Tough Cookie полностью

She looked at me uncertainly. She took the card and fingered it cautiously, and I could imagine her telling Tom, Goldy told me to call you, it’s probably nothing, but she figured it might be kinda important—

I put my mittens back on. “Need to hop. They’re doing our show live today. It’s a fund-raiser dedicated to Nate Bullock, remember him?”

Still staring at the card, she nodded her rainbow-pink head. “Sure. The TV tracker dude.”

“I’m doing Mexican egg rolls. Crab cakes. Ginger-snaps.”

Now she looked at me, perplexed. “I’ll try to catch it. But you know my customers would rather see an extreme ski video than a cooking show.” She shrugged.

I finished the roll—flaky, buttery, and spicy-sweet—polished off the coffee in two greedy swallows, and thanked her again.

When I ducked out of the warm shop, another fiercely cold wind struck me broadside. I struggled past the brilliantly lit facade of the Killdeer Art Gallery. In the Christmas-plaid-draped front window, black-and-white photos of backlit snowboarders making daring leaps off cliffs vied with garish, romantic oils of Native Americans beside tipis. A third of the window was devoted to watercolors of mountain villas. Just visible behind these were collages made up of images of ski equipment. When Coloradans enthused over Western Art, they weren’t talking about Michelangelo.

The last shop on the row was Furs for the Famous. Ah, fame. Fame was much desired by the hoi polloi, much despised by celebrities, much avoided by the infamous. As I clomped back down the steps toward the gondola, fueled by Cinda’s rich coffee, I reflected that I had no use for fame. Doing a gourmet cooking show had spawned neither gourmet cooks nor ardent fans. But complainers—who wrote and called and stopped me in the grocery store to ask if they could substitute margarine for butter, powdery dried muck for fresh imported Parmesan, and blocks of generic je-ne-sais-quoi for expensive dark chocolate—these I had in abundance. Tom had given me an early Christmas present: a T-shirt silk-screened with: DON’T ASK. DON’T SUBSTITUTE.

And speaking of Tom, being married to a police investigator had also brought me recognition, as Cinda’s question demonstrated. Sometimes I felt like the pastor’s wife who is told of incest in a church family. Nobody wants to bother the pastor with it, right? Somebody’s sending a poisoned letter to a cop? Don’t bother the cop! Let Goldy handle it.

I walked down the snowpacked path and tramped across an arched footbridge. Four feet below, Killdeer Creek gurgled beneath its mantle of ice. Christmas and the promise of more snow would soon bring an onslaught of skiers. I trudged onward resolutely, not wanting to think about the holiday, and all the parties I would miss catering.

Sell the old skis. Get the new drains, I told myself. Develop the personal chef sideline, then reopen your business. And quit worrying!

I clambered up the ice-packed pathway to the clanking gondola. The car manager, his hair swathed in an orange jester cap, his face spiderwebbed from a decade of sun, stopped a car for me. I heaved my backpack and poles into the six-seater while the car manager whistled an off-tune Christmas carol and clanked my skis into the car’s outside rack. The car whisked away.

Up, up, up I zoomed toward the bistro. Even though snow continued to fall, the sky had brightened to the color of polished aluminum. The muffled grinding of the cable was the only sound as the car rolled past snow-frosted treetops and empty, pristinely white runs. This early, an hour and a half before the runs officially opened, I was alone on the lift. Our small studio audience usually rode up at quarter to eight. Early-bird skiers who couldn’t brave the cold would still be guzzling cocoa at Cinda’s or the Karaoke Café. Or they could be poring over maps of Killdeer’s back bowls, those steep, ungroomed deep-snow areas braved by only the hardiest of skiers. Or maybe they would be having their bindings checked at the repair shop, or just staring out at the snow-covered mountains. In other words, they could be anticipating real fun.

I shifted on the cold vinyl seat and peered downward. Below the new blanket of flakes, groomed, nub-bled snow had frozen into ridged rows. The grooming was left to the snowcats, those tractor tanks that churned and smoothed the white stuff after-hours. By the time I skied down at nine, I knew, the new powder would be lumped into symmetrical rows of moguls: hard, tentlike humps of snow arrayed across the hill like an obstacle course. As much as I loved skiing, and I did, this might or might not be fun.