Gina looked over at Tate. “Psst. Hey,” she whispered.
Tate, who was lolling around beside his oven, looking bored out of his mind, glanced over.
“Hey,” he whispered back.
“Is your pie done?”
“Nope.” He didn’t look concerned. Come to think of it, he barely looked conscious.
“Did you set the oven at 375?”
“Yup.”
“I think something’s wrong,” Gina said. “We both put the pies in at approximately the same time. They should have been done ten minutes ago. But my crust still looks raw.”
He bent down, opened his oven door, and surveyed its contents.
“Ditto,” he said.
The crew had taken a break, and Barry and Zeke were sitting at the production table, heads bent together.
“Barry,” Gina called.
He looked up. “Yes, cookie? Those pies smell incredible.”
“They’re nowhere near done,” Gina said frantically. “I think something’s wrong with my oven.”
“Yeah, me too,” Tate called.
“Hmm.” Barry strolled over, opened the door to Gina’s oven and looked inside. “Yep. I think you could be right.”
“Well, what do we do? We only have thirty minutes left on the time clock. Can you bring somebody in to fix the ovens? Or reset the clocks?”
“Don’t think so,” Barry said affably. “I guess you’ll just have to figure out something else. We’re bringing the judges back in thirty, and then we wrap it all up.”
“That’s not fair,” Gina cried, running her hand through her already sweat-dampened hair. “You can’t expect us to be able to bake with an oven that’s messed up.”
“Sorry,” Barry said with a shrug. “Improvise.”
“Schcrew that,” Tate said, slurring the words. “Hey. You guys did this on purpose. You knew the ovens were schcrewed up. I bet you did it yourselves.”
Now Zeke hurried onto the set. “Is there a problem?”
“They’ve discovered that the ovens aren’t properly calibrated. And I’ve explained that they have”—Adelman glanced over at the clock—“twenty-six minutes to figure it out.” He nodded at both contestants and went back to the control table.
“Hey!” Gina said angrily. “Tate’s right. You guys did this to us deliberately.”
“One of the qualities we’re looking for in our Food Fight winner is the ability to think on his or her feet,” Zeke said. “Consider it part two of your challenge.”
“My ass!” Gina said angrily. She stomped back to her kitchen and turned the oven’s heat up to 425 degrees. Then she rolled up a strip of aluminum foil, fashioned a protective collar for the edge of her neatly crimped crust, and put the pie back in the oven. She had no idea if it would keep the crust from browning too much—or what the higher heat would do to her filling—but she didn’t know how else to salvage the situation.
In the meantime, she went to the refrigerator and found a carton of whipping cream. She dumped the cream into a bowl and attacked it with the handheld electric mixer she found in a drawer of her kitchen, adding a teaspoon of sugar and a tablespoon of the bourbon to the cream. When she was satisfied with the whipped cream’s consistency, she slid the bowl into the refrigerator.
Now there was nothing left to do but wait. She paced back and forth in the kitchen, coming face-to-face with Tate more than once.
He seemed completely unfazed by any of the ongoing drama. He puttered around his kitchen, straightening things up, washing the dishes he’d used, wiping down the counter, literally whistling while he worked. Once, she thought she saw him take a giant gulp from the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. She tried not to look shocked. What was he thinking?
After ten minutes, she could bear it no longer. She took the pie out of the oven. The higher heat seemed to have helped. The filling seemed set, and the crust, once she’d removed the protective foil, seemed to have browned up a little too. Not perfect, by a long shot, but better. She had only ten minutes left. She cut the pie into slices, slid the slices onto individual plates, and set them in the freezer to allow them to cool quicker.
Five minutes later, she removed the slices and proceeded to chop each slice into healthy chunks. Then she took the pecan pie chunks and dumped them into tall-stemmed parfait glasses that were probably just meant to be pretty set dressing. She was dropping generous dollops of the sweetened bourbon whipped cream into the last of the glasses when the buzzer went off.
