carrots, onions, and potatoes poked out of sawdust-filled bins.

  She shut that door and opened the one next to it. It was a pantry stocked with big canisters of flour, sugar, rice, macaroni, and dried beans. Its shelves were lined with rows of canned and boxed goods.

  She cracked her knuckles and got to work.

  By the time Steve had found some duct tape and covered the broken window with a heavy piece of cardboard, Jenn had a roux bubbling in a saucepan, a pot of macaroni boiling, and had just begun sautéing her quick dice of onions, celery, and carrots in an obscene amount of butter.

  “I’m going to see if there’s any beer in the fridge,” Steve announced, disappearing into the walk-in. He returned a minute later and slid onto the stool on the other side of the counter.

  “No beer?” Jenn asked, sticking a couple pieces of bread in the toaster.

  “Nope, but look what I found instead.”

  “That’s aquavit,” Jenn said, glancing up from the fine mince she was putting on a couple gloves of garlic. The last time she’d had aquavit had been before Fawn Creek’s homecoming dance her senior year. It had given her all the courage she’d needed to make a complete ass out of herself. And Heidi.

  Man, she’d been hell-bent on forcing Ken Holmberg and the town council to release her from her Miss Fawn Creek obligations. The homecoming dance, less than a month after the state fair debacle, had seemed to be the perfect venue during which to force their hands—and Heidi the perfect excuse for them to divest her of her crown. But you don’t force a Scandinavian to do anything. The entire culture apparently existed simply to provide a definition in the dictionary for the words “unflappable” and “stoic.” Still, she’d thought the homecoming dance stunt would have done the trick in a staunchly conservative, Lutheran community like this. Nope.

  In retrospect, thank God. Because it had been her position as Miss Fawn Creek that had gotten her asked back on Good Neighbors a few weeks later. And from there … here.

  “That stuff’ll kill you.”

  “Yup.” He unscrewed the top. “But at least we’ll go out warm.” He leaned over the counter and hung, head upside down, as he snagged a couple juice glasses and wiggled his way back upright.

  He filled them both and pushed hers toward her. “To Fawn Creek,” he said, raising his glass.

  She snorted, lifted the glass, and clinked. “You’re only toasting them because everyone you’ve seen has doted on you.”

  “Ain’t it great?” he conceded.

  She took a swig and added some milk to her roux, whisking rapidly as she poured. “Yeah, if you’re you. But I’ve been coming back and forth to this town for twenty-three years”—she added handfuls of the grated cheese into the mix—”and no one has ever asked for my autograph. And before you point out the obvious, yes, I am a little jealous. Nah. More resentful. You’re jealous of something you want. You’re resentful of something you think you should have.”

  She shifted the white sauce off the stove, took another sip of aquavit, and unhooked some potholders from above the stove. Then she swung the pot with the macaroni over the sink and upended it into a colander waiting inside.

  “You’re a fixture here,” Steve said.

  She looked over her shoulder at him and started crumbling the toast she’d made into a sm
all pan sizzling with garlic and butter. “I am not. I only come here to visit my parents. I don’t even come in to the town proper that often.”

  “Bull,” he said, twirling his juice glass around. “You’ve known everyone we’ve seen today. Everyone.”

  Had she? She dismissed his observation. “Coincidence. We could walk down the street every day for the next week before I saw anyone else I recognized.”

  She dumped the drained macaroni into a bowl and poured the white sauce over it, folding the golden silky concoction carefully. Then she took another swallow of aquavit.

  “But they’d know you,” he said.

  She took the sizzling vegetable mixture off the stove and emptied it into the bowl, along with a few sprinkles of pepper and mustard and a grate of fresh nutmeg. “Maybe. But only because everyone in this town knows everything about everyone else. You know that saying about a person’s life being an open book? Well, a small town is like a communal blog that everyone reads every day.”

