Elaine Orr - Jolie Gentil 05 - Trouble on the Doorstep (13 page)

I made one of my lists, as is my habit when I’m overwhelmed.

To do for Saturday

Figure out how to organize Sunday.

Ask bank to take money from us Sunday.

Train Scoobie to think before he opens his mouth.

Train George to think before he picks up his pen.

Check with Markle re food order.

To do for Sunday

How get hot dogs/buns to Silver Times?

Drinks for audience.

Assign clean-up to George.

Paper plates and napkins (Monica)

Who counts hot dogs eaten?

I added to the lists and studied Steve’s estimates in between doing a load of guests’ sheets and dusting the two bedrooms that would be used tonight.
It was when I was reaching into the fridge to make sure there was enough orange juice for tomorrow that I glanced at the clock on the stove. “Yikes!” Guests were supposed to arrive in half an hour.

I picked up Jazz and dashed up the back staircase, with Jazz squirming all the way.
She has to stay in my room unless she’s with me, and Aunt Madge definitely doesn’t want her greeting the guests. She’s figured out that when I pick her up and head toward the stairs she’s going back to her bedroom prison.

The doorbell rang as I was coming back downstairs.
“Nuts!” I hadn’t gotten Ramona yet and we don’t leave the B&B when guests are in it unless it’s someone Aunt Madge knows or they’ve stayed here before and she trusts them.

Ramona had her scarf wound so it covered the bottom half of her face.

“I’m so sorry. I was too absorbed in plans for Sunday.”

She unwound her scarf and pulled off gloves as we walked back to the great room.
“I would have just waited at the store, but I called and you didn’t answer, so I thought I should make sure you’re okay.”

Time for a mental head-slap.
“I had the washer and dryer on and I was upstairs dusting. I bet that’s when you called.”

“Don’t worry about it.
You know I walk everywhere.” She was scanning the great room and smiled at me. “Scoobie told me that when you burned the muffins it made smoke marks on the wall near the stove. I didn’t really believe him.”

“Scoobie’s going to get himself burned,” I said, and told her about how Sunday had morphed from a time for the teens to have some fun into a contest of sorts itself.
“So I have tons to do,” I finished.

“Aren’t they supposed to do the work?” she asked.
She turned on Aunt Madge’s electric kettle.

“They will for the main event, and some on Sunday.
But it’s happening so fast.”

“Can’t you ask Megan and Alicia to line up kids to work?” she asked.

More mental head-slap time. “I didn’t even think of it.”

THE TWO GUESTS HAD gotten settled and gone in search of crab cakes and clam chowder. I didn’t laugh when one of them asked me if I thought the crabs would be “local and fresh.”
Do they really think we harvest crabs in December?

Ramona and I had just finished eating our baked chicken and veggies when the phone rang.

“Jolie, it’s Andrew Markham.
How are you this evening?”

“Fine,” I said, and mouthed his name to Ramona, who arched an eyebrow at me.

“Fred Brennan told me about your plans for Sunday. Are these the same teens who’ve been helping with lawn clean-up and such out here?”

“Basically yes.
There may be a few others. I heard a couple newer volunteers might come, too.” This news I had gleaned in a phone call with Aretha, who said she would do anything for the food pantry except spend another afternoon with Reverend Jamison’s secretary.

“That’s terrific,” he said.
“You’ll be accepting donations, for Harvest for All, won’t you?”

“Yes, but there’s not an admission charge or anything.”

“Would it be all right if I sent an email around to a lot of folks who live here? It might add to your coffers.”

“That would be terrific.”
We talked for another minute to clarify the time (one o’clock on Sunday) and get a sense of how many people he thought would respond to his email.

When I hung up I looked at Ramona.
“Can you help Sunday?”

“JOLIE, YOU’RE DRIPPING the mustard.”

I looked at the table in time to see two yellow globs of the stuff about to drip onto the floor, and stuck a hot dog bun on them.
I had shaken the mustard without realizing the cap had already been twisted open. I looked at Lance. “Thanks. Where did Scoobie and George go?”