“Time’s up!” Barry announced, stepping onto the set. “Everybody step away from the ovens!”
Chapter 65
Val rushed onto the set and looked down at the charred pie on Tate’s countertop.
She grabbed her star’s wrists. “What the hell happened?” She pushed at the pie with her fingertip. “What the hell do you call this?”
Tate’s grin was wobbly. “It’s an old Cajun specialty. Blackened pecan pie.”
“That’s all you have to say for yourself?” She leaned forward and sniffed his breath, then fanned the fumes away from her face. “I don’t believe it. You’re plotzed. Totally, stinking drunk.”
“I prefer to think of my current condition as pleasantly buzzed.” Tate got a butcher knife and began hacking at the pie, haphazardly slapping the misshapen pieces on the plates he’d set out on the counter.
“You can’t serve this crap to the judges,” Val said. “They’ll laugh us right off the set. Off the show, for damned sure.”
Ignoring her, he opened the refrigerator, took out a bottle, and painstakingly placed a maraschino cherry on the top of each hunk of pie.
“Plate appeal is nearly as important as palate appeal,” he said, flourishing the finished product.
“All right, people,” Zeke said, joining them in the kitchen. “Five minutes. I’ve got the judges coming over right now.”
He looked down at the plate Tate held out and blinked. “Are you serious?”
“Never more serious in my life,” Tate said. He gestured toward the pan. “There’s plenty more. Would you like a taste?”
Zeke sighed. “You’re not making this easy for me, Tate. What am I supposed to tell Barry? And the judges?”
“Tell them my oven was broken,” Tate said. “Tell them you people deliberately sabotaged our equipment. Tell them Tate Moody does not fuckin’ appreciate bein’ fucked with, you moron!”
Zeke shook his head and held his hand out to Val. “I’m sorry, Valerie. You know I have nothing but respect for you and your abilities.” He gave Tate a pitying glance. “I respect him too. Most of the time.”
Val took Zeke’s hand in both of hers. “Thanks, Zeke. I appreciate that. And the chance to compete. I’m just sorry, well, you know. For all of it.”
Wow!” Barry said, glancing down at the judge’s tally sheets. “Talk about a drama-packed evening. After two riveting rounds of competition, everything came down to one night—one show—one dish. Our contestants were asked to prepare a favorite southern dish—bourbon pecan pie. They were given the recipe, and all the ingredients necessary, and a two-hour time limit.”
He leaned in nearer to the camera, as though to impart a closely guarded family secret.
“But what our contestants weren’t given,” he said, in a hushed tone, “was the information that they would be baking their pie in ovens whose thermostats had been turned down by fifty degrees!”
Tate glanced over at Gina, who stood motionless in her kitchen, her hands tightly folded on the countertop. “Told ya,” he said.
Gina forced herself to look pleasant when she felt murderous.
“We wanted to see how our chefs would react to this kind of real-world challenge—how they would change or adapt their game plan,” Barry confided. “And as you saw, our contestants had two very different responses. Regina Foxton’s bourbon pecan pie parfait was an innovative way to deal with a not-quite-set pie by first chilling it, then chopping it up and layering it with sweetened whipped cream for a pecan pie par
fait. Her rival, Tate Moody, was not quite as successful. The judges just didn’t love his Cajun blackened pecan pie. And so…”
The cameras cut to Gina, beaming.
And to Tate, who had placed Moonpie on his kitchen counter and was busily feeding him the remnants of the pecan pie. Not an astute judge of southern cooking, the dog was happily lapping it up.
And then the camera came back to Barry, his arm around Gina’s shoulder.
“Regina Foxton—you’re our very first Food Fight winner, and our newest Cooking Channel network star!”
While the Food Fight theme music swelled, the judges swept onto the set, to shake hands and congratulate Gina. Toni Bailey and Beau Stapleton even offered polite, if somewhat chilly greetings to Tate.
“Dude,” Beau Stapleton said, slapping Tate on the back. “I don’t get it. You had her beat, hands down. I watched your pie crust technique. It was flawless. And not everybody can make a pie crust. What happened up here tonight?”
