They were playing Twenty Questions when a T-rex loomed up from a corn field.
Fen let out a startled shriek. Carter stomped on the brakes. The truck lurched forward, water sloshing, before she realized that the T-rex was a statue clutching a soda bottle and a hamburger in its tiny hands. It stood beside a faded billboard.
DINOSAUR PARK & BUFFET
NEXT EXIT
“Not sure they thought through the implications of ‘dinosaur buffet.’ It sounds like we’re the food.” But Carter was already pulling toward the exit.
“It could mean that it’s a buffet of dinosaurs,” Fen pointed out.
The Dinosaur Play Park consisted of life-size statues of a T-rex, a Triceratops, a Stegosaurus, and, rather inexplicably, a knight in armor. Fen was not all that impressed with the statues, but she took a few photos for Norris’s benefit before they headed into the buffet. She was slightly relieved to see that it did not appear to be dinosaur-themed.
A hostess greeted them pleasantly. “Welcome to the Dinosaur Park and Buffet. Got any questions?”
“Yes,” said Carter. “The main one being ‘why?’”
“Why what, hon?”
“Why dinosaurs?”
“You stopped, didn’t you?” the hostess asked.
Carter smiled. “I see your point.”
“What can I eat here that I can’t get anywhere but Iowa?” Fen asked.
The hostess pointed. “You want the salad bar.”
Fen was disappointed. Salads were nothing to get excited about. If the best Iowa food was salad, she hated to think what the rest of it was like.
Carter also did not look thrilled about salad. As they headed for the salad bar, he said in an undertone, “There better be bacon bits.”
“Ugh. Seriously?”
“The fake stuff is ugh. Chopped real bacon is delicious.”
“You don’t call chopped real bacon ‘bacon bits,’” Fen pointed out. “And if Iowa’s specialty is any kind of bacon over lettuce, I’m never coming back.”
But when she reached the salad bar, she realized that she had underestimated the art of the Iowa salad. She’d been thinking of the standard American salad type of “leafy greens plus something else.” But these salads had no leaves anywhere in sight, and the only green was the spooky neon of lime Jell-O.
The bar had an entire section devoted solely to Jell-O salads. Some were transparent, with grapes or marshmallows suspended in them like a mad scientist lab where mysterious things floated in jars. Some were beautifully molded. Some were chopped into cubes of all the colors of the rainbow, so long as the rainbow was made of neon or food coloring. Some were opaque with whipped cream or mayonnaise—alarmingly, it was hard to tell which.
There were non-Jell-O salads as well, like a concoction of kidney beans, cheese chunks, and mayonnaise—at least, Fen hoped it was mayonnaise. And that wasn't the only bean salad, by far. There were six different types of coleslaw. There were marinated vegetables – every type of vegetable. There were relishes. There were pickles. There were pasta salads. It was a gigantic feast of dishes that Fen had never seen in her entire life, let alone tried. And all of it was much, much more interesting than what she had previously thought of as salad. She could feel her horizons expanding.
“I don’t know about this,” Carter muttered, eyeing an amber Jell-O salad with olives and shredded carrots floating in it.
“Expand your horizons,” said Fen, piling her plate with seven-layer salad, macaroni salad, and Snickers salad. “Think of them as side dishes, like Korean banchan, not typical salads.”
“When you put it that way…” He helped himself to a scoop of warm German potato salad. Poking a bit of bacon with his fork, he said, “Real bacon.”
She enjoyed the potato salads and coleslaw, but they both ended up leaving most of the Jell-O on their plates. Carter was openly and she was secretly glad that another Iowa specialty turned out to be hamburger and corn on the cob. There was a limit to how much she could enjoy a meal consisting entirely of side dishes. Precious had bits of their hamburgers, and Sugar had assorted fruits and vegetables with the Jell-O scraped off.
Fen got a family-sized tub of herring salad to go for Norris. He gulped it down and flapped his fins enthusiastically.
“We’re pretty close to Kerenza, right?” Fen asked.
“Less than an hour, if we make good time,” said Carter.
