Hot Dish

by Brockway, Connie

  “Do you really think, Eric,” Ned said, “that Dunkovich was going to hand this thing over to the Hallesbys? You don’t get yourself busted up over a butter head, then pay twenty-five hundred dollars just to give it away, do ya? He’s got something else in mind, and frankly, I don’t give a crap why he wants it. I just care how much he wants it, and he’s gonna have to want it pretty damn bad in order to get it.”

  “The mayor might be willing to do some back-door bartering for it, too,” Turv suddenly announced. “I heard him tell the Ripley’s guy that maybe Fawn Creek would just like to keep the butter head in Jenn Lind’s hometown.”

  “You’re kidding,” Ned said, a little chagrined Turv had kept this piece of information back until now. “Well, that makes four.”

  “Four?” Turv asked.

  Ned looked at his hand. He was holding up three fingers and he knew he should be holding up four. He thought a second … Oh, yeah!

  “Four,” he announced, his little finger popping up. “This Jaax guy. I didn’t think he’d want to buy it when I saw him on the television, but I didn’t think anyone else would be willing to pay much for it. And I was wrong about that, and boy howdy, so maybe he’d be interested in getting in on the auction.”

  “Auction? That’s slick, Ned,” Turv said, impressed.

  “Thanks,” Ned replied modestly. “Now the way I figure it, we should get us at least ten thousand dollars easy. Maybe more.”

  Turv grinned. “So let’s start making calls.”

  “This the mayor?”

  Paul cradled the phone between his shoulder and his ear so he could open the bottom drawer of his desk and stick the insurance file folder back in place. “Yeah?”

  “This is the butter head bandits.” The guy giggled.

  Higher than a kite, Paul thought with an inner sigh. Just like he’d suspected, the butter head had been stolen as a prank and now the “bandits” were trying to figure out some way to give it back without getting in too much trouble.

  “Fine. Drop it off in the parking lot tonight when everyone’s gone and stay out of trouble from now on.”

  “Whoa there, mayor. We’re not dropping anything off. Not without getting paid.”

  Asshole kids. “Paid? What are you talking about?”

  There was a long pause, a muffled conversation. “We’re talking about seventy-five hundred dollars.”

  “What?” Paul exploded.

  “Look, we hear that there’s a guy in town who’ll pay ten thousand dollars for this here thing but he might not feel like he has like legal ownership if he was to buy it from … well … from—”

  “Thieves?” Paul said sharply.

  “Yeah. So how about it? You buy it from us for seventy-five, then turn around and sell it to him for ten. That’s a profit of twenty-five for you. Seems fair.”

  “No.”

  “Okay. How about seven thousand?”

  Now Paul wanted that butter head. He wanted it to ride beside Jenn Lind during the parade. He wanted its image telecast all over the nation, raising curiosity about his town, and he wanted to make for it a little refrigerated shrine right in the town hall lobby. But there were moments that happened in a life that revealed to a man what he was—or had become. And in that instant, Paul finally knew himself to be a true Minnesotan, because no matter what anyone else in the country thought or was willing to pay, there was no way in hell he was going to pony up a thin dime to some blackmailing son of a bitch for a chunk of rancid butter.

  “Are you insane?” He slammed down the phone.

  Jenn was driving back from the first taped segment of Checklist for Living. She was frustrated, resentful, and angry, and that unnerved her because she shouldn’t have been. She should have been happily complying with whatever Bob Reynolds and AMS asked her to do, especially since none of it was particularly unreasonable or excessive.

  So what if they’d had to do three takes of “Winter Wonderland Weekend’s Checklist” bullet number three: snow angels? It wasn’t anyone’s fault that she’d had to flop around in three separate unblemished patches of snow and wave her arms and legs like an idiot only to struggle to her feet and be told the crew had to reshoot because her ass had made too deep an impression in the snow. If it was anyone’s fault, it was hers, because she’d allowed her ass to get that big.

  Then why did everything in her rebel against it?

