Hot Dish (5 page)

Carl held up his left fist. His stubby index finger shot up. “One, you’ve hit the bottle and are on the downward slide.”

“Plausible,” Steve agreed, nodding encouragingly.

“Two”—Carl’s middle finger shot up, joining the first one—”you aren’t Steve Jaax at all. You just look like Steve Jaax—that picture in that article is pretty fuzzy—and figure since this is just a state fair you can produce any old piece of crap and we won’t know the difference. Well, let me tell you, mister, we will.”

“You take your butter seriously,” Steve said seriously.

“Damn straight,” Carl said. “Now, frankly, I don’t give a damn who you are as long as you deliver. But if those butter heads don’t look like those girls, you’re not getting a red penny and I will sue your ass—after I beat the crap out of you.”

At this, Steve felt a long dormant flicker of pride raise its teensy head and take umbrage at having his artistic integrity questioned. He started to draw himself up but then remembered he was being paid to carve
butter
. Relieved, since every fight he’d ever been in had ended with him saying, “Ow,” or worse, he relaxed back in his chair.

“Any other reasons why you think a guy like me would take a crap job like this?” he asked curiously.

“Yeah.” Carl’s hand dropped. “You’re trying to put as much distance between you and whatever’s behind you as possible. In which case, I still don’t care as long as what you’re running from doesn’t catch up with you here.”

“Impressive.”

Carl settled his fists on well-padded hips. “You want to tell me which one it is?”

Steve saw no reason not to tell him. At least, most of it. “I’m broke. My soon-to-be-ex-wife is trying to bleed me dry in the divorce. I wanted to get out of New York City. I like state fairs. The gig is short. I’m qualified. And, gee, it sounded like fun.”

At this last, unmitigated bit of bullcrap, even the stolid Carl had to smile.

“Okay,” he snorted. “Get off your ass and get some coffee in you. The first girl is gonna be in the freezer in twenty minutes waiting for you to do her.”

A girl waiting for him to do her in the freezer, Steve thought, pushing to his feet. The world was full of mystery and wonder.

12:35 p.m.

Fifteen feet away

Walter “Dunk” Dunkovich, who would someday soon share a prison cell with Steve Jaax, gave a quick once-over to the guy in the baggy chinos who the kids had been trolling for beer. He could have told those poor punks they’d been wasting their time. The guy was busted. But he had other plans for them.

He adjusted the collar of his marigold yellow Lacoste shirt—look the role, fill the dole—and hailed the trio, “Hey, guys! Come here.”

They looked around and saw a regular guy waiting for his college pals to show or maybe his girlfriend to get back from the john. They shrugged and shambled over.

“What’s up?” Ned asked suspiciously.

“Saw you with that dude over there. No joy, eh?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Wasn’t so long ago I was where you guys are now.”

“Oh, yeah?” the skinny kid asked. “You lived in a pissy little town where everyone thought they were better than you?”

“Sure.” Dunk smirked back. “Got out, though. Someday you will, too.”
Probably not
. “Tell you what. Hand over the twenty and I’ll get your beer for you.”

He held out his hand, and without a second’s hesitation, the skinny kid slapped the twenty in it, saying, “Thanks, buddy.”

“Look,” Dunk said. “I don’t want to get into any trouble, so why don’t you guys disappear? Meet me over on the other side of the sky ride in five, ‘kay?”

“Sure. Cool.”

The kids headed around the cement engine house and Dunk pocketed the money, sauntering away in the opposite direction to disappear into the crowd, thinking that not only was a sucker born every minute but sometimes they came in litters.

3:40 p.m.

The Empire Building

“I want to see the Butter Head! You said I could see the Butter Head! You
promised
!”

A bang shook the freezer as a fat little cheek smashed into the Plexiglas window like a bug hurtling into the windshield of a VW. The cheek stuck, glued there by equal parts sweat, syrup, and sunscreen. Above it, a kid’s single visible eye rotated in its socket like a gecko’s, coming to rest on the hundred-pound, head-shaped block of butter inside. A grubby hand crept up the Plexiglas, leaving a sticky smear next to other sticky smears relating the countless journeys of dozens of gooey noses and sticky fingers.

“Butter head,” the kid crooned.

