Hot Dish (14 page)

“I didn’t mean to bother you when you were on your phone,” Mrs. Soderberg said.

“Oh, no. Don’t apologize,” Jenn said. “Wow. You were, like, my guru.”

“Well,” the little old lady said, coy and cute as an antique Kewpie doll, “I don’t know that I know exactly what that means …”

“Can I do something for you?”

“You could if you wanted to,” Mrs. Soderberg purred.

Jenn smiled. “What’s that?”

“You can stop telling everyone those awful recipes you make on your show are the real t’ing!”

The physical jab hadn’t been nearly so powerful. Jenn’s head snapped back like she’d been struck. She’d been caught completely off guard. She should have known better. It wouldn’t matter if one day the rest of the world fell at Jenn’s feet. Even if that day ever came, Fawn Creek would still find fault with her. They always had.

“Swedish pancakes in ten minutes. Bah!
Stekare
.”

Jenn had a vague recollection that
stekare
meant something like “idiot” or maybe “imbecile.” Mrs. Soderberg’s hand rose, her index finger seeming to telescope away from her knuckles like—

“Ow!”

The troll had stabbed Jenn in the breastbone!

“Real Swedish pancakes take at least three days in a cool room to sponge proper and thin real good.”
Jab
.

“
OW
!”

“That’s what makes ‘em smooth. Not some
enfaldig
electric blender.”

Jenn thought she knew the translation for that word, too. She backed away, Mrs. Soderberg stalking her step for step, until Jenn banged into the snow-covered bus bench behind her. She rubbed her breastbone, eyeing the shrunken little troll resentfully.

“Well, that’s great if you happen to have three days to wait, but most people don’t,” Jenn said, hoping Hilda here didn’t miss the implication that people who
did
have three days to waste making perfect pancakes had a little too much time on their hands.

“If you go to the trouble of doing something—” The Finger came flying back up. Instinctively, Jenn caught the old biddy’s wrist. Ha! Foiled!

“Ya might wanta do it
right
.” The Other Finger came out of nowhere, delivering a round-house stab right to the sternum.

“
Damn
it.”

“Nasty girl,” Mrs. Soderberg muttered darkly and started to turn.

Jenn relaxed. The old termagant swiveled. Jenn jumped back, hit the bench with the back of her legs, and fell heavily, landing squarely on her ass in the center of the bench. The Finger hovered above her, poised like a rapier in the hand of a master fencer.

“I t’ought you woulda known better,” Mrs. Soderberg declared. “Always t’ought you had more sense than a lot of them silly girls but I s’pose I shoulda known you’d come to dealin’ in nonsense what with all them stunts you pulled in high school after you lost that pageant. Sour grapes was all them stunts was—that’s what I always said. But
this
is just plain wrong.”

Jenn barely heard her. Her eyes were fixed on the Finger.

“Now. You understand what I am saying about effort?”

“Yeah, yeah! I understand!” Jenn said.

“Good. There’s no shortcuts fer quality.” The troll swung around and trudged off, the tassel on the back of her ski cap swinging jauntily.

“Your yulekage wasn’t as good as Flo Larson’s,” Jenn muttered, rubbing her poor breast bone. She remembered the cell phone she still held and brought it to her ear.

“Natalie?”

“Well, that took long enough,” Nat’s voice boomed, suddenly crystal clear.

“Sorry about that,” Jenn said, watching with a mixture of unwilling admiration and unreality as Mrs. Soderberg made it to the end of the street and, of all things, clambered arthritically atop the shiny black Polaris snowmobile parked there, something big and lumpy strapped to the back in a monster burlap bag. Probably potatoes for lefse. Enough lefse to feed every damn celebrant who showed up for the sesquicentennial. With a few deft movements, Mrs. Soderberg fired the snowmobile up and glided smoothly out onto the poorly plowed road, her tassel flying.

“What?” Nat squeaked from the phone.

“I hate this town.” Jenn stood up, brushing the snow from her butt and noting the size of the ass imprint in the snow on the bench. Nope. No kringle.

“Do you ever get tired of saying that?”

Jenn pondered. “Everyone has a raison d’être, Natalie. Tess had her D’Uberville. Felix the Cat had the Master Cylinder. It is our enemies who define us.”