  She’d always been a team player. Why was she reacting this way? Maybe she was the diva Nat had accused her of becoming. Maybe she was going through really early menopause. Maybe this was an early midlife crisis. Whatever it was, it was threatening to get out of hand.

  Since she’d arrived in Fawn Creek, her family had been robbed, she’d been poked by her cooking mentor, forced to go out and ransom a butter head in a snowstorm, almost done the horizontal tango with Steve Jaax on a lunch counter, been blackmailed by a guy in a body cast, and donned a tacky disguise to play blackjack—and she’d arrived on Friday and it was only Sunday night. No wonder she felt like she might spin off into fifty directions at once.

  She was a practical, deliberate, responsible woman who made measured and well-considered choices. She had to stomp on this madness fast before she did something stupid, something irredeemable. She just needed to get back on track, was all.

  Her cell phone rang, and she flipped it open. “Jenn Hal—Jenn Lind here.”

  “This is the butter head bandits,” the guy on the other end announced portentously, then ruined the effect by snorting.

  “Are you high?” Jenn asked suspiciously.

  “No.”

  She knew high when she heard it. “Yes, you are,” she said, disgusted. “What do you want?”

  “We know the butter head is worth ten thousand dollars. We want seven.”

  “Are you insane?” She wanted to shout at him that she knew they’d already sold the damn thing for twenty-five because she’d been the one who’d paid them. She didn’t. She didn’t want anyone to know about her involvement with Dunkovich.

  “No,” the guy answered seriously.

  “You must be if you think I’m paying you anything more than the hundred bucks I already left you and for which you were supposed to leave me the butter head. Now you tell me where it is,” she demanded, although she suspected that the butter head was already in Dunkovich’s hospital room. “Now listen, you clowns,” she went on, “if you don’t stop calling me about this crap, I’m going to hunt you down and take that butter head and I’m going to—”

  The phone went dead.

  “What’d she say?” Eric asked eagerly.

  “You know, for someone who is supposed to be the last word in nice, Jenn Hallesby can be a real bitch. She was about to tell me to put the butter head where the sun don’t shine. And the mayor reamed me just as good,” he added. “In fact, they used almost the same identical words.”

  “Maybe they’re talking together. Maybe they think if they stick together we’ll just give up and let ‘em have it dirt cheap,” Turv said. “Maybe they don’t think we’ll deliver it to ‘em even if they do give us the money.”

  “Why would they think that?” Eric asked. “I don’t want the damn thing.”

  “Because we already sold it to ‘em twice and didn’t?” Turv suggested.

  Turv had a point.

  “Jenn called us clowns,” Ned told the pair, waiting for them to express the outrage he felt. They didn’t disappoint.

  “Where’s she get off? She’s the one who was playing patty-cake in the snow for the camera all afternoon. A woman her age …”

  “Don’t matter. What matters is that they’re not taking us serious,” Ned said. “We gotta prove we mean business and that this is their last chance to get the butter head.”

  “How are we gonna do that?” Turv asked.

  “Desperate circumstances, my friends,” Ned said gravely, looking each of them in the eye, “call for desperate measures.”

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  5:30 p.
m.

  The Lodge

  Jenn parked the Subaru in the barn and was just coming out of it when she spied her dad and Steve tromping up the hill from the direction of the lake. Both men were dressed in ratty terry cloth bathrobes and Sorel boots, both men’s calves—her dad’s skinny, Steve’s hairy—exposed in the area between. Steve was carrying a pail and her dad was holding a loofah. They spotted her at the same time.

  “Hi!” Steve called out, lifting his hand in greeting. “We just took a sauna!”

  “I see.”

  They continued smiling and tromping their way through the snow toward the back door, Jenn gazing after them longingly. She wanted to take a sauna. She wanted to be dressed in a ratty terry cloth robe heading back from the tumbled-down shack by the lake. She wanted to be walking next to her dad in companionable … companionableness. Or Steve. But she couldn’t because she had other things she had to do. Like become phenomenally successful, she reminded herself, rolling the garage door shut and making her way to the Lodge.

  Success meant security. She had to keep that thought foremost in mind.