“Dunno,” Tate said, leaning in close enough to allow Beau to smell the bourbon fumes.
“I do,” Stapleton said, stepping backward.
“Hey, Tate.” D’John brandished his ever-present video camera. “I’m doing interviews for my documentary on the making of Food Fight. How would you sum up your experience here on Eutaw Island? Was it everything you thought it would be? What was it like to be stranded on an island with Gina Foxton?”
“S’great,” Tate said boozily. “All of it was just great.”
An hour later, with the wrap party still going, Val finally managed to slip away. She knocked on Tate’s door, but wasn’t surprised when he didn’t answer, or to find the door unlocked and the room empty, except for his neatly packed duffel bag.
Commandeering a golf cart, she drove herself down the oyster-shell path to the ferry dock. Silhouetted in the light at the end of the dock, Tate was sitting on the edge, his bare feet dangling in the water. He had an arm around Moonpie, who seemed captivated by something in the water below.
He must have heard her footsteps approaching, but he didn’t turn around.
She sat down beside him and lit a cigarette.
“Nice night,” he said.
“If you happen to like temperatures in the nineties and one hundred percent humidity,” she said.
“I thought you’d still be at the party.”
“It’s winding down. Everybody still has to pack yet. Anyway, I wasn’t really in the mood to celebrate.”
“Yeah.” He sighed deeply, and finally turned to look at her. “Look, Val. About what happened tonight…”
She held up a hand to stop him. “I just want to know one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Was she worth it?”
“Yeah,” he said. “She’s worth all of it. And more.”
Chapter 66
The sound of a police siren shattered the thick morning air. She’d been in a deep sleep, so deep that awakening felt like trying to swim to the surface of a lake with her ankles chained to a pair of bowling balls. Gina threw off the covers and looked wildly around the room, uncertain of her whereabouts.
Sunshine streamed through a window covered with sheer organza curtains. A fan hummed from the top of a table, and from somewhere outside, birds called. The siren kept going. It seemed to be getting louder. Her sleep-smeared eyes focused on the nightstand by the bed. Lisa’s cell phone vibrated against the wooden tabletop. Wanting only to stop the siren, she picked up the phone and instantly regretted it.
“Good morning, my television star!” Birdelle’s voice trilled.
“Mama?”
“Well, who else? I guess you’ve been too busy with all the media interviews and that type of thing to think of calling anybody as unimportant as your mama and daddy.”
“Huh? Mama, I just woke up. I haven’t talked to anybody.”
“Well, I have,” Birdelle announced. “I’ve talked to the Jesup Press-Sentinel, the Jacksonville Times-Union, the Savannah Morning News, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, WGUP, and I don’t even know who all else, just since six this morning.”
“About what?” Gina yawned and looked at the clock on her nightstand. It was eight o’clock.
“You, of course! About how I taught you to cook, and how you were always such a bright, adorable little girl. I’m waiting for one of those courier service folks right now, to come pick up the pictures.”
“Pictures of what?”
“Why, you, silly,” Birdelle said. “I’m giving them copies of you with your 4-H project when you were eight, and then, of course, that precious picture of you with your trophy and tiara when you were runner-up Miss Teen Vidalia Onion—”
“Oh, Mama, not the Vidalia Onion picture! I look like a total rube in that homemade dress and that bad perm—”
“You were just as lovely as you could be,” Birdelle said serenely. “Your daddy still carries a copy of that picture around in his billfold.”
She looked at the clock again. Eight o’clock! The ferry was leaving in exactly an hour—and she still had to shower and dress and pack.
“Mama, I can’t talk right now,” Gina said. “I’ve got a million things to do before the ferry leaves.”
“Not even famous for twelve hours, and already she’s too busy to speak to her loved ones,” Birdelle said mournfully. “All right. Put your sister on.”
“Sister?”