“Great, and you see yourself as having been defined by some poor dying little town. That’s pathetic.”

“I notice you’re not here, doling out Mother Teresa-sized piles of compassion and encouragement—to either the town or me.”

“I got stuff to do. Deals to make. You’re not my only client, you know.”

“Ha. You would have been here if my hometown had been Charlottetown. Or Santa Barbara.”

“Damn straight. But it’s not. Look, Jenn, if you really want some moral support—”

“That’s sweet. But no,” Jenn said, hurriedly cutting off Natalie’s offer. She didn’t need Nat witnessing any Mrs. Soderbergesque run-ins. Nat’s poor little ticker wouldn’t be able to handle it. You can only laugh so hard.

“I was going to suggest you get a dog,” Natalie said.

“Look. Call me if you need me. I got another call coming in, and you’re just whining, anyway.”

“Gee, thanks. Your support means so—Nat? Natalie!” The signal was gone.

Jenn clicked the phone shut, looked around, and found herself peering over the dingy café curtains that covered the lower half of Smelka’s front window into the café. The five booths lining the wall were empty; the only occupants were two men sitting at the lunch counter. From the size of the hands cupping their coffee mugs, Jenn guessed they were farmers. Friends, too, she surmised from the fact that though they sat one stool apart and faced straight ahead, their lips were moving.

Small-town men avoided making eye contact during a casual conversation. Jenn had decided long ago that there was some sort of canine component to this, a convention that held eye contact to be unnecessarily aggressive. Besides, it was better to stare at nothing when you chatted. That way no one could be accused of “looking funny” when they heard something stupid.

Jenn could almost hear the kringle calling her name, but she resisted. She considered what to do next. Experience told her it would do no good to call the Food Faire owner up and try to hurry him along in plowing the parking lot entrance clear. So she brushed the snow off the bench and sat down to wait, looking around for changes since her last visit four months ago.

Nothing much.

Fawn Creek didn’t look like an anachronism. The storefronts, at least those belonging to businesses still operating, didn’t look any more like throwbacks to dime-store days than their suburban counterparts. The gas stations sold Lotto tickets, Food Faire did a steady business in pre-washed bags of Dole salad (though heads of iceberg heads still sold best), and the lone video store boasted all the latest DVD releases.

True, a dusty Brylcreme poster still lurked in the back of Haarstad Drug’s display window, and no one in a long succession of owners of Myerson’s Department Store had ever replaced its pointy-breasted mannequins with their Jackie-O hairstyles with newer models, but these were small things. The men didn’t
all
sport Elmer Fudd hats and none of the pickup trucks in town—and there were lots of pickup trucks in town—had gun racks tacked up in the back window. Sure, the few women on the street looked like they’d sewn seams up the sides of their favorite down comforters and poked their heads through the tops, but haute couture was hard to find in any arctic climate, especially during arctic periods. Even the women lawyers in Minneapolis, the fashionable young ones who still dreamed of warm and successful futures in L.A., wore down coats when they were forced to emerge onto the streets rather than take one of the ubiquitous skyway tubes that linked the entire downtown district in a construct bizarrely reminiscent of a giant gerbil city.

Not that there were any skyways in Fawn Creek. Hell, there wasn’t even a crosswalk. Nope. Fawn Creek was an anachronism because there was no reason for it to exist.

It should have died along with the family-farm dynasties and timber barons who had once fought over it. No dairy, no farming, no lumber, no soft industries were interested in investing here, and certainly no manufacturers had considered putting in a plant. The only place doing a profitable business was Ken Holmberg’s hockey stick—making plant, and just how profitable was open to speculation. Yup, Fawn Creek was a town with a terminal case of obsolescence going through a cruelly protracted demise. Only the fact that it was the county seat, and thus law, justice, and the Medicare central, kept it from a quick and clean expiration.

That and, unaccountably, the fact that the people who’d stayed here had dug in and refused to leave.

Jenn could understand a guy wanting to stay. Especially a professional guy like Ken Holmberg. Fawn Creek was a middle-age, middle-class, professional guy’s wet dream: huntin’, fishin’, drinkin’, and if you were a “townie,” twice-a-month dinner parties where you’d surreptitiously goose your best pal’s wife before taking turns shooting squirrels from the back deck with the rest of the boys—a “sport” at which Ken held the title.

