Deep Dish (2 page)

T
he 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.

“Do you realize who else used to be food editor at the Atlanta newspaper?” Birdelle, her mama, had demanded. “Mrs. Henrietta Dull, that’s who. Mrs. S. R. Dull herself. My mama kept Mrs. Dull’s cookbook right beside her King James Bible and her Eugenia Price novels.”

Two years ago, Gina was doing a cooking demonstration: no-fuss holiday desserts, it was, on
Atlanta Alive!
, the noontime television talk show on the local NBC affiliate, and Scott Zaleski was the producer.

She’d been asked back to do three more segments after that, and after the fourth segment, and a lot of flirting and provocative e-mails, Scott had asked her out to dinner.

He was blond and athletic, well dressed, and wildly ambitious—for both of them.

Six months after they’d started dating, he’d sold GPTV on her concept for a new kind of southern cooking—flavorful but healthy, with an emphasis on fresh, locally produced foods prepared with an updated twist on regional traditions. It was called
Fresh Start with Regina Foxton.

Their set was the same one she’d used for the
Atlanta Alive!
shows. But it was starting to grate on her nerves. The cupboard doors, whose rich dark wood looked so expensive on camera, were actually just stained plywood, and they were warped so badly they had to be closed with gaffer’s tape. The countertops were a cheap imitation granite laminate, and the cooktop, donated by a long-ago sponsor, was, as far as Gina was concerned, ready for the scrap heap.

Their offices weren’t much either. Hers was actually the former janitor’s closet. So much for the glamour of big-time show business. At least she could use the mop sink to wash her face.

She steamed toward Scott’s office. How could he leave her out of the loop on so many critical changes for the show? If there were issues with the sponsor, and with the budget, shouldn’t she have been the first to know?

The door was closed. She knocked, waited. “Scott?”

She opened the door and stuck her head inside. Empty.

His office was tidy as always, desktop cleared, books and tapes stacked neatly on their shelves. She plopped down in his swivel chair, determined to confront him as soon as he showed up.

Her irritation melted a little when she caught sight of the screen saver on his computer. It was a color photo of the two of them, stand
ing on the beach last summer at sunset, his arms wrapped around her waist. Scott’s blond hair glowed in the golden light, and her own face seemed to glimmer with happiness.

How sweet! And surprising. Scott was the least sentimental man she’d ever known. She had no idea the photo had meant so much to him. She reached out to touch the screen and bumped the mouse. Suddenly, the photo disappeared, and a document materialized on the computer screen.

Squinting at the print, she felt a passing twinge of guilt. The small print ran together in an incomprehensible blur. She fumbled in the pockets of her slacks and brought out the reading glasses, which also made her feel guilty.

Scott was always pestering her to get fitted for contacts, but she’d tried them once, and hated the sensation of having a foreign object in her eye. Her readers were fine, she’d protested, but he’d banned her from wearing them on camera. No glasses, no aprons, nothing, he’d proclaimed, that might give off even a whiff of Betty Crocker. Regina Foxton was young, hot, and gorgeous. No granny glasses!

Glasses perched on the end of her nose, she started to read.

The document was Scott’s résumé. Laid out in neat rows of black and white, it made him out a young television phenom. Bachelor’s degree in comparative lit, cum laude, University of Virginia. Master’s in film and television, Florida State University. Internships at CBS and ESPN. Before the
Atlanta Alive!
job, he’d produced a Sunday-morning political debate show for a public television station in Jackson, Mississippi, and before that, he’d been a production assistant at CNN.

She read on. E. Scott Zaleski was thirty-two years old, unmarried, with professional affiliations that included board memberships for the Association of Georgia Broadcasters and the High Museum’s Young Associates as well as the Nature Conservancy.

He was currently employed as producer and creator of the Georgia Emmy-winning
Fresh Start with Regina Foxton
show.

Creator? Gina said it aloud. Of
her
show?
Fresh Start
?

The office door swung open, and Scott rushed inside. He was dressed in a dark pin-striped suit, wearing the silk Armani tie Gina
had bought him at Barney’s in New York. He stopped in his tracks when he saw Gina sitting at his desk.

“Hey!” he said. He glanced at his watch. “Shouldn’t you be taping?”

“I don’t know,” Gina said, crossing her arms over her chest. “I was just going to ask you the same question. We started taping two hours ago. Where were you?”

Scott set his briefcase down beside the battered wooden kitchen chair facing the desk and sat down with deliberate caution. “I was in a business meeting. But Jess is perfectly capable of directing a segment on her own.”

Gina looked him up and down, from his impeccably cut and groomed hair to his polished hand-stitched English oxfords. “You look very nice.”

“Thank you,” Scott said, fingering the tie. “So do you. Look, Gina, let’s cut the drawing-room comedy, please. What’s going on? Why are you skulking around in my office?”

She lifted an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t call waiting for you in your office skulking. The door wasn’t locked. Why, do you have something to hide?”

