Finger Lickin' Fifteen (Stephanie Plum 15)

My father was hunkered down in his favorite chair in front of the television. He’s retired from the post office and now drives a cab part-time. He picks up a few people early morning to take to the train station, but mostly the cab is parked in our driveway or at the lodge, where my father plays cards and shoots the baloney with other guys his age looking to get out of the house. I shouted hello, and he grunted a response.

I shoved through the swinging door that separated kitchen from dining room and sucked in some air. There were racks of ribs laid out on baking sheets on the counter, pots and bowls of red stuff, brown stuff, maroon stuff on the small kitchen table, shakers of cayenne, chili pepper, black pepper, plus bottles of various kinds of hot sauce, and a couple cookbooks turned to the barbecue section, also on the table. The cookbooks, Lula, and Grandma were dotted with multicolored sauce. My mother stood glassy-eyed in a corner, staring out at the car crash in her kitchen.

“Hey, girlfriend,” Lula said. “Hope you’re hungry, on account of we got whup-ass shit here.”

Grandma and Lula looked like Jack Sprat and his wife. Lula was all swollen up and voluptuous, busting out of her clothes, and Grandma was more of a deflated balloon. Gravity hadn’t been kind to Grandma, but what Grandma lacked in collagen she made up for with attitude and bright pink lipstick. She’d come to live with my parents when my Grandfather Mazur went in search of life everlasting at the all-you-can-eat heavenly breakfast buffet.

“This here’s a humdinger dinner we got planned,” Grandma said. “I never barbecued before, but I think we got the hang of it.”

“Your granny’s gonna be my assistant at the cook-off,” Lula said to me. “And you could be my second assistant. Everybody’s got to have two assistants.”

“We’re gonna get chef hats and coats so we look professional,” Grandma said. “We’re even gonna get our names stitched on. And I’m thinking of making this a new career. After I get the hat and the coat, I might go get a chef job in a restaurant.”

“Not me,” Lula said. “I’m not working in no restaurant. After I win the contest, I’m gonna get a television show.”

“Maybe I could help you with that on my day off,” Grandma said. “I always wanted to be on television.”

I took a closer look at the ribs. “How did you cook these?”

“We baked them,” Lula said. “We were supposed to grill them, but we haven’t got no grill, so we just baked the crap out of them in the oven. I don’t think it matters, anyways, after we get the sauce on them. That’s what we’re fixin’ to do now.”

“We got a bunch of different sauces we’re trying out,” Grandma said. “We bought them in the store and then we doctored them up.”

“I don’t think that’s allowed,” I said. “This is supposed to be your own sauce recipe.”

Lula dumped some hot sauce and chili pepper into the bowl of red sauce. “Once it gets out of its bottle, it’s my sauce. And besides, I just added my secret ingredients.”

“What if they want to see your recipe?”

“Nuh-ah. No one gets to see Lula’s recipe,” Lula said, wagging her finger at me. “Everybody’ll be stealing it. I give out my recipe, and next thing it’s in the store with someone else’s name on it. No sir, I’m no dummy. I’m gonna take the winning recipe to my deathbed.”

“Should I start putting the sauce on these suckers?” Grandma asked Lula.

“Yeah. Make sure everybody gets all the different sauces. Since I’m the chef, I got the most refined taste buds, but we want to see what other people think, too.”

Grandma slathered sauce on the ribs, and Lula eyeballed them.

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“I might want to add some finishing touches,” Lula said, pulling jars off my mother’s spice rack, shaking out pumpkin pie spices. “These here ribs are gonna be my holiday ribs.”

“I would never have thought of that,” Grandma said.

“That’s why I’m the chef and you’re the helper,” Lula said. “I got a creative flare.”

“What are we eating besides ribs?” I asked.

Lula looked over at me. “Say what?”

“You can’t just serve ribs to my father. He’ll want vegetables and gravy and potatoes and dessert.”

“Hunh,” Lula said. “This is a special tasting night and all he’s gettin’ is ribs.”

My mother made the sign of the cross.

“Gee,” I said. “Look at the time. I’m going to have to run. I have work to do. Rex is waiting for me. I think I’m getting a cold.”

My mother reached out and grabbed me by my T-shirt. “I was in labor twenty-six hours with you,” she said. “You owe me. The least you could do is see this through to the end.”