Deep Dish
Mary Kay Andrews
This book is dedicated with love to the posse: Susie
Deiters, Jeanie Payne, Sharon Stokes, and Ellen
Tressler, with thanks for all those Saturday mornings
spent in the pursuit of excellence in junking.
Happy trails, y’all!
Contents
Chapter 1
One more week. Gina repeated the words to herself as…
Chapter 2
The crew scattered. Watching their retreat, Gina noticed for the…
Chapter 3
Somehow, she managed to get through the rest of the…
Chapter 4
She was a zombie. Driving aimlessly around Interstate 285, circling…
Chapter 5
Driving home, Gina tried to make her mind tackle practical…
Chapter 6
The morning sun shone brightly off the burnished aluminum skin…
Chapter 7
Her cell phone started to chirp at six o’clock. After…
Chapter 8
Jerk,” Regina said quietly, as the door closed.
Chapter 9
Scott was standing on the Fresh Start set, deep in…
Chapter 10
Valerie Foster waited until the Fresh Start crew was preoccupied…
Chapter 11
Tate felt himself relax as soon as he heard the…
Chapter 12
That’s it, everybody,” Scott said, after they’d finally finished with…
Chapter 13
Tate was demonstrating his grandmother’s method for seasoning a cast-iron…
Chapter 14
BoBo looked up from the cell phone he’d been hunched…
Chapter 15
Tate whirled around to face Regina, and Moonpie squirmed in…
Chapter 16
When Gina got home, Lisa met her at the door.
Chapter 17
You absolutely sure you wanna do this?” Tate asked, shaking…
Chapter 18
Gina!” Lisa pounded on the bathroom door with both fists.
Chapter 19
On Monday morning, Gina forced herself to look squarely in…
Chapter 20
Perspiration trickled between Gina’s breasts. Her damp hair was matted…
Chapter 21
Using long-handled tongs, Tate deftly transferred the cornmeal-coated fish fillets…
Chapter 22
Gina raced into the dressing room, locked the door, and…
Chapter 23
Javier Soto eyed the mesh bag of Vidalia onions on…
Scott?” Gina closed her eyes as D’John blotted powder on…
Chapter 25
As soon as Scott was gone, Gina jumped up and…
Chapter 26
Tate took the plastic hanger with the baby blue satin…
Chapter 27
Gina looked at herself in the full-length mirror in the…
Chapter 28
All right, people,” Just Joel said with an air of…
Chapter 29
I think my jaw is dislocated,” Tate said, his fingers…
Chapter 30
Good news, good news, good news,” Val sang out, her…
Chapter 31
Valerie Foster was sitting in the Vagabond, going over production…
Chapter 32
Lisa was sitting on the living room sofa, surrounded by…
Chapter 33
Val Foster looked dubiously at the sixty-foot launch idling alongside…
Chapter 34
As the dappled green waters of Eutaw Sound slid by,…
Chapter 35
Lisa!”
Chapter 36
Val watched Gina Foxton and her producer/boyfriend climb into…
Chapter 37
Tate bolted from the dining room, but Val managed to…
Chapter 38
Val Foster managed to make it through the communal dinner…
Chapter 39
The air in her room was as hot and sticky…
Chapter 40
Gina was sitting in the makeshift makeup room—in reality, a…
Chapter 41
Valerie was watching Tate as the judges were introduced, and…
Chapter 42
Each Food Fight kitchen was a stainless steel symphony. Side-by-side…
Chapter 43
As promised, a lone golf cart was waiting right outside…
Chapter 44
Tate gazed up at the pig hanging from the lowest…
Chapter 45
The camera crew and her own entourage were waiting on…
Chapter 46
Tate watched the judges’ faces carefully. Their dishes had been…
Chapter 47
D’John was brushing powder over Gina’s face—a shame, Tate thought,…
Chapter 48
Well, that’s it for round one of The Cooking Channel’s…
Chapter 49
Tate looked down at the crude map he’d drawn earlier…
Chapter 50
Safely back in her room at the lodge, Gina did…
Chapter 51
As they’d planned the night before, Gina and Tate each…
Chapter 52
Rattlesnake Key loomed before them, a forbidding-looking dark green spit…
Chapter 53
Gina pointed at the stack of debris Tate had hauled…
Chapter 54
He was admiring the fillets he’d cut from the redfish…
Chapter 55
After making a mental note to give up all forms…
Chapter 56
Lisa Foxton squinted through the salt-flecked window of the trawler’s…
Chapter 57
It occurred to Tate that he was living every red-blooded…
Chapter 58
They’re coming!” Lisa leaned so far over the bow of…
Chapter 59
The cell phone clipped to Mick Coyle’s hip rang loudly…
Chapter 60
Look,” Zeke said, grabbing Lisa’s elbow. He pointed to a…
Chapter 61
Gina stood on the kitchen set, staring down at the…
Chapter 62
Gina was halfway to the ballroom when Tate caught up…
Chapter 63
People, please!” Zeke pleaded, pacing back and forth on the…
Chapter 64
Tate!” Val saw him walking rapidly toward the front of…
Chapter 65
Val rushed onto the set and looked down at the…
Chapter 66
The sound of a police siren shattered the thick morning…
Chapter 67
Gina needed to pack. She needed to pack, she needed…
Chapter 68
Gina blew into the Vittles production office without bothering to…
Chapter 69
Thanks to Lisa’s ruthless efficiency, most of the furniture in…
Chapter 70
Gina kicked the Honda into a low gear and gritted…
Epilogue
She knew she should be nervous, but for the first…
Reggie’s Simply Sinful Tomato Soup Chocolate Cake
Cream Cheese Frosting
Tate’s Grilled Ginger Peachy
Tate and Gina’s Brunswick Stew
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Mary Kay Andrews
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter 1
One more week. Gina repeated the words to herself as she stood on the set, her makeup already starting to mel
t under the hot lights trained on her.