Jenn, perched disconsolately atop the model’s stool inside, eyed the unappetizing specimen and shrank even lower within the embrace of her Eddie Bauer parka.

The eye found her. “Hey!
That
ain’t the queen! You ain’t the queen! You’re
no one
!”

Even this snot-faced little brat had her pegged. The tears she’d held in check for the last two hours seeped into her eyes.

“Where’s the queen? I don’t wanta see
her
! I don’t want to see you!
You’re
no queen!”

A hand appeared out of nowhere and snatched the creature away. Too late. Augmented by three beers and nose-diving blood sugar levels (the result of two bags of Tom Thumb doughnuts), what was left of Jenn’s defenses shattered. She buried her face in the puffy sleeves of her parka and sobbed.

“Hey!” said the sculptor, some young guy named Steve.

Jenn lifted her wet face. Steve had electric blue eyes, like a young Paul Newman, dark wild hair, and a really nice body, and he wasn’t so much
older than her that his interest—hitherto uncommunicated—would be icky, and she didn’t care at all. She lowered her head back down.

“Hey, princess. What’s the deal? Are you sick?” He sounded rattled.

She lifted her head again and found that he’d come around the side of the butter block and was standing over her, the grapefruit spoon he’d been using to carve in his hand. He was really good-looking in an Irish-barroom sort of way and she still didn’t care.

She didn’t care that her nose was running and her eyes were puffy and her lips were wobbly. She didn’t care that her mascara was running and the bang she’d spent ten minutes lacquering into a big, glamorous pouf was flat. She didn’t care that the cute artist thought she was a case or that the people outside the freezer looked really uncomfortable.

Because, like that gecko-eyed kid had said, she was no one.

She wasn’t the queen; she wasn’t even the “real” Miss Fawn Creek. She was a pretender. An also-ran who had elbowed her way past her far worthier competition for nothing. All she’d managed to win was the town’s resentment and her schoolmates’ enmity. Well, they’d shown her all right.

A fresh wave of sobs shook her.

“You want to quit? Come back later? I can do another girl first.”

Come back? Once she left the state fair today, she wasn’t ever coming back. “No. I’ll be fine in a minute.”

Outside the freezer, some guy shouted, “Whatda ya say to her, asshole?”

“Nothing!” Steve shouted back. Tentatively, he patted her on the shoulder. Like you would a dog of suspect temperament.

“Come on, kid, snap out of it before that guy out there decides to beat the crap out of me, will ya?”

“I’m … I’m trying!” But not too hard. It felt too good to cry. She wasn’t crying anymore just because of the gecko-eyed kid, or the Buttercup crown, or the student council, or even the last fifteen months. She was crying because she suddenly realized how alone she was. And that it wasn’t going to stop. And neither were her tears. Maybe ever.

“Crap.” Steve had squatted down in front of her and was trying to peer up at her face between her hands. “What’s there to cry about? You’re a princess, aren’t you? A pretty princess.”

She’d been wrong.
That
stopped her tears.

She spread her fingers apart and stared down at his face. He looked a little like a hound dog, but not nearly as sincere. My God, she realized in horror, he was patronizing her.

“And you have a real pretty pink dress”—he nodded—”and a crown and a—”

“
Stop that
”

He rocked back on his heels. “What? What’d I do?”

“You’re being a condescending jerk—that’s what. You’re acting like … like I’m crying because I wasn’t crowned the stupid Buttercup Queen.”

He stood up, clearly a little hurt that his stab at playing sympathetic adult to her pathetic teenager had been rebuffed. “Why are you crying then?”

“Because I wasn’t crowned the stupid Buttercup Queen!” She burst into a fresh wave of tears.

He threw up his hands in exasperation.

“But it’s not that simple!”

He crossed his arms over his chest. Her lower lip trembled.

He sighed, yanked an unused pallet over toward her, and sat down at her feet.

“Okay, kid,” he said, “why don’t you just settle down and tell me about it?”

“You don’t really want to hear,” she said. But she wanted to tell him.

He’d lost that phony, wide-eyed sincerity. He didn’t look especially sympathetic but he did look interested. “Yeah, I do. Let’s face it. I can’t carve you if your face is buried in your sleeve, so out with it. What’s with the waterworks?”

Outside the refrigerated unit, the spectators had grown bored and drifted away. Jaax didn’t seem to notice or, if he did, to care. He really was listening to her.

