Hot Dish (17 page)

But then she looked at his face and realized that self-delusion was one character flaw he didn’t own. He hadn’t been attracted to her like that.

“Anyway, I started to get into it, really into it,” he said, “for the first time in a couple years. I was trying to figure out some way to visually articulate who you were at that second, that instant, and there was the butter and the light coming in on it and I saw it. Not only your face but a whole body of work, form borrowed from dusk, movement revealed through a quixotic combination of light absorbed and refracted.”

His voice had gone deep and vibrant and Jenn remembered what Bob Reynolds had said about Jaax being damn near poetic when it came to his art. Bob was right. Little goose bumps were lifting on her skin—

“So,” he said, abruptly coming out of tortured artist mode and slapping his thigh, “you say you don’t love the town. How come?”

The abrupt transition made her head spin.

“It seems like a real nice town,” he said. “The people have been friendly and accommodating. Everyone has a smile. So what’s your problem?”

Problem? She
had a problem? Fine, she’d lay it out straight. “It’s an incestuous little burg, like a lot of little isolated towns. Gossipy, with a chip as big as Lake Superior on its collective shoulder, smug, morally superior, adulterous….”

She glanced over at him. He was frowning at her in perplexity.

“I hate to point this out, but for someone who’s supposed to be the Next Big Thing in Charming Lifestyle Hostesses, you’re kinda light on the ‘charm,’ aren’t you?” he asked.

“I’m a lot more charming when I’m not up here. This town tends to bring out the worst in me,” she said, perversely pleased he’d called her the Next Big Thing. If Steve Jaax had heard of her, her little star must really be on the rise. “Besides, you asked. I’m just telling you the truth. Small towns pretty much suck.”

“So why do you hate this town?”

He still wasn’t listening. She’d just explained. And she didn’t
hate
Fawn Creek…. Oh, sure, she said as much to Nat all the time but that was just reflex. Her feelings toward Fawn Creek were perhaps a little bitter from the experience of having lived here, but for the most part impartial and objective. Fawn Creek had its good points, foremost being they understood a good thing when they had it, and second most, they knew when to be uncommunicative. Of course, that was as much a matter of genetics as discretion….

“It’s not like I have a personal relationship with this town, Steve. I never did. Another point you might not recall from the conversation in the freezer is that I only lived here a couple years. As soon as I could, I bolted. But in the public’s mind, Fawn Creek is my hometown, and since that fits in a lot better with my image as Martha of the Midwest and it lends Fawn Creek a little reflected glory, we both go with it. But we both know the truth.”

“And that is?” he asked curiously. Jenn had to admit, Steve knew how to listen.

“I’m not one of them.”

“So if you’re not one of them and they don’t think of you as one of them, why are you their grand marshal?”

“You’re being coy again.”

“No,” he denied. “I’m not.”

“Okay. For their part, whether or not I’m a native daughter, I draw crowds. So they’re willing to go along with the charade, hoping that the crowds include some entrepreneur looking to invest in a dying town a hundred miles from nowhere.

“For my part, it’s called making my new bosses happy. I have a new show coming out on a new network and the people that decide things there decided this would be good for my image.

“You must’ve heard of Dwight Davies and his new cable network, American Media Services? That’s who I work for and, yeah, I know,” she
said, catching his eye as they came up to the stop sign that marked the literal edge of town. “He’s not the most tolerant man in the world but—”

“I’d quit,” Steve said. “I wouldn’t work for him. A few years ago, he fired an entire department in a company he purchased because the women had posed nude for a calendar, even though the proceeds were donated to breast cancer research.”

She’d been about to pull away from the stop sign but instead she rotated in her seat. “That’s not true.”

“Yes, it is.”

“How do you know?”

“I hear things. I’m connected.” He pointed out the front of the car. “Shouldn’t we get going? I mean we’re just stopped here.”

“So what? It’s not like we’re causing a traffic jam. And if Davies had done that, he’d be sued a thousand times over,” she protested.

“He’s an asshole, not an idiot. There’s ways around these things,” he said. “Davies is the worst kind of bigot, the kind that masks his bigotry under a mantle of concern. He’s the kind who convinces people that it’s their duty not to tolerate the things he dislikes for the good of their children, their neighborhood, their community, or their country.”

