Kitchens of the Great Midwest (13 page)

“With you?”

Killer Keeley rapped Prager’s desk with a ruler. “William,” he said. “Front row.” Damn, Keeley picked a crappy time to get his groove back.

“Yes,” Prager said, looking back at Eva as he moved up four desks.

“Sure, sounds fun,” she said, and her smile scattered every other thought in his mind. He spent the rest of the class entranced, watching Keeley’s mouth make noise, as he luxuriated in the hopeful blood shimmering through his veins.

 • • • 

Eli was eating Fritos out of the bag and reading the sports section when Will walked into the kitchen and leaned against the counter.

“Dad, I really need to use the car Friday.”

Eli didn’t look up. “Why, what’s happening?”

“I got a date with a girl.”

“Ah, that’s funny, I have a date that night myself.”

“You have a date?” This was the first Will had heard of his dad dating anyone since their mom died. It had never even occurred to him that his dad would ever date anyone again, much less have sex, or even want to.

Considering how his mom died, hurled from the back of his dad’s Harley Panhead, in an accident that left Eli with just a sprained ankle, and also considering that Eli had not been on a motorcycle since then, it seemed to follow that his dad would be in a state of perpetual mourning, and this course of action had Will’s and Julie’s approval. Anything else felt like hateful treason.

“Yeah, a woman I met at church.”

That was another thing, much less devastating, but dumbly annoying: Eli had started going to early services at a Lutheran church after the funeral. Prager totally didn’t get this at all. Prager’s grandpa on his dad’s side was a nonpracticing Ashkenazi Jew named Frank who had had the misfortune of marrying a devout Lutheran woman named Greta who raised all of their kids, including Eli, strict Missouri Synod Lutheran. And even though Will wasn’t technically Jewish because neither his mom nor his grandmas was Jewish, being raised Jewish would have been a thing, and Prager knew he would’ve loved it.

Eli, meanwhile, refused to recognize any of the traditions, mostly because he didn’t know them, so it was up to Prager to hold his own Passover Seder and observe the High Holy Days and set out a menorah on Hanukkah and get noisemakers for Purim. Eli neither encouraged nor prevented any of this.

Prager, however, totally disapproved of his own dad’s religious practices, especially if it meant that he was using Lutheran Bible study class as a meet market.

“Oh,” Prager said. “Where are you going?”

“Just Luigi’s, downtown there.”

“Oh,” was all he said. It was too much to take in.

“You can have the car that night, if you don’t mind dropping me off.”

“Oh,” Prager said. What an awful bargain; what a shadow cast over what could’ve been such an incredible night.

 • • • 

“Hey,” Eva said before fifth period the next day. “Just letting you know. My dad wants me home by nine at the latest.”

“Oh,” Prager said. That was sure some overprotective dad bullshit right there. It just about killed having dinner in Minneapolis, unless they ate at six or something. What a better world it would be without people’s dads.

“And he wants to meet you,” Eva said.

“Up here, William,” said Killer Keeley, pointing at Prager’s head. “Now.”

 • • • 

Prager turned up The Current 89.3 as he drove his dad down Main Street toward Luigi’s. They were playing “Ashes of American Flags,” by Wilco. His dad turned down the volume without asking.

“Hey, so who you going out with tonight?” his dad asked, unnervingly chipper.

“Just this new girl.” Prager didn’t feel like talking. He felt almost like
his mom was still alive and he was driving his dad to meet his dad’s mistress. He thought for a second about rear-ending the car in front of him, just to put the kibosh on his dad’s awful plans, but the fact that he had his own wildly anticipated date greatly overrode any impulse to sabotage his father’s.

“What’s she like?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Well, I’ll tell you about the woman I’m meeting. Her name is Pat. She’s a widow, her husband died three years ago. She’s got one kid, a little boy named Sam. And she’s younger than me, thirty-five.”

“Sounds great,” Prager said. He hoped that his dad came across like how he really was, not how he was behaving tonight, all bright-voiced and interested, and would drive this woman, and all women, away screaming forever. There was reason to be hopeful for this. He stopped at the curb down the block from Luigi’s. “Is right here OK?”

“Sure,” Eli said. “Well, good luck on your date, and we’ll swap notes in the morning, huh?” Eli raised his eyebrows in that
hubba hubba
motion. Mortifying.

“See ya,” Prager said.

“Love ya, kid,” Eli said, and walked to the front door, fifteen minutes early for his horrible date with the Lutheran widow.

 • • • 

Eva and her family lived in a stout tan-colored apartment building farther down Main, near the Knowles Center. The paint on the sides of the building was chipping and faded and the parking lot was mostly filled with cars that looked like they were abandoned at an impound lot: old, but none old enough to be cool. It was not the sort of place where you’d ever guess someone as amazing as Eva might live. Prager had probably passed this place a million times and never really noticed it. Now he was here, parking his dad’s Ford Taurus in the lot, his heart punching his sternum,
walking across fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts to reach her door. There was an RC Cola vending machine outside the lobby under an overhang; someone had taped a handwritten sign to it that read
BUSTED
.

