Janet Evanovich - Finger Lickin’ Fifteen

“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.

“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.”

“Okay,” Lula said. “Now we put these ribs back into the oven until they look like they been charcoaled.”

Twenty minutes later, my father took his seat at the head of the table and stared down at his plate of ribs. “What the Sam Hill is this?” he said.

“Gourmet barbecue ribs,” Grandma told him. “We made them special. They’re gonna have us rolling in money.”

“Why are they black? And where’s the rest of the food?”

“They’re black because they’re supposed to look grilled. And this is all the food. This is a tasting menu.”

My father mumbled something that sounded a lot like taste, my ass. He pushed his ribs around with his fork and squinted down at them. “I don’t see any meat. All I see is bone.”

“The meat’s all in tasty morsels,” Lula said. “These are more pickin’-up ribs instead of knife-and-fork ribs. And they’re all different. We gotta figure out which we like best.”

My mother nibbled on one of her ribs. “This tastes a little like Thanksgiving,” she said.

My father had a rib in his hand. “I’ve got one of them, too,” he said. “It tastes like Thanksgiving after the oven caught on fire and burned up all the meat.”

What I had on my plate was charred beyond recognition. I loved Grandma and Lula a lot, but not enough to eat the ribs. “You might have cooked these a smidgeon too long,” I said.

“You could be right,” Lula said. “I expected them to be juicier. I think the problem is I bought grillin’ ribs, and we had to make them into oven ribs.” She turned to Grandma. “What’s your opinion of the ribs? Did you try them all? Is there some you like better than others?”

“Hard to tell,” Grandma said, “being that my tongue is on fire.”

“Yeah,” Lula said. “I made one of them real spicy ’cause that’s the way I like my ribs and my men. Nice and hot.”

My father was gnawing on a rib, trying to get something off it. He was making grinding, sucking sounds and really concentrating.

“You keep sucking like that, and you’re gonna give yourself a hernia,” Grandma said.

“It’d be less painful than eating these burned black, tastes like monkey shit, dry as an old maid’s fart bones.”

“Excuse me,” Lula said. “Are you trash-talkin’ my ribs? ’Cause I’m not gonna put up with slander on my ribs.”

My father had a grip on his knife, and I thought the only thing stopping him from plunging it into someone’s chest was he couldn’t decide between Grandma and Lula.

“Are you really going to enter the competition?” I asked Lula.

“I already did. I filled out my form and gave it over to the organizer. He wanted me to do a favor for him, and I said nuh-ah. I said I don’t do that no more. Not that I don’t still have my skills, but I moved on with my life, you see what I’m sayin’.”

“Did he take your form anyway?”

“Yeah. I got pictures of him from when he was a customer.”

“You’d blackmail him?”

“I like to think of it as reminders of happy times,” Lula said. “No need to negatize it. What happens is, he looks at the picture of himself and thinks bein’ with me was better than a fork in the eye. And then he thinks it’s special if that shit stay between him and me and for instance don’t be seen on YouTube. And then he takes my contest application and gives it the stamp of approval.”

“You got a way with people,” Grandma said.

“It’s a gift,” Lula said.

“I’m making myself a peanut butter and olive sandwich,” I said. “Anyone else want one?”

“I got to go to the lodge,” my father said, pushing away from the table.

I figured he might get there eventually, but he’d stop at Cluck-in-a-Bucket on the way.

“I don’t need a sandwich,” Lula said. “But I’ll help clean the kitchen.”

Lula, Grandma, my mother, and I all trooped into the kitchen and set to work.

“I don’t see any more barbecue sauce anywhere,” Grandma finally said. “The floor’s clean, the counters are clean, the stove’s clean, and the dishes and pots are clean. Only thing dirty is me, and I’m too pooped to get clean.”