He sighed. “You’ve been reading my memos.”

“Nuh-uh,” Gina said. “Just the résumé. Although that in itself was quite a revelation. I never realized you were the
creator
of
Fresh Start
.”

He waved his hand in dismissal. “That’s just résumé-building. Nobody takes that stuff seriously.”

“I do,” she said. “And I didn’t realize I should have been building my own instead of concentrating on my piddly little job here.”

He stood up and closed the office door, then sat back down.

“I was going to talk to you. Today. After I got back from my meeting. I’m sorry you had to find out about it this way.”

“Find out what?” She felt like screaming. But she’d never been much of a screamer. “What’s going on with the show, Scott?”

“God,” Scott said. He crossed and recrossed his legs, then leaned forward and took Gina’s hands in his.

“I’ve been in a meeting with the Tastee-Town people all morn
ing. It’s not good news, Geen. Wiley wants to pull the plug on the show.”

Tastee-Town Foods was the sponsor of
Fresh Start with Regina Foxton
. What had started as a mom-and-pop grocery store in Hahira, Georgia, in the early 1960s had evolved into a multistate publicly traded supermarket chain with outlets all over the Southeast. Wiley Bickerstaff III was the grandson of the founder of Tastee-Town. And the current CEO.

Gina was stunned. “But…Wiley loves me. He loves the show. He had me cater his fiftieth birthday party last spring. He’s been selling the cookbook in all the stores in Georgia. I was the guest speaker at his Rotary Club meeting last month. He invited me to lunch at the Piedmont Driving Club two weeks ago. He never said a word.”

She rolled her chair around to within inches of Scott’s. “Wiley Bickerstaff loves me! This must be a misunderstanding.”

“Yeah,” Scott said bitterly. “He’s nuts for you. He just doesn’t love the show anymore. Talk about passive-aggressive behavior. Wiley always wants to be everybody’s buddy. He left it up to me to be the bearer of bad news.”

Gina stood up abruptly. “Scott, when were you going to tell me? After you’d already fired every single functional member of the crew and hired on a bunch of teenagers? Or were you going to tell me after you had me substituting Spam for pork tenderloin?”

“Hey!” Scott said sharply. “I was trying to protect you. I still thought until this morning that there might be some way to salvage the show. That’s why I slashed the personnel and grocery budget. To try to show Wiley we could still produce a viable product for a reasonable amount of money.”

“And?” Gina said.

Scott’s shoulders slumped. “No go. Tastee-Town’s new marketing director is under the mistaken impression that their advertising dollars could be better spent elsewhere. They’re putting all their money on NASCAR racing.”

“So that’s it? We’ll be off the air?”

Scott sat back in his own chair. “Looks like it. I’m really sorry,
Geen. I’ve been putting out feelers, hoping we’d line up a new sponsor, but right now, I’m not optimistic.”

“I guess not,” she said. “Since you’re obviously hunting for a new job.”

“That’s not fair,” he said, looking hurt. “And before you go off half-cocked, accusing me of abandoning you, you should know that since Wiley started making noises about dumping the show, I’ve pitched you all over the country. Sent
Fresh Start
tapes every place I could think of. I didn’t tell you anything because I didn’t want to distract you from making the best show possible.”

“Oh.” Now she felt like a heel. First for spying on him, and second, for coming this close to accusing him of disloyalty, when all he’d been doing was looking out for her best interests.

“Scotty,” she whispered, coming over and sitting down on his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I had no right—”

He buried his head in her hair, kissed her forehead. “It’s all right, baby,” he murmured. “We’ll think of something. You’re the best in the business. Wiley Bickerstaff is a moron. Tastee-Town’s gonna live to regret getting rid of us. It’s you and me against the world, babe.”

She fought back sudden tears. God. She’d been so mad at him for keeping secrets from her, she hadn’t thought about losing the show. Her job! She’d worked since she was fourteen years old. Made straight As in school, never failed at anything in her life. And now, staring thirty in the face, she was out of work. Fired, essentially. And if she was out of a job, so was Scott.

She felt a chill of fear run up her spine.

The previous spring, after years of renting and scrimping and saving, right after Tastee-Town signed on for another year’s worth of shows, she’d bought the two-bedroom town house in Buckhead, the first home she’d ever owned. What hadn’t gone into the down payment, she’d spent on furnishing it. Her five-year-old Honda Accord was paid for, but the transmission had been making weird sounds for the past month.

Now what?

“I’m almost thirty,” she said aloud. “Now what?”

“Now you get back to the set and finish the show,” Scott said, kneading her shoulder muscles.

“Okay. But no more secrets.”

“Deal,” he said.

Gina managed a small smile. “That’s my girl,” he said, kissing the tip of her nose. Gently, he dislodged her from his lap and stood up. “We’ve got ten shows left under contract. Let’s make ’em the best damned shows you’ve ever done. And in the meantime, I’ve still got some irons in the fire. I’ll figure it out.”