Deep Dish Read online

  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…

  Chapter 24

  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.