  “Is that you, Jenn?”

  “Yes, Mom,” Jenn answered, hanging her jacket up on one of the pegs in the back hall. Steve and her father were nowhere to be seen. They were probably doing more bonding somewhere.

  Bruno evidently hadn’t been asked to join the boys’ club, either, because he lay in the mudroom atop her father’s old snowmobile coveralls, snoring away. She squatted down next to him and stroked his big, smooth head. Poor Bruno. Left all alone—

  “Bruno! Where are you, my prince?” From somewhere deep in the house, Steve’s voice boomed. Then, lower: “It’s just an endearment, Cash. Not a name.”

  Like he was on a switch, Bruno jumped to his feet, knocking Jenn over. He raced out of the room without a glance back, in such a hurry to get to his Beloved New Master’s side that his back end fishtailed around the corner out from beneath him.

  Jenn, on her butt on the floor, covered her face with her hands. You’re being stupid, she told herself, and over-emotional.

  “I didn’t realize when you left this morning that you’d be gone all day,” her mother said from the kitchen. “I assume those AMS people got hold of you and that’s what kept you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know, Jenn, I’ve been meaning to ask you about—Oh, honey! What are you doing down there?”

  Jenn looked up to find her mother standing over her, wiping her hands on a white kitchen towel. She looked so perfect. Straight out of Verandah magazine, with her triple-foiled auburn highlighted hair, dressed in charcoal gray slacks and a robin’s egg blue twinset. She even wore resoled Pradas on her little feet.

  Nina shouldn’t have been here. She should have been lording it over some roulette wheel at a charity event at a Raleigh country club, not slinging Heart Healthy Hash in a ramshackle cabin in Minnesota. Jenn burst into tears.

  Her mother sank down next to her, putting her arm around her. “Honey, what’s wrong?”

  Jenn said the first thing that came to mind. “Steve and Dad took a sauna!”

  Instead of the confusion this statement should have engendered, her mother’s expression melted. “Should we take a sauna?” she asked softly. “Come on, Jenny. Let’s you and me take a sauna.”

  Jenn blinked up at her mother through grateful, watery eyes. “Okay.”

  Jenn squatted disconsolately in the low, windowless sauna, giving herself an occasional cursory swat with the cedar branch her mother had provided. Steam rose in waves from the hot stones piled in a pan atop the tiny wood-burning stove tucked in the comer, its flues angled up and out. Sweat poured off her body, soaking the too small bathing suit she’d found in the back of her bedroom closet.

  The last time she’d been in this sauna had been ten years ago. She’d been here for a weekend, fighting a miserable head cold, and decided to take advantage of the head-clearing properties of a good steam. She had fired up the little stove, and had been wheezing and snuffling when the door had been thrown wide and a half dozen Fawn Creek women from her high school class had stumbled in, liquor bottles held high, laughs and burps erupting with equal velocity.

  It was Missy Erickson celebrating the dissolution of her three-year marriage to Eric Erickson. No one had bothered to inform Jenn that the Lodge was renting out the sauna and main room for parties.

  When they’d seen who was sitting naked in the sauna, the “girls” had insisted Jenn join them. Roosting on benches of various heights, her former classmates had entertained themselves by peering through the vapor, openly searching her body for some sign of artificial enhancement.

  Jenn supposed she ought to have been flattered.

  For her part, she’d been thankful for the obliterating steam. This was a northern Minnesota sauna, not a health club steam room, and the bodies the steam concealed were not the toned and tightened torsos of ladies who lunch but don’t munch. Missy tipped the scales at two hundred pounds and Missy’s friend Julie Wick, once the hottie of Fawn Creek who’d sent away for her bras from specialty stores …? Well, Jenn hadn’t been surprised by the effects of gravity on a quadruple-D boob.

  “Pour some more water on the rocks, will you, Jenn?” Her mother broke through the memory.

  Jenn reached over and scooped some snow from the bucketful they’d brought in and ladled it atop the big, smooth river stones. It vaporized with a soft hiss.