  She ducked into the refrigerator and emerged with a plate of sliced ham, which she chopped into bits and added to the macaroni. Then she spooned the mixture into a small casserole dish she’d found and buttered. She finished by sprinkling the garlic-butter-soaked toast bits on top and popped it in the oven. Time for another sip of aquavit.

  She lifted her glass to her lips. The alcohol had slid down more easily with each sip twenty years ago, too.

  “They asked you to be their grand marshal.”

  He was still on Fawn Creek? She regarded him knowingly. She’d seen it before in urban dwellers, the Jimmy Stewart syndrome: small town equals virtue. Hell, she should have recognized it earlier; she’d built a career on the precept.

  “Look, tootsie cake—Whoa! Sorry. That would be the aquavit speaking. Try again.” She concentrated. “Look, Steve, you keep saying that like it’s a big deal or something. It’s not. It seems to me,” she continued, enunciating carefully, “that many have been asked to be grand marshal—some of whom aren’t even real. Like your … my … mom’s butter head. To be honest,” she went on, warming to the subject, “I’m a little surprised you agreed to co-marshal. Not to be rude or anything, but you just don’t seem like the type who likes to share the spotlight.”

  His expression of offended dignity couldn’t have been more contrived. God, he was cute.

  “The reality check on all this,” she went on, “is that the town council is desperate for anything that might draw some speculators here and one of those things is me. Their last-ditch effort to get noticed. Come visit Fawn Creek, Jenn Lind’s hometown. If Chico, the dog-riding monkey, had been born here, they would have named him grand marshal. And he probably would have been a bigger draw.”

  “What about me?” he asked.

  Ah, crap. Now she’d hurt his feelings. Man, his ego was fragile. Sort of like the Hindenburg, enormous but vulnerable.

  “You?” She tipped the mouth of her glass in his direction, wiggling it invitingly at Steve and withholding her opinion until after he’d poured her another half a juice glass full. “You are media fodder, babe. Steve Jaax, cosmopolitan hipster, roughing it in the northland? Hell, you’ll score all the local news shows and that’s just the sort of coverage these poor schmucks are depending on.”

  She tipped open the oven door and peeked inside. The top of the macaroni was bubbling nicely; the golden crumbs needed only a minute more to turn crispy-crunchy good.

  “Not that I begrudge the town their every effort. I hope it works. I don’t think it stands a chance in hell of doing so.”

  “How come?”

  “There’s no seed money here, Steve. Most of the people make less than twenty-five a year. In order to survive, this town needs a bunch of people willing to invest in little cottage industries. And that means someone needs some cash or a reason to invest here. And there is none!

  “There’s no freeway within ten miles, no industry to attract people—except for Ken’s hockey stick plant and”—she glanced right and left and lowered her voice confidingly—”rumor has it that Minnesota Hockey Stix is not as financially stable as it ought to be, despite its recent expansion. If Ken pulls out, there goes another forty or fifty families. The economy of a small town is sort of like a coral reef. The balance is incredibly intricate and delicate. Ten families leave and the ripple effect is felt everywhere from the public school assistance from the state to the amount of gas sold. Fifty families leave and the impact is devastating. It’s not just his employees. It’s the people who plow his parking lot, the local drivers he uses to ship his products, and the maintenance service he employs, the café where most of the people at the plant eat lunch every day.

  “It doesn’t help that the casino has siphoned off a lot of what tourism the town had. The snow has been crappy for three years running and that means no snow trade tourists.” She took a sip and mused. “There’s nothing here but lakes and woods, and in case you haven’t tumbled to it, Steve, Minnesota isn’t exactly short on lakes.”

  “Then the town must be happy with what’s happening outside,” Steve said, pointing out the window at the near whiteout conditions on the street.

  “You’d think, wouldn’t you?” Jenn said with a little sigh. Fawn Creek just couldn’t seem to catch a break. “All this snow is great, if it had either shown up earlier or held off a little longer. As it is, it’s just going to keep travelers from heading up here for the sesquicentennial.”

  The whole conversation was depressing her way out of proportion to what this town meant to her. Time to change the subject.

