Hot Dish

by Brockway, Connie

  “Nah.” She wagged her finger under his nose. “There’s more to it than that.”

  “There is?”

  “Yeah, you’re looking for something. Something you’ve lost.”

  “Jesus!” He blinked. “What else did you learn from that Jamaican housekeeper? Fortune-telling?”

  “A killer jerk chicken.” She eased back onto her side of the counter, feeling very wise and very, very old. She sighed. Oh, well, if you couldn’t be a nymph, you might as well be a kick-ass crone. Her and the Delphi oracle, sistahs.

  The thing was, the real thing was, that she liked Steve. She liked his honesty, his charm, and the open-faced pleasure he took in almost everything, including his own mythology. She also liked his … wrists, a lot, and she suspected a lot of women did and that made her feel a little low because undoubtedly they were all glamorous young women, and a man as famous as Steve would take pleasure in all that young adoration. Ah, hell. Steve would take pleasure in any adulation. “Answer the question.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, looking thoroughly guilty. “Inspiration, I suppose. Why?”

  “You need my advice,” she said, coming to a sudden decision. That in itself should have raised warning flags. She didn’t make sudden decisions. Ever. Oh well, one for the books … “I’ve been following your career—”

  “You’ve been following my career?” he interjected, flattered.

  “Come on. You’re being coy again, right?”

  “No!” he denied.

  “You’re Steve Jaax. You’re like an art icon. And you carved my head in butter and then went on to tell the whole world that while you were doing it you rediscovered your talent and found your focus. How could I not follow your career after that?”

  She nodded. Her vision swam. No more nodding. “I’ve seen pictures of everything you’ve done. I’ve seen most of it in person. The stuff that’s not in private collections, that is.”

  She waited. He waited. “You’re not going to ask me what I thought of them, are you?” she finally said. “‘Cause you’re afraid of what I’ll say. Me. A nobody. Well,” she said because false modesty was something she never could stand, “really someone pretty big but not someone whose opinion you would normally care about.”

  “I care about everyone’s opinion,” he said.

  Damn. He was telling the truth. “God, that’s gotta be rough.”

  “You have no idea,” he whispered.

  “Look. Ask me.”

  “Really?” he said, doubtfully.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Do you like my stuff?”

  “The older work is terrific. Your new stuff sucks.”

  He stared at her for a full five seconds before slamming his palms down on the counter and surging up over it like Swamp Thing. He looked pretty impressive standing above her, snarling. “You set me up!”

  Hastily, she reached under the shelf and uncovered the domed plate of semlor she’d seen on her earlier forays there. She plopped three small, golden, cream-filled buns on a new plate and slid it under his tensed jaw. At once, his jaw untensed. Slowly he melted back into his seat, his scowl replaced by an unwillingly interested expression. Food, the Great Leveler.

  “Eat.”

  She didn’t have a clue where she had grown the cajones to talk to him like this. She wasn’t an art critic. She wasn’t even the kind of person who liked giving advice. Okay, that was a lie, but she didn’t give advice out about stuff she didn’t have any expertise in. Okay, another lie. She’d never given out art advice. Whatever. The whole impulse was bizarre. Maybe it was being here in Fawn Creek where she wasn’t so much Jenn Lind as Jenny Hallesby. Maybe it was because he seemed so oddly isolated.

  Maybe it was because she was drunk.

  He took a small, grudging bite of the bun.

  “What do you think?” Now she was being coy. She could tell what he thought from the look on his face.

  “Oh … Oh!” He took another bite and closed his eyes, the cream filling oozing out the back end of the bun. “What is this?”

  “A cream bun.” She laughed at the look on his face. He finished the first one and started on the second. “Want some coffee?”

  “No,” he said, chewing away. Then he paused and cast her an aggrieved look. “You hurt my feelings.”

  “Look, Steve, art-wise you’re coasting. If I can see it, others can. The real question is why your manager or agent or whatever the hell you guys have didn’t say anything.”

  “Because you’re wrong?” he suggested around a mouthful of almond cream.