  “Why don’t you tell me about it?” her mother said. Her mom, a very modest lady, hadn’t stripped to the buff, but still wore her terry cloth robe. A turban covered her hair.

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  So much for trading mother-daughter confidences.

  “Why are you doing this, Jenn?” Nina said unexpectedly. “This AMS show. I don’t understand. And before you say anything, I’m not asking because of Dwight Davies’s reputation. I’m asking because it’s not making you happy.”

  Happy. Now there was an interesting choice of words.

  “I’m happy enough,” Jenn said, curling her lips up at the corner to prove it. “And I am going to be enormously successful when this thing finds its audience. You should see the fabulous amounts of money they’re throwing at this show, Mom. And the production values are fantastic … and …” She blinked rapidly. Fabulous, fantastic, enormous. All the superlatives in the world wouldn’t make this palatable.

  She opened her eyes wide, willing the tears not to come. She tried to fake a laugh.

  “Mom. They’re calling it Checklist for Living. Checklist for LIVING.”

  And she fell apart. Again.

  She melted like the Wicked Witch of the West, right down onto her knees, burying her face in her mother’s terry cloth–covered lap and wrapping her arms around her, crying like her mother could make it all better with a kiss.

  “I hate this town, Mom.”

  “Jenny …” Her mother’s hand, gently petting her head, checked.

  “I do!” Jenny insisted. “Everything was going fine until I came here and now it’s all falling apart. This town is like some evil place from a Stephen King novel sucking my life away.”

  “Jenny. Your employers would have changed the name of your show whether or not they’d come to Fawn Creek,” her mother said calmly.

  “I wouldn’t be too sure about that. You don’t know, Mom. You don’t know what this town is capable of doing.” Her parents never had understood what it had meant when the student council had given her name to the Buttercup judges.

  “I know they can be small-minded and oversensitive but I don’t think of the people of Fawn Creek as being Destroyers of Worlds.”

  Jenn pushed herself upright, raking the damp tendrils of hair back from her face. “Mom, remember the year we moved here? The whole thing with the Fawn Creek student council and the Buttercup judges?”

  “Jenny—”

  “I know,” Jenn broke in, embarrassed. “It’s all in the past. I let it go. I really did. I thought I did. But
then I arrived and Steve was here and he is so damned charmed by this place! He only sees the quaint and the quirky. It’s infectious, even though I know better, Mom! Before I realized it, I started seeing things through his eyes and”—she lifted her hands—”damned if things didn’t look not too bad. And Steve had me thinking that maybe over the years people had begun to … I dunno … feel I was part of the place. It’s stupid. I feel so stupid.”

  “Why?” Nina asked.

  “Because they’re doing it again, Mom. They’re fucking around with my future. I’m sorry!” she wailed. “I shouldn’t have said fuck! But fuck, Mom! Someone’s threatened to show the media that stupid picture of me and Heidi from the high school homecoming dance.”

  “Oh, Jenny. No one here would do that.”

  “They have! And I can’t let that happen. I’ve worked too hard for this.” She couldn’t believe her mother was defending the town. It surprised and confused her. Her mom felt the same way she did about Fawn Creek, didn’t she?

  “For what?” her mother asked, sounding every bit as frustrated as Jenn felt. “Jenny, if your new employers are the sort of people who would fire you because of a picture … is it worth it?”

  “Are you kidding?” Jenn asked, dumbfounded.

  “No, I’m not. Why is it worth it?”

  “To succeed? For security. Since when do you have something against security? I don’t understand you and Dad. I go out and ‘do’ what you and Dad have spent twenty years ‘planning’ and then you act disappointed in me!”

  “We’re not disappointed,” Nina murmured. Her eyes slid away from meeting Jenn’s. “Jenn,” she finally said. “I was forty-five, only five years older than you are now, when this business opportunity arose for Cash and I. It was an immense gamble. The initial investment would cost us literally all of our assets, but if it worked, we would not only be set for the rest of our lives but you, and your children, and possibly your children’s children, would never want for any material thing. We thought we’d have a lock on the future for us and our descendants. So we took that gamble and we lost.”