Five more days, two shows a day. Ten shows. And the season would be over. She would have two weeks to rest. Two weeks with no makeup. No heels. No cameras. She would let her jaw muscles relax. Not smile for fourteen days. No cooking either, she vowed, knowing immediately that was one promise she couldn’t keep. Right now she might be sick of smiling, sick of staring into a camera, sick of explaining why you had to let a roast rest before carving it, sick of chopping, dicing, slicing, and sautéing. But that would pass, she told herself. Just ten more shows.
“Ready?” Jess asked, from just off camera.
Gina took a deep breath and smiled up at the camera trained on her. “Ready.”
Her brow wrinkled in intense concentration as she carefully whisked the Parmesan cheese into the bubbling pot of grits on the front burner of the cooktop.
“Turn the pot toward the camera so we can see the label,” Jess said quietly from the table where she usually sat beside Scott, watching through the monitor on the laptop. Where was Scott, Gina wondered? Jessica DeRosa, his assistant producer, was only twenty-four, just a couple years out of film school, and she was probably quite capable of directing a show on her own, but Scott was such a control freak, he rarely let her.
Without warning, the gas flame under the pot flared up, and then just as suddenly died. Gina stared down at it, grimacing in disbelief.
“You’re frowning,” Jess commented. “Come on, Gina, don’t make it look so hard. Remember what Scott says. These recipes should look so easy, a trained chimp could fix ’em blindfolded.”
The cameraman snickered, and Gina looked up to give Eddie a stare of disapproval.
“Not funny,” she said. But it wasn’t Eddie, the overweight, balding veteran of three seasons’ worth of her shows, behind the camera. This cameraman was a kid, with a frizzy shock of blond hair sticking out from under a red bandanna worn piratelike, around his forehead.
Where was Eddie? she wondered. Were he and Scott in some kind of meeting elsewhere—maybe over at the Georgia Public Broadcasting offices?
“I’m not frowning because the recipe won’t work,” Gina said. “The darned stove is on the fritz again. The flame keeps flickering out. I thought Scott said we were gonna get a new stove before the season was over.”
Jess shrugged. “I guess we’re just gonna make do with this one for the last week. Does it make any difference?”
“Only if we want viewers to believe I know better than to try to cook grits on a cold stove.”
“Keep stirring,” Jess advised. “And smiling.”
Perky, that’s what Scott always insisted on. Nobody really cared how your food tasted, as long as you looked perky and happy while you were fixing it. And sexy. Which was why she was wearing a scoop-neck tank top that showed off her tanned shoulders and shapely arms, instead of the bib apron with “Gina Foxton” embroidered on it in flowing script that she’d worn the previous season, before Scott took over the show. And her career.
“Now add the cheese,” Jess called. “And tell us why you need to keep stirring.”
Gina made a show of turning down the burner, even though in reality, the burner was stone cold and now seemingly inoperative.
“Once your grits reach the boiling point, you want to turn the heat way down, to keep them from burning,” she said. “Now whisk in your cheese, which you’ve already grated, and if it looks too thick, you can add some more of the cream to make sure you’ve got the right consistency.”
She reached for the bowl of Parmesan and dumped it into the hot grits, stirring rapidly. But now, despite Jess’s directions to the contrary, she was frowning again.
She sniffed as her nose, always hypersensitive, alerted her that something was amiss.
What was that smell? She sniffed again and realized, with horror, that the aroma wafting from the pot was not the honest corn smell of her stone-ground grits, nor the smell of homemade chicken stock, nor the fresh scent of cooking cream.