  “No, I’m not.” She leaned over the counter again. “Steve, you’re making money off being you.”

  There. She’d said it. She drew back and waited for his reaction. He licked the tips of his fingers clean.

  “’Course, there’s a chance you just don’t have anything more to say,” she suggested. “Maybe you’ve reached a place where anything you come up with will be the epitaph for your career. It’s been a good career.”

  “It’s still a good career,” he said as he reached for another semlor.

  “Have you ever considered hanging it all up?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you should,” she suggested kindly. “You have to be pushing fifty. Maybe the best isn’t yet to come. Maybe the best is all in the rearview mirror. If all any of it means to you anymore is a chance to see your name in People magazine …” She trailed off. “I mean, I’m not trying to be cruel here or anything but—”

  “Man, then I’d hate to hear you when you were.” Remarkably, he no longer sounded all that offended. He sounded … flattered? Whatever Steve Jaax wasn’t, he was seriously odd.

  “You’re tough,” he said admiringly.

  “On you,” she admitted. What had gotten into her? The burn of “make it righteousness” had left, leaving an empty feeling behind. What right did she have to bitch anyone out about pandering to their own celebrity? She was exhibit number one. “I’m a marshmallow when it comes to me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Do you realize I have spent twenty years becoming the consummate Minnesotan in order to escape Minnesota? How’s that for irony?”

  “So what? You created a persona, an image. Nothing wrong with that.”

  He was a much nicer man than she was a woman. She still had a crush on him, she realized.

  “The thing to keep sight of is that at least you’re doing what you love to do, and you’re really, really good at it,” he said. “You must be to have attracted Dwight Davies’s attention. The man’s an asshole but he knows quality when he sees it.”

  “Crass commercialism,” she said tonelessly.

  “Why would you say that?” For the first time since she’d met him early that morning, he looked annoyed. “You’re doing what you love and getting paid a shit load to do it. What more can you ask?”

  “Is this what I love?” she mused quietly. “I don’t know that it is. I’ll bet you always wanted to be an artist or something like it. I bet you had a soldering gun when you were eight or something, right?”

  “Yes. So?”

  “Well, I never set out to be a lifestyle coach or a cooking maven or felt some inner calling to bring the torch of domestic enlightenment out of the hinterlands to illuminate the chaotic modern world.”

  His mouth twitched into a smile. “So what did you want to be?”

  “I can’t remember,” she said, a little sadly, a little drunkenly. “Probably a lawyer. Don’t all ambitious little suburban girls want to grow up to be lawyers? It doesn’t really matter what I wanted. I just know it wasn’t this. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to be anything. I’ve just wanted to succeed. And here I am, forty years old, speeding down a highway straight to the Promised Land of Commercial Success. And you know what I see when I look in the rearview mirror?”

  “The Ghost of Martha Stewart Past? No? What?”

  He was trying to make her laugh but her smile was wan. “Nothing.
I look in my rearview mirror and the road behind is empty.”

  She’d often been mistaken for being younger than she was, and now rather than seeing that as a compliment, she felt it as an indictment.

  “At forty you should have a history,” she whispered, “things cluttering your past. There should be messy relationships, heartbreaks, bittersweet memories, embarrassments, and extravagances. There should be a first home somewhere back there, anniversaries, champagne dinners, a fast car.” She looked up and caught his eye. “There should at least be a dog, don’t you think? I mean, a dog? I love dogs! Why haven’t I ever had a dog?”

  Because her eyes had always been focused forward, nothing deterred her from the goal; nothing interrupted her forward momentum. No detours. No off-ramps. There were to be no bumps in her road, no siree. She’d routed her life carefully, one straight line to the land of security, to that “home” she’d been promising herself since she was sixteen, the one she not only lost but somewhere even lost the memory of because looking behind didn’t get you ahead. That was how you got an image like hers in the rearview mirror.

  She gave him a wry smile. “But all that’s gonna change as soon as I conquer this last frontier, national syndication.”

  “What’s going to happen then?”

  “I’m gonna get a dog.”

  “Why don’t you get one now?”