For the first time it registered in her foggy brain that she was alone in the room. Lisa’s bed was still made up. Gina checked the bathroom. Empty. And there was no telltale pile of her sister’s clothes on the floor to indicate that she had ever been there.
“Put Lisa on the phone,” Birdelle repeated.
“Uh, Lisa’s in the shower right now,” Gina fibbed. “But I’ll have her call you as soon as she can.” And before her mother could protest, Gina disconnected. And then she turned the phone off.
Where on earth was Lisa? Barry had been adamant that the ferry would leave the dock at nine o’clock sharp. And since she and Lisa had to drive to Savannah to catch a noon flight back to Atlanta, they were on an uncomfortably tight schedule.
She tried to think back. Last night’s party had gotten kind of wild. Her last memory, before begging off to go to bed, was seeing D’John trying to teach Zeke and Barry Adelman how to do the Electric Slide. The memory of the black-clad New Yorkers attempting to boogie-oogie-oogie with a bald black man in a white caftan was surreal.
In fact, the whole day seemed surreal.
As she stood under the shower, she replayed the taping in her mind. Even with the disaster with the oven, everything had gone so much better than she could ever have anticipated. The pecan pie parfaits had been a huge hit. Everybody had seemed genuinely glad that she’d won the Food Fight.
The only thing that could have made her victory sweeter was sharing it with the one man she couldn’t seem to please.
Tate. She’d looked all over for him, but he’d disappeared as soon as the taping was over. Even Val said she didn’t know where he’d gone. Obviously, he’d slunk off to lick his wounds by himself. That hurt. If he truly cared for her, couldn’t he have been happy for her?
As she rinsed the conditioner out of her hair, she slung her head from side to side, willing him out of her mind—and heart—for good.
She was toweling off when she heard the bedroom door open and close. “Lisa?” she called anxiously.
“Yeah?”
“Where have you been? We have to be down at the ferry in thirty minutes.” Gina wrapped a towel around her chest and stepped into the room, ready to give her truant sister a piece of her mind.
Lisa sat on her bed, holding out a mug of coffee. “I went downstairs to get you a cup of coffee. Is that okay?”
“Mama called,” Gina said. “She was asking about you, and naturally, I couldn’t tell her you never came home last night.”
“Yes, I did,” Lisa said. “I got in right after midnight. You were snoring your head off. St
ill snoring when I got up at seven. I showered, dressed, packed, and you never moved a muscle. Just how much of that Eutaw Yeehaw punch did you drink last night?”
“None,” Gina said. “Wait. Seriously? You’re packed and ready to go?”
“Yup,” Lisa said. “You’re packed too, except for your overnight bag. Everything’s been taken down to the dock. You’ll just have time to grab some breakfast if you’ll hurry up. Iris and Inez are both downstairs. They want to congratulate you and tell you good-bye.”
People!” Zeke stood in the lobby of the lodge, checking off items on his clipboard, as the crew members darted in and out with luggage and equipment. “We need everybody out on the porch, loading up in the golf carts immediately.”
“Hey, you,” Lisa said, kissing him lightly on the cheek. “Just let Gina grab a bite, all right?”
“All right,” Zeke said, blushing. “But we really have to hurry, okay?”
Lisa led Gina into the dining room, where a plate of ham biscuits was set out on the sideboard alongside glass carafes of juice and coffee. She was helping herself to a biscuit when the two old ladies came bustling out of the kitchen.
“There she is!” Inez said, beaming wildly, and digging her elbow in her twin’s side. “I done tol’ my sister the first time I saw you that you was a winner. Come here and hug an old lady’s neck.”
Gina wrapped her arms around Inez’s shrunken shoulders. “I could never have done it without your help. Thank you so much for everything.”
“That’s all right, honey,” Inez said, patting her hand. “You sure enough did me proud this week. I never seen a chile from off-island take to a place like you did. Fishin’ and swimpin’ and crabbin’.”
“Look like she mighta had a lot more help than Mr. Tate,” Iris grumped.
Deep Dish Page 34