“It’s not like it’s a big tragedy or anything.”
Except to me
. “It’s just … well, I sort of thought maybe … no—” She broke off angrily. “I was supposed to be the Buttercup Queen. The emcee guy had actually said ‘Miss Fa’ and there’s no other princess from any place that begins with an ‘f,’ but at the last second, they stopped him because someone showed up with a petition the whole freaking Fawn Creek student council signed that said I’d lied on my application and so I couldn’t be Queen Buttercup. They disqualified me right on the spot.”

Steve looked impressed. “Wow. That’s cold. But, man, if you were going to lie on your application, you had to know there were risks.”

“No!” she protested. “I don’t
take
risks. I don’t gamble.
Ever
. I thought I was telling the truth. I didn’t understand. It wasn’t my fault.”

She knew how she sounded and sure enough the interest had faded from Steve’s bright blue eyes.

“Okay,” he said. “They’re assholes and you were screwed. At least you can sleep the sleep of the pure and virtuous while they will be haunted by … Hold the phone. Are you blushing? You are blushing. Why? You can sleep the sleep of the pure and virtuous, can’t you?”

She mumbled.

He stood up. “Nah-uh. You did something. What? Come on, kid, you can tell me. I am the champion of Been There, Done That, Wish I Hadn’t.”

“It’s stupid.”

“It usually is,” he said. “Unburden yourself. You’ll feel better.”

She looked into his somber, earnest, homely-handsome face and … she did.

She told him about her parents losing everything on a gamble, being uprooted and moving from urban splendor to rural insignificance, her loneliness, her parents’ weird complaisance and how she was sure it was simply a brave front, her subsequent determination not to add to their financial burden, the brainstorm that had visited her when she’d heard about this Buttercup scholarship, how she’d worked her way up through the regional pageant qualifiers to the final round and the final chapter today, what Mrs. Soderberg had said about why the rest of the students hated her (okay, Mrs. Soderberg hadn’t used the word “hate” but it had been implied), and her betrayal by Fawn Creek High.

She told him everything.

Except about Tess. Because that was private. Too private to tell strangers.

He sat hunkered on the pallet at her feet the whole time, his gaze never leaving her face. No one had ever listened to her like that before.

When she ran out of steam and trailed off, he stood up and slapped at his pant legs.

“I better get to work,” he said.

She regarded him blankly. “That’s it? I spill my guts and all you have to say is that you have to ‘get to work?”’

He shrugged. “You’ve stopped crying and I see some really promising directions I could go with your face and—”

“You haven’t been listening at all, have you?” she demanded, shocked and hurt. “You’ve just been studying my face.”

“No!” he denied. “Well, yes. I’ve been studying your face, too. I can’t help it. It’s just reflex, like a teenage boy with a
Penthouse
gets—” He broke off as he realized what he’d been about to say. “It’s involuntary.”

She gave him an unfriendly, unblinking stare.

“Look,” he said, angling back around to the front of the butter head, “I’m just gonna go around here and listen while I work. I’m totally on
autopilot. Now you were saying how you really felt you deserved this thing.” He smiled. “Why?”

It was an obvious sop but she didn’t care. His had been the most sympathetic ear she’d had in fifteen months. And he could have told her to either shut up or get lost but he hadn’t.

“Yeah. Well,” she said, “the thing is. I would have made a kick-ass Butter Queen. I knew my shit, Steve. I mean, I
knew
my shit.”

She was surprised to hear herself using language like this, especially in front of a stranger. “All that Suzie Home-maker stuff they want the Butter Queen to be able to do? I can do it!
All
of it. I’ve won five ribbons here in the junior baking and canning division. Two firsts, a second, and two thirds.

“Now that’s great if the Pillsbury Doughboy ever wants to get cozy,” she continued, “and since I am doomed—and I do not think that I overstate my case here, Steve. I mean
doomed
—to live in Fawn Creek for another three hundred and sixty-five days, he’s probably as close as I’ll get to a guy without back hair. You know what I mean?”

She leaned forward. “Lumberjacks. Or Sons of Lumberjacks.”

She expelled a heavy sigh, her gaze falling to the freezer floor and the little curls of yellow butter scattered over it.

“So what are you going to do next?”