Hot Dish (45 page)

She swept the cards from the box and shoved her kings deep inside. “Bite me, sugar puss,” she said succinctly.

Her insides were trembling, and she felt light-headed, almost giddy. Maybe regret would set in later but right now she felt amazing. Relieved. Free.

She’d done it. There was no way she could buy the butter head now. Dunkovich would in all likelihood sell the photo to some tabloid rag, Dwight Davies would fire her as well as try to blacklist her, and she was fairly certain she’d be replaced by a younger woman on
Good Neighbors
. On the other hand, the view in her rearview mirror had never looked better, and though she couldn’t quite make out every turn and curve in the road ahead, she had no doubt it was going to be an interesting route.

With a luxurious sigh of relief, she casually took the wig off her head and tossed it on to the poker table, followed close behind by her dark glasses. The Poker Channel cameraman swung toward her. She reached the rope separating her from Heidi and leaned over it, capturing her friend’s face between her palms and giving her a big, fat kiss on the mouth.

“Thanks, Heidi,” she said and, hiking up her pink satin skirt, stepped over the rope.

She was halfway to the bar when she heard someone hail her. “Jenny Hallesby.”

She stopped and turned to find Karin Ekkelstahl of all people bearing down on her, a grim, determined look on a face made for grim, determined looks. She was wearing a nurse’s uniform.

“Yeah?” Jenn said, still walking as Karin fell into step beside her.

“I had to come by and tell you something.”

“So tell me”

“I’m Mr. Dunkovich’s nurse. And I told him about you and Heidi kissing at homecoming. I swear I didn’t think it would do any harm but he was watching you on the television and he was all gaga over you and he’d been sort of flirting with me and”—her lips pressed together so tightly they almost disappeared—“well, you took the Fawn Creek crown from me.”

“And you didn’t want me taking him,” Jenn said.

“Yup. But turns out he’s not worth having,” Karin said roughly. “I heard him blackmailing you. That’s …
wrong
.”

And as they all knew, Karin Ekkelstahl was not one to tolerate “wrong.”

“And the picture?”

“He lied. There is no picture.”

Jenn waited for the outrage to hit, the realization that all this had been for nothing and that she’d jettisoned a career for no reason at all. But there had been a reason, and it didn’t have anything to do with that stupid butter head.

She patted a miserable, defiant, and guilty Karin on the arm. “Ah, hon. Don’t knock yourself out over it,” she said and left her behind.

Steve wasn’t in the bar. He was in her dad’s truck waiting right outside the front of the casino, listening to the radio.

She scooted in and he grinned at her. Prince, aka Bruno, lumbered up off the floor and popped onto the bench seat between them. Jenny draped an arm over his huge neck and gave him a hug.

“Are you a hero?” Steve asked casually.

“Yup.”

“No one will ever know.”

“Nope.”

His grin got wider. “Seems like you’re not the only hero in Fawn Creek. I just heard on the local radio station that some snowplow driver risked his life to dive in after some idiot snowmobiler whose machine broke through the Lake. Saved the guy’s life.”

“Screw it up or save it. That’s the Fawn Creek way,” Jenn said as Steve turned out onto the road, the end of the truck nearly slipping into the ditch as they fishtailed. She would probably need to make him pull over
and take over the driving duties in a short while, but he was so obviously having fun and no one else was on the road.

“So,” she said, trying to find the right tone, “when are you going to be moving here? Because I think I ought to notify the state patrol, since I’ve become so civic minded and all.”

“Moving here
part-time
,” he said. “Not full-time. I couldn’t live in a place like this full-time. Neither could you. I mean, we’d go nuts.” He glanced over at her, a little too casually, to see how she reacted to his use of the plural pronoun.

We
. She leaned her head against the seat. She liked it. She might even love it. “You’re probably right. Where are we going now?”

“Anywhere you want.”

“What do you say we just head off for a while and see where the road takes us?”

“Good idea.” Steve smiled at the road ahead.

“And later,” she said, feeling the contentment spreading through her, “later, we’ll go home.”

Dear Reader,

Yes, there are busts made out of butter at the Minnesota State Fair, but not of the fictional “Buttercup finalists” put on by the equally fictitious Minnesota Dairy Federation. Instead, the butter sculptures are of the young women vying for the title “Princess Kay of the Milky Way,” a competition with a long tradition sponsored by the Midwest Dairy Association. No little girl who’s ever visited the “Great Minnesota Get-Together” ever passes up the opportunity to see one of the princesses sitting in her refrigerated kiosk being sculpted.

Likewise, the northern part of my state has many small towns struggling to find their place in the modern economic climate. Many, unhappily, have already faded into history, while others have reinvented themselves and flourished. There is no Fawn Creek and no Oxlip County, but they have their progenitors in the small towns where I spent long, lazy summer months “up at the cabin” and later those where I lived as an adult. Like my heroine, Jenn Hallesby, my fondness for small towns is based on late-blooming appreciation, respect, a jaundiced eye, and a wry smile.

My best,

Connie Brockway