He was right. Davies was exactly that sort of bigot but she couldn’t see him firing a bunch of women who’d flashed their breasts in the name of cancer research. “Well, I don’t believe it. About the calendar,” she said, aware she sounded touchy.

“No one looks at the devil while they’re sitting at his dining table.” He didn’t so much say this as intone it.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I made it up. Just now. Good, huh?”

A stripped-down tan Dodge pickup traveling toward them from the opposite direction slowed as it passed. The middle-aged woman behind the wheel cranked down her window. “Okay, then?” she called out.

It was Leona Unger. Jenn opened her own window and the cold air rushed in. “Fine, Mrs. Unger, thanks.”

“That Jenny Hallesby? Up early, eh? Say hi to your folks for—say.” Leona Unger’s head, well insulated by what Jenn suspected was one of her son’s fur caps, poked out the window. “Is that Steve Jaax there next to you? Well! This is a pleasure, Mr. Jaax. A real pleasure.”

Steve leaned forward over Jenn’s lap, ducking his head down so he could see Mrs. Unger. “Thank you. Likewise, Miss—”

“Leona Unger.” She was blushing like a schoolgirl and Steve had all but crawled over Jenn in order to suck up a little more adoration.

Jenn stuck an elbow in his chest. “Down, boy.”

“I saw your picture in the
Crier
,” Leona was saying. “So I went online and Googled your work. It was somet’ink. I t’ink I like
Lantern Dance
best, though.”

“Really?” Steve asked, settling in to the conversation like it was going to last. It wasn’t. “Why is that?”

Leona’s face screwed up in thought. Fawn Creekians did not give social answers when questioned. “Way it moves and expands out, like an osprey opening its wings—sorta disturbing you, ya know?” He nodded. “And the way you used—oops.”

Thank God, another car had shown up and slid to a halt behind Mrs. Unger. In the summer, Mrs. Unger would have waved the Ford around her and no one would have thought twice about it. But the banks of snow pushed up by the plow made it impossible to move around her. “Best go,” Mrs. Unger said. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Jaax. Real pleasure. We don’t get celebrities up here.”

Steve met Jenn’s cold look and gingerly eased back into his own seat as Leona took off. “I’m sure she meant ‘artists.”’

“No, she didn’t.”

“You married?” His question came out of nowhere.

“Nope.”

“Ever been?”

“Once.” She provided the classic answers to the questions no one was ever rude enough to ask. “It didn’t last too long. We were young, and it didn’t take.”

“Bull,” Steve announced calmly. “Someone screwed it up. Whose fault was it?”

“No one’s.”

“Bull.”

She glanced at him. He looked perfectly composed, absolutely confident. “There has to be a fault?”

“Always,” he said. “For example, I’ve been married three times. The last two times the breakups were completely my fault.”

“That’s a lot of divorces, Steve. You don’t look too torn up about them.” But then, she hadn’t been torn up either. Maybe she and Steve shared a similar inability for lasting romantic love. Not that her love life had ever been all that romantic. Sex had been nice, though.

She missed sex.

She’d decided soon after her divorce that serious romantic entanglements only complicated her ability to focus on her goals, and hookups, as well as being personally unappealing, could be anathema for a career like hers, one based on a wholesome image.

Oh, she dated. Once or twice per guy but nothing serious. Not “sex serious.” Consequently, her sex life had never been what you’d call “great,” more like “barely adequate.” Then, when Dwight Davies’s people had started looking at her a few years ago, she’d cut herself off completely.

Still, she really did miss sex, even though she knew it wasn’t safe in more ways than she could count.

“I’m not,” Steve was saying. “If I was going to be torn up about it, I wouldn’t have screwed it up, would I?”

“Is everything simple in your world?” That would be nice.

“Things are simple in everyone’s world, Jenn. People complicate them to make themselves feel better. I was a dick. My wives divorced me. They were right to divorce me.
I
would have divorced me.”

“Did you know you were going to be a dick when you got married?” she asked, curious in spite of herself.