“Out to the car to get the last box of hot dogs,” Ramona said.
She and Alicia were taking the twisties off bags of hot dog buns so they could open them faster to stuff them with cooked hot dogs.

One week ago at this time I’d been putting the last vases of lilies around the Cozy Corner great room, and now I was getting another room ready for an onslaught of eaters.
This group would not be as neat.

“Jolie, do you want the iced tea sweetened?” Megan called from across the counter that separated the Silver Times kitchen from the large dining room.

“Um, I guess. Maybe some of it.”

“Did anybody order napkins?”
Aretha asked this as a general question to the room.

One of the boys answered.
“We swiped some paper towels from the rest room.”

“I brought napkins,” Monica said, in her soft voice.
“They’re in the back seat of my car.” She and the young man, I thought was named Greg, walked out together.

I surveyed the room.
The dining room seats sixty, according to the sign on the wall, and I guessed it to be about eighty by one-hundred feet. At the end where I was, a counter separated the dining room from the kitchen. It had a horizontal accordion gate of sorts that rested on the counter and could be up or down. It had taken George and Scoobie almost two minutes to figure out how to raise it so we could pass hot dogs across the counter to the five eaters who would sit facing what I fervently hoped would be a small audience.

Per Fred Brennan’s request, we had rolled a large sheet of heavy-duty plastic under the long table that would seat the eaters—contestants, as Scoobie kept reminding me.
A number of the tables residents used for dinner were now against the wall and we had lined about twenty chairs in front of where the four boys and one girl would sit cramming their faces with hot dogs and buns.

“I got it, I got it,” Scoobie said.
He was carrying a box of hot dogs that I bet weighed twenty-five pounds, too much concentrated weight for someone who had hurt his back badly last spring. It was kind of funny to see Aretha trying to wrestle them from him.

“Where’s George?” I asked.

“The paper called,” Scoobie said as he plopped the box on the counter. “There was a three-car accident outside Wal-Mart.”

“Great.”
It was George’s fault this had morphed into something bigger than Scoobie and the teens having a small practice audience, and he wasn’t even going to help.

“Jolie.”
Andrew Markham walked in, seemingly leading a senior citizen parade. “I hope we aren’t too early.”

“Not at all.”
We aren’t supposed to start for twenty minutes!

I started to say something else, but Alicia and Ramona called to me, so I just watched Andrew start assigning chairs to his cohorts and walked to Alicia.
“What’s up?”

“Ramona and I think we might need more people loading the dogs,” she smiled, “because Greg and his friends say they’ve gotten up to four in one minute.

“Boy, are they going to be sick tomorrow,” Ramona said.

“Naw.
They’ll get rid of all of it before they leave,” Scoobie said. Alicia gave a sort of typical teenager giggle.

“Why don’t you concentrate on getting the water boiling?” I said to Scoobie.

He bowed and moved toward the kitchen where Megan was unpacking the box of hot dogs.

“Gee, four per minute times five people, maybe,” I said. “Do you think we should have hot dogs and bun supplies at each end of the table?”

“You’ll probably need one pile per person,” said a man’s voice.

I turned to see Nat Markham standing at the edge of the long table, lightly drumming his fingers on it. His tone had not been a helpful one.

“Gee, really?” I asked?
Why is he here?
“What makes you say that?”

“Because, that’s what they do when the hot dog stand on the boardwalk does their contest every summer.
If you don’t have someone assigned to each person, then the eaters closest to the hot dogs have an advantage.” He stared at me, unblinking.

I groaned.
“You’re right. We should have thought of that,” I said.

“This is a practice, Jolie,” Alicia said, with far more patience than most fourteen year-olds exhibit.

Ramona grinned at her. “I think we’ll let Scoobie organize the feeders.”

“Can you help?” I asked Nat.

He shook his head.
“I just came by to look at a couple of the duplexes. Heard you guys in here.” He walked out.

As I turned to walk toward the kitchen I saw Andrew Markham looking at his son with an expression of irritation.
It vanished as his eyes met mine, and he turned to talk to a man just entering the room.