  “Because I want to know that I can take care of him like he deserves, that I have the time and the right place for him.” Because you never knew when the storm might break, when your home might disappear and you might find yourself an exile.

  When your friends might die.

  Her eyes stung and she blinked rapidly, trying to clear them, and looked down.

  Steve was holding her hand. How had that happened? Her own hand tightened in his. He reached across the counter with his free hand and brushed her knuckles lightly. His eyes were incredibly blue. If she leaned over a few feet, just twenty-four inches … there’d be something to see in her rearview. She wet her lips.

  His gaze sharpened and he stood up, his hand dipping beneath her hair to cup the back of her head. He leaned forward and his mouth touched hers, at first as soft as chamois cloth, questioning and tentative, not the least bit overconfident.

  She practically jumped to her feet, grabbing hold of his shirt front and pulling him in closer, kissing him back, a little amazed, a little desperate, and a little embarrassed. She didn’t have to be; he reacted well to encouragement.

  With a moan, he hooked his arm around her and lifted her up, dragging her over the counter. No, onto the counter. Dishes flew, clattering to the ground and spinning on the floor as he brushed the last of them out of the way and pushed her down onto the Formica, his arm cushioning her back, his mouth sealed against hers.

  She cupped his jaw between her palms and kissed him back, hungry—no, starving. He tasted of almond cream and aquavit, heady and sweet, and his tongue swept between her lips and found hers and she sighed with openmouthed pleasure back into his mouth. Her head was swimming, foggy and sparkling at the same time, drunk, drunken, on kisses, on alcohol, who the hell cared as long as she could stay focused on his lips and hands and the way they were traveling over her, molding her hips and her ribs and riding up to her breast? There he hesitated, a little uncertain, a great deal careful. It was incredibly arousing. She wanted it to go on and on, necking like a teenager, hot and flushed and driven.

  He made a sound, low, urgent, and she felt herself being shifted and then his knee next to her hip. He was climbing right up onto the counter with her, straddling her. Not so uncertain after all.

  Abruptly, he tore his mouth away and pushed himself up and braced his hands on either side of her head. He looked around a little wildly, as out of breath and befuddled as she felt. “Jenny. This is a lunch counter…. There’s got to be—”

  A blue light suddenly painted his face and his white shirt, disappeared, and painted them again. She turned her head and stared dumbly straight into the flashing signal of the sheriff’s patrol car.

  “Looks like our ride’s here,” she said.

  “Fuck,” he answered.

  Chapter Thirty

  12:05 a.m.

  Saturday, December 9

  Fawn Creek town hall

  It was after midnight. From inside the town hall’s glass vestibule, Ned watched Turv park the front-end loader in the Quonset hut garage, where Ned had parked the plow an hour earlier, and haul the sliding doors shut. Turv trotted across the empty parking lot, flapping his arms and puffing clouds of vapor into the frosty night air. For being half frozen, old Turv looked pretty happy, and after Ned told him what he’d learned, old Turv was going to look happier still.

  He opened the door to the vestibule and Turv scooted in.

  “Some weather, eh?” he said.

  “Got that right,” Ned agreed.

  Turv peeled off his choppers and rubbed his hands together to get the blood back circulating. “Did she really leave the money in the castle like you told her?”

  “Yup. I couldn’t get out there until about two hours later than we told her, ‘counta the asshole mayor kept driving by to see if I was clearing the highways to his liking. She had the hundred bucks all wrapped up tidy with a rubber binder and stuffed right in the castle.”

  Ned, feeling that perhaps someone ought to call attention to his honesty in his dealings with his partners, decided that someone would be himself. “You know, a guy coulda just taken the top twenty dollars for himself and no one would have known better.”

  “If a guy was an asshole,” Turv said.

  Ned had wasted his breath. Turv couldn’t appreciate a subtle moral problem like that.

  Turv’s prematurely corrugated brow pleated up into a few more ropy lines as he frowned. “Don’t suppose you had a chance to pick up the butter head and drop it off then?”

  “Nope,” Ned said, hugging his surprise to himself just a little longer.