  She opened the oven, slid on a mitt, and took out the concoction, setting it in front of Steve. She found silverware and handed him a fork. She spooned a portion onto a plate and slid it in front of Steve. “Dig in but blow on it first or you’ll burn your mouth.”

  He perked right up, shoving his fork under a huge load of food and impatiently blowing at his fork until she nodded. Then he stuffed the whole forkful into his mouth.

  Euphoric revelation transformed his face.

  He swallowed, forked up another mouthful, puffed quickly on it, shoved it in, chewed, and swallowed.

  “What is this?” he asked through another mouthful of food.

  She shrugged.

  “No. No, I have to know the name of it,” he insisted. “This is … I’ve never had anything like this. Well, like it maybe, but this is … this is transcendent.”

  She understood. She felt that way about good food, too.

  “What’s it called?” he persevered.

  “I dunno. Hotdish?”

  “Hotdish,” he breathed rapturously.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  8:30 p.m.

  Smelka’s Café

  Steve, finishing his first plate of hotdish in record time, heaped his plate full again and began on that. Jenn watched him eat, sipping aquavit, and nodding contentedly. This was what she loved most about cooking: people loving what she made, discovering their inner gluttons, realizing their sybaritic potential. So many people went through life with their palates dulled by convenience and expediency. Steve had an appetite. He enjoyed things, people, food, conversation. He probably really enjoyed sex, too. Not that she’d ever find out. But a woman could wonder, speculate. It had been so long since she’d even speculated, she felt a guilty enjoyment in it.

  She wondered if underneath that white shirt, Steve had any muscle tone. He didn’t look like the type who belonged to a gym. But he had a nice, flat stomach. Nice broad wrists, too, probably from the sculpting. Strong-looking, tensile.

  “This is what you do?” he interrupted her pleasantly lascivious thoughts. “Teach people how to make hotdish?”

  If only. She cupped her cheek in her hand and smiled at him. “There’s no recipe for hotdish. It’s just what you have on hand and how you put it together. It’s never the same twice. I couldn’t make that again if I tried.”

  “It’s art,” he intoned soberly.

  “It’s food,” she correc
ted, pleased nonetheless by the compliment. Steve might just get it. Whatever “it” was. She wondered if he was a good kisser. He’d taste like aquavit and hotdish. She took another sip.

  “Where’d you learn all this?” he asked. “From your grandmother?”

  She snorted again and wondered what was up with that. She generally eschewed snorting but this was Fawn Creek. She wasn’t trying to impress Steve with her femininity—not because she didn’t want to; she just figured it was a moot point—and what the hell? “Hell, no. My grandmother had staff.”

  “Staff.”

  “Yup. You know. Maid, cook, housekeeper, gardener. Staff. My parents did, too, once upon a time. That’s where I learned a lot of my stuff. From Tina, the housekeeper. She was Jamaican and she could cook anything.” She wondered where Tina was now. “I think of everything my mom misses, she misses Tina the most.”

  “And you? What did you miss?”

  A face popped into her head, a square face covered in freckles, surrounded by bright copper curls. Tess. She didn’t think about Tess too often anymore. Time had healed that wound, at least. But thinking about Tess now, Jenn felt like there was something undone about her memory. Like Jenn had missed something important, somehow. Like she’d missed the funeral (she hadn’t). It was weird. She couldn’t think what it would be.

  Jenn tipped the rest of the aquavit into her mouth and gave a little involuntary shiver.

  “I’m sorry,” he said so quietly that she wondered for a second if she’d said something aloud, something revealing. She looked up and found him studying her, appealing and somber and concerned. She didn’t want that. If he was concerned, it made her suspicious that there was something to be concerned about and there wasn’t. She had everything under control. On autopilot. Best to steer this conversation back to safe—to less uncomfortable territory.

  She leaned over the counter. The room rocked a little then steadied. “What are you doing here, Steve? What are you really doing here?”

  “I want to see my—your—butter head,” he said.