I suddenly realized that if Nat Markham was looking at a couple of duplexes he must have gotten the contract finalized.
George either didn’t know or was waiting until after the contest to tell me.

The chairs for onlookers were almost full, so I grabbed two of the excited teen boys as they headed toward Alicia.
With something less than eagerness they began grabbing chairs that still sat around dinner tables and setting them in rows behind the others.

I was hot and I hadn’t yet been standing over the boiling hot dogs, which I would be in about five minutes.
Lance was in the front row and I sat next to him for a moment, fanning myself with one of the stolen paper towels.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Oh yes, just wishing I were in my house watching football, that’s all.”

“You mind if I stop by to visit sometime?”
I still wanted him to look at Steve’s estimates, but the hot dog contest had kept me occupied.

“Any time.”
He seemed to be trying not to sound dispirited, but he was failing.

“Your TV was okay, wasn’t it?”
I asked. Lance’s tiny house had a big screen TV that dwarfed his living room.

“Oh yes,” he said.
“It’s in my apartment here.”

“How are repairs?” I asked.

“Moving along well. Once they took the hardwood floors up and cleaned the subfloor the smell was pretty much gone. I told them as long as there was no way for mold to grow they could work on some other houses first. I’m fine here for the winter.”

“I’m sorry, Lance.”

He shrugged. “There’s worse things than…”

“Yo, Jolie.
Who said you could sit?” Scoobie called from the kitchen.

“Your public calls,” Lance said.

I walked into the kitchen. Megan and I were the cookers, and Alicia had organized two of the boys to carry the rectangular cake pans of hot dogs from the counter to each of the now five feeding stations, as Scoobie called them, behind the contestants. Alicia’s good friend Clark was overseeing the bun loaders, and Monica stood ready with napkins and bottles of water. No Sylvia.

“We really need a counter for each of the five,” Aretha said.
She was looking into the kitchen from the dining room. “How come your face is all red and Megan’s isn’t?”

“Because Megan is unflappable,” said George, who still had his camera strap around his neck.
He walked halfway into the kitchen and stopped.

“Good, you’re back,” Aretha said.
“You’re a hot dog counter.”

George turned quickly and walked back into the dining room.
I think he had guessed from my expression that I was not having fun. I turned to Megan. “Why aren’t you so hot?”

She lifted her collar and I saw one of those flexible blue ice packs on her neck.
“I brought three. There’s two more in the freezer. Help yourself.”

“Good to know you aren’t unflappable,” I said.

By the time Scoobie and his teens thought we were ready to start, there were almost forty people in the audience. A large basket to the left of the feeding table had a sign that said “Harvest for All and Red Cross Donations” and people had been steadily putting cash and checks into it. There were a couple of plastic bags full of donated canned food under the table.

“Ready, set, go!” said a young man’s voice.

The room immediately sounded more like a race track than a dining room. Megan and I stood still and watched for almost a minute before either of us thought to dump the next batch of cooked hotdogs into a pan.

“Jolie!
I knew you’d be here.” Elmira Washington walked into the kitchen.

“We’re kind of busy here,” I said.

“You can listen,” she said, and stood directly in front of me.

Her nose was red from the cold, so I figured she had walked to this building from her duplex.
The stroll had not put her in a better mood than her usual.

“That Markham boy just came by my house.
He didn’t think that estimate was too high, he thought it was too low!” Her voice had risen with each of the last few words.

“Elmira!” Megan’s tone was sharp.
“This is a fun event for the kids. You can talk to Jolie later.”

“Well, I never…You can’t talk to me like that!”

I saw Aretha stand from where she was sitting in front of her eater. When she saw it was Elmira she rolled her eyes at me and sat back down. The only reason more people weren’t noticing was because the din of the crowd seemed to grow with every consumed hot dog.

“Elmira, what we’re saying is
later
,” I said. “I’ll call you tonight.”

She glared at each of us and stomped out, nose in the air.

I glanced at Megan as I reached for a pair of tongs. “Looks like you’ll be on her naughty list.”

“I’ll consider it a compliment.”

There was a retching noise and a loud splat. We had lost our first contestant.