  “Crap. I suppose we should just go do it now then.” Turv sighed gustily. “I mean, we got no reason to keep the damn thing anymore, do we?”

  “Yes,” Ned said, “we sure do.”

  “Why’s that, Ned?”

  “Because Providence has finally smiled down on us, Turv. Look what Eric found on his way out of town.” He held up a pink Xeroxed sheet like the one Eric had phoned him about, a flier he’d found pinned to Pamida’s community bulletin board half an hour ago.

  Turv stared at the reward flier. “Holy shit,” he whispered.

  “Indeed, Turv, my friend,” Ned said. “Indeed. All we got to do is call this number, claim we found the butter head dumped out in the woods someplace, and collect us twenty-five hundred dollars. And,” he added magnanimously because he was in a really fine mood, “by the way, I think you got a real calling there with sculpting, Turvie. That butter head looks better now than when we took her. Kinda like Angelina Jolie.”

  “Thanks.” Another set of wrinkles joined those already on Turv’s forehead. “But … but what about Jenny Hallesby?”

  “What about Jenny Hallesby?” Ned asked, mildly exasperated. “She had her chance. If she hadn’t been so damn greedy and paid us the thousand dollars we asked for to begin with, she’d be staring at her butter face right now. Serves her right. Besides, it’s not like she couldn’t have afforded it. Greedy, greedy, miserly, and greedy.” He shook his head over the failings of modern women.

  “So, if she’s not paying the reward, who is?” Turv asked.

  “Don’t know,” Ned answered, feeling downright chipper. “And I don’t much care.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  7:30 a.m.

  The Lodge

  The sun, bouncing off all the white snow outside, filled her room like a movie set’s lights, waking Jenn up.

  She rolled over in the single bed she’d had since they had moved to the Lodge, wondering—and not for the first time—why she wasn’t in a larger bed, and looked around for her clothes. They were
heaped in the center of the threadbare rug. At least, they weren’t hanging on a hook in the Fawn Creek jail, which is exactly where Greta Smelka had wanted her and Steve to be after Einer had called her to tell her about the café’s broken window. Even Steve’s celebrity hadn’t been enough to save them from Greta’s wrath. His checkbook, on the other hand, had done the trick. He’d also added more than enough to cover the cost of replacing the dishes that had been broken during their … what? Make-out session?

  Jenn smiled lazily and stretched. Despite her throbbing temples, she felt pretty damn good. She supposed she ought to feel some little tickle of embarrassment; she didn’t. Making out with Steve Jaax on the counter of Smelka’s Café sure wasn’t something she regretted. Steve was a really good kisser, and besides, she couldn’t imagine him being embarrassed about some excellent necking. It would be anti-Steve Jaax. She decided to take a page from the Steve Jaax Handbook of Celebrity Live in the Momentness and enjoy.

  She rolled out of bed, relaxed and with a little girlish frisson of anticipation that she found as goofy as it was unusual. She decided to go with that, too. After a quick look to see if any semlor had been ground into them during her Encounter on the Counter (there wasn’t), she slipped into the jeans she’d worn last night, and a nubby, oversized gray-green sweater. Then she slid her feet into a pair of shearling slippers and headed down the hall to the bathroom.

  She emerged ten minutes later with everything brushed and was about to return to her room when she heard voices downstairs. One was unmistakably her father’s. The other was a female voice, thick with a north Minnesota accent. Heidi! Her pleasure in the day grew as she trotted down the steps leading into the back of the kitchen.

  Against anyone’s expectations—including her own—she and Heidi Olmsted had maintained their friendship after high school. What had begun as two outsiders forging a relationship out of loneliness—and what could have been more unlikely than a beauty pageant princess and a dog sled–racing dyke?—had developed into appreciation, admiration, and real affection. Though painfully shy, once she relaxed, Heidi had proven to have a great wry sense of humor, cool-headed reasonableness, and a vastly charitable nature. Jenn wasn’t exactly certain what she brought to the relationship; she was just glad Heidi enjoyed her company.