But what was here for any woman with two brain cells to rub together? Nothing. Yet Jenn couldn’t condemn every woman in Fawn Creek as an idiot. Far from it. Which left only one reason for them to stay: fear.

They were afraid to leave, frozen by their apprehension of the unknown, unexplored world beyond.

Jenn could empathize. Fear, she understood. Fear of failure, fear that somehow everything she’d worked for could be snatched away, and fear that if she didn’t make it big this time there would be no second chances. Because with every achievement, every penny accumulated, every success she notched on her belt, she came closer to the guarantee that no one could ever just walk in one day and—poof!—take what she had away.

The AMS gig was going to be that guarantee.

Okay, she might be a little ragged around the edges lately but who wouldn’t be? For twenty years she’d worked eighteen-hour days, researched everyone with whom she’d come into contact (because Jenn did not take chances when it came to knowing what to expect and from what corner it would come), smiled and smiled some more, forgone any semblance of a home life (except for that brief foray into wedded bliss: nice guy, good in bed, a risk taker), and kept her eyes on the prize.

But, Lord, didn’t she look forward to the day she could just … relax?

Not yet. She led a public life, one open to scrutiny anywhere, anytime. You wouldn’t spot Jenn Lind wearing baggy sweats and a T-shirt. Jenn Lind’s face would never be photographed naked and splotchy. No mike was going to pick up Jenn Lind muttering an unkind comment. She kept a smile like a vice cop kept his gun, unholstered and ready to be used to take down the enemy: suspicious media, an uncertain audience, a jaded critic.

And, yeah, it was tiring. Even exhausting. So what?

“Relax when you’re dead,” she muttered, stretching her legs out and idly noting the worn spot in the corduroy.

A trace of disquiet rose at the sight of this blemish on the Jenn Lind facade. Then she remembered where she was: Fawn Creek, where no one had any expectations of her, where old ladies tried poking holes in her sternum, where no one cared what she was because they
knew
who she was. No one but Jenn Hallesby. Certainly not the construct known as Jenn Lind. She could fool the rest of the world but she couldn’t fool Fawn Creek. Not a one of them. So that hole in her corduroys? It didn’t matter. Not here.

She spread her arms out along the back of the bench, tilted her head back against the brick wall …

And relaxed.

10:05 a.m.

Same place

A black Mercedes town car swerved on to Main Street, as out of place in Fawn Creek as a shark in a goldfish bowl. And like a shark, the black beauty fishtailed as it came, reeling violently from side to side as though hunting in the shoals of the snowbanks for some tasty Pontiac or Chevy to crash into.

As Jenn watched, the driver hit the brakes and the back end slammed into the snowbank on the other side of the street. It shuddered to a stop and the driver’s door swung open. A guy got out, went around to the front, and climbed awkwardly over the snow onto the sidewalk in front of the hardware store, his back to her.

He was not from around here.

First, because rather than boots he wore beat-up deck shoes, and second, because he wore nothing more up top than a gray leather jacket unzipped and open, exposing a white shirt beneath. Oddly enough, in a land where everything was white—food, skin, attitudes—the one thing no self-respecting native would be caught dead in was a white shirt. Plaid, yes. Or a nice faded chambray if you were the “sensitive” type. And soft polar fleece pullovers had gained a staunch following in recent years, especially in a color that resembled dead grass, dead marsh, or something dead floating in dead marsh or dead grass. But the most telling confirmation of this guy’s out-of-town status was that he was looking around and smiling like he’d just arrived in the Emerald City.

That would be the Olive Drab City, tin man
, Jenn thought.

He hailed the same guy who’d given her the hard look and who was now leaving the hardware store. The stranger gestured animatedly, “animated gesturing” adding to the list of “tells” proclaiming his tourist status.

Fawn Creek males always dug their hands in their back pockets when forced to have a street-side conversation, never using the front pockets
because, well, a guy didn’t wanta accidentally bump into something in his pocket that he shouldn’t. Sure enough, the Fawn Creekian rucked up his jacket and stuck his hands, palms out, in his back pockets.

The stranger should just carry a sign
, Jenn thought with a small smile.
I Am Steve Jaax and I Am Not From Here
.