No. This…this smell…resembled nothing more than the stink of melting polymer.
“Gina,” Jess said, a warning in her voice. “You’re frowning again.”
“Gawd, y’all,” Gina exclaimed, shoving the offending pot away, toward the back burner. “This stuff reeks.” As sometimes happened, usually when she was overexcited or totally aggravated, her carefully moderated accent-eradication coaching fell away in an instant. “Jeezus H. You-know-what,” Gina said. “What is this stuff?”
The kid behind the camera guffawed.
Jess blinked innocently. “What?”
Gina reached over to the tray of ingredients her prep cook had placed on the countertop, and grabbed the plastic tub of grated cheese. Without her reading glasses, she had to hold the tub right up to her face to read the label.
“Cheez-Ease? Is this what we’ve come to? Y’all have sold my soul for a tub of dollar-ninety-eight artificial cheese made out of recycled dry-cleaning bags?”
“Please, Gina,” Jess said quietly. “Can we just finish this segment?”
Gina dipped a spoon into the pot of grits and tasted. “I knew it,” she said. “And that’s not cream, either. Since when do we substitute canned condensed milk for cream?”
Jess stared down at her notes, then looked up, a pained expression on her face. “We’re having budget issues. Scott told the girls they should substitute cheaper ingredients wherever necessary.”
“He didn’t say anything about it to me,” Gina said, walking off the set and toward the table where Jess sat.
She hated to make a scene, hated to come across as a prima donna or a food snob. But you couldn’t have a show about healthy southern cooking, a show called Fresh Start, for heaven’s sake, if you started to compromise on ingredients.
“Jess,” Gina said calmly. “What’s going on around here?”
Jessica’s pale, usually cheerful face reddened. “Let’s take a break,” she said. “Everybody back in ten minutes.”
Chapter 2
The crew scattered. Watching their retreat, Gina noticed for the first time that the cameraman wasn’t the only new face on the set. Jackson Thomas, her sound man, had been replaced with a chubby-cheeked black girl with a headful of dreadlocks, and Andrew Payne, the lighting engineer—sweet, serious Andrew, who approached lighting as an artist approached a canvas—had been replaced with two pimply-cheeked youths whose bumbling around reminded her of Dumb and Dumber.
“Jess,” Gina said, sliding into the empty seat beside the assistant producer, “where’s Scott? And Jackson?”
Jess picked up the thick production notebook that was her bible and leafed through the pages detailing the upcoming segment.
“Jess?” Gina gently took the notebook from her.
“God, Gina,” Jess said with a sigh. “You need to talk to Scott. Really.”
“I will,” Gina said. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” the younger woman admitted. “He left me a voice mail this morning, telling me he had a meeting, and he’d be in later. That’s all I know. Honest.”
“What about the crew? Why all the changes? And why wasn’t I told anything about budget problems?”
“Scott said—” Jess bit her lip. “At the production meeting Friday he just said there were some issues with the sponsors. We have to tighten our belts to get through the rest of the season. He asked Eddie and Jackson and Andrew to stay after the meeting to talk to him. And when I got here this morning, the new guys showed up and said Scott told them to report to me.” Tears glistened in Jess’s eyes. “I’m sorry. That’s all I know.”
“It’s okay,” Gina said. “But no more surprises. What’s going on with the next segment? The herb-crusted salmon. You’re not going to tell me I’m supposed to take Chicken-of-the-Sea and make it look like salmon steaks, right?”
Jess looked off at the set, where the prep cooks were setting up the ingredients for the next shot. “Actually, you’re using mackerel.”
“Mackerel
!” Gina shot out of the chair. “I’ll kill Scott when I find him.”
Although Fresh Start with Regina Foxton aired on Georgia Public Television, the show operated not out of GPTV’s handsome headquarters in the shadow of downtown Atlanta but out of leased production and office space at Morningstar Studios, which was a bland complex of single-story concrete-block buildings located in a light industrial area five miles away in Midtown.
Two years ago, when she’d signed on to host her own show, Gina had thought the Fresh Start set the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. That was when everything about television was new and wonderful. Face it, she’d had stars in her eyes, big-time.
But what could you expect from a girl from small-town South Georgia? Odum, her hometown, wasn’t exactly Hollywood. Not even Hollywood, Georgia, let alone Hollywood, California.
She’d majored in home economics at the University of Georgia, gotten interested in writing there, and after a series of reporting stints at small-town weeklies, she’d ended up with what she considered her dream job—food editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. At twenty-six years old, she’d been the youngest woman ever to hold that position. Back home in Odum, her mama and daddy were beside themselves with pride for their oldest girl.