“No!” He looked offended.

“But you guessed,” she said slyly.

“Maybe.”

“So why did you get married?”

“I wanted kids. A home.” His eyes were straight ahead and his bloodhoundy face looked melancholy but with a familiar sadness, like he’d gotten used to it a long time ago. Like a chronic cough or arthritis.

“Do you have any kids?” she asked gently.

“No.” He smiled without looking at her, eyes straight ahead. “I said I wanted a home with kids, not to make a bunch of broken homes with kids. How ‘bout you? Any little princesses around?”

“No.”

“Never found Mr. Right Genes?”

“Never found the time. Never even had the time to think about when would be a good time.” Then she added softly, “Now I suppose the time’s passed.”

How could that have happened? How could she be forty and still feel like she was just starting out, that there was so much more to be done, accomplished, tied up, before she turned her attention to other matters?

She couldn’t remember a time she hadn’t put things on the back burner and focused on the future and making sure it was secure before she started populating it with things like a dog and a garden and writing that book on Scandinavian cookery and learning how to relax. And thinking about kids.

“You could still get knocked up.”

“Not me. I’m too careful.” And too celibate. Not that she was going to tell him that. This little Subaru Confession episode was only going so far. “You could knock someone up,” she suggested.

“Not me. I’m too careful, too.”

It was a glib answer and she shot him a quick glance. Could he be celibate, too? Nah. He was Steve Jaax, fer chrissakes. The sperm banks would probably pay him tons for the results of ten minutes with a
Maxim
magazine.

11:15 a.m.

County Road 73

They drove in companionable silence, Steve distracting himself from worrying about his butter head by peering out of the window at the view. He’d considered asking Jenn for a little more reassurance—she had a calm, dispassionate way of stating things that made them seem not only probable but inevitable—but the fact that she’d corrected his unintended, but in no way untrue, comment about the sculpture being “his” made him think this might not be wise.

He didn’t want to set off any warning bells.

So, instead, he focused on the scenery. It was great. Who would have guessed white could present so many aspects, so many colors and forms and dimension? Hard, knife sharp, and crystalline, bruised and sullen, pebbled and crunchy, feather soft and ethereal. Salt shakered, cloud whipped, clotted and stretched, thin and dense. And that was just the snow!

His breath had fogged up the window and he scrubbed it away with his sleeve. He wasn’t going to miss any of it. It gave him ideas. And ideas, as any artist pushing fifty will tell you, are nothing to sneeze at.

At least, he hoped that was what they’d say.

A dearth of ideas wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you chatted about over a bottle of beer. It might lead to unpleasant speculation about, say, burnout. And over-the-hillness. And ends of roads.

He snapped his thoughts back from their current direction and focused on the trip rather than the destination. He was an expert at that.

The road carved through patches of trees and open ground, following a gentle kiddies-ride roller-coaster path until they turned into some kind of pine forest. Whatever type of pine tree they were Steve wanted one. Or at least to find where they might grow in New York.

They stood crowded together, dark empresses frozen by the Medusa face of the Northern Lights, their branches entangled, their heads caught
close together in whispers overhead, a carpet of darkness at their feet, mauve-skinned with beryl needles. God, that was poetic.

He should tell Jenn.

He looked over at her. He thought maybe she was humming. Her head was subtly, but definitely, moving from side to side in time to some inner tune. He wondered what sort of music she listened to. She looked too perfect to like flamenco guitar—his current favorite music. Flamenco lovers were inevitably messy people and there wasn’t a hair out of place on that smoothly groomed head.

She had on some sort of faux-fur coat, from under which peeked the hems of light brown corduroys and from beneath these the pointy tips of black Italian cowboy boots. Oversized lilac-framed sunglasses covered her eyes and she’d covered her honey-colored hair with a sable-colored silk scarf, à la Audrey Hepburn. Her skin was smooth and ivory like thick vellum. She looked expensive, sexy, and out of place. But she also looked warm. In a bunch of ways. He liked her. And he could tell that she liked him, too.

But she didn’t want anything from him and she didn’t think he wanted anything from her, either. Which was not his usual experience. Women generally thought he was sort of a lech.