“Hey, Will,” she said. He didn’t even see her standing there, watering plants on a first-floor patio. She was wearing a black babydoll dress, a German army jacket, and fingerless gloves. That outfit, and her smile, made him want to throw himself at her feet.

“Oh, hey,” he said, not taking off his sunglasses. “I guess we’d better skedaddle.” Did he just say that? God, he was a dork sometimes.

“Hey, come in for a sec, my dad wants to meet you.”

He was hoping she’d forgotten this part.

 • • • 

The man introduced as Jarl Thorvald sat in a poofy navy blue lounge chair, watching the game show
What a Life
and drinking Old Style out of a can tucked in a bright blue beer koozie. He stood up after Eva and Prager closed the door behind them. Prager’s first impression was that he hardly looked like Eva at all; this guy was short, fat, bald, and wearing a half-buttoned short-sleeved shirt, a loosened blue tie, and stained sweatpants. He did not look like a man capable of cooking, or even eating, French onion soup with blue cheese, let alone with Gruyère from Switzerland.

“How do you do?” Jarl asked, after they were introduced from afar. He buttoned his shirt to the top and straightened his tie.

Prager took in the small, dim apartment as he walked over to the living room. Even with the porch drapes closed and only the kitchen light on, he could see how underfurnished the place was; the living room had no couch, just a lounge chair and a folding chair, a black TV and DVD player on a cheap particleboard stand, a glass table in the dinette with two padded folding chairs that was stacked with sports magazines and beer cans, and nothing on any of the walls except a giveaway
wall calendar from a local bank. It looked like the apartment of a man who lived alone; there was no evidence of a teenage girl anywhere.

“So I hear you’re in a band,” Jarl said, and took another swallow of Old Style. His beer koozie said
KEEPIN
’
IT
REEL
and had a picture of a fisherman on it. “What kind of music?”

“Sad country ballads,” Prager said.

“You like Jimmy Buffett?”

Weird question, Prager thought. Jimmy Buffett wasn’t close to what he would call country. He thought that Jimmy Buffett was music for people who hated music. But he looked at Jarl there, the father of the object of his affection, considered the man’s decisive way of phrasing his opinion, and said, “He’s OK, I guess.”

“OK? He’s the most influential musician of the twentieth century. That’s what he is.”

Not even close, Prager thought. Not even in the top one thousand. Maybe he was somewhere in the fourteen hundreds, between Poco and Edison Lighthouse.

“So, your parents OK with you being a
country
musician?”

“Yeah,” Prager said. “My dad doesn’t mind, and my mom, she, uh, she passed away, but I like to think that wherever she is, she’s a fan.” Prager nodded and pursed his lips. He didn’t talk about her often, but when he did, he badly wanted to bring her up in conversation like he was over it, so he could put other people at ease.

“We should go, Dad,” Eva said.

“Oh yeah, that’s right,” the old man said, exuding the enthusiasm and authority of a school custodian. “Be back by nine.”

“I know.” Eva kissed Jarl on the cheek and led Prager to the front door.

“Hey,” Jarl said. “Where are you two going?”

Eva looked at Prager, as if to say,
Better tell him
.

“Steamboat Inn, down in Prescott,” Prager said. It was the nicest restaurant he could find nearby. He’d wanted it to be a surprise.

 • • • 

Eva looked at Prager as he unlocked the passenger-side door for her.

“I’m sorry about your mom,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

“It’s sad, but it happens,” he said, repeating the line he always said in this situation, staring past her at the grocery store across the street.

“My mom died too, two years ago,” Eva said.

“Really?” he said. “Of what?”

“Lung cancer. Yours?”

“Motorcycle accident.”

“Come here,” she said, and hugged him, right there in the parking lot, in front of everybody letting their kids out of minivans and hauling bags of groceries and driving by in sports cars. When, after at least ten seconds, they let go of each other—him first—Prager looked at her. She now looked older, like a woman, a woman whose hand he could take and stride into the darkness with, because she was a woman whose darkness matched his own, and they could fix each other without even trying. They wouldn’t even have to talk about it.

 • • • 

In the car, Eva explained that she and her dad had moved to River Falls from Mankato, where Jarl had been working as a parking lot attendant before he was let go after some misunderstanding. Through no fault of his own, she said, it had taken him a long time to find work. A company in River Falls called Loomis Home Products that made novelty beer koozies for truck stop gift shops finally hired him part-time last month to work in shipping. She asked Prager if he wanted a beer koozie and he said sure, so she dug around in her black bag and, laughing, gave him one that read
SEXY
GRAN
’
PA
.

“I will treasure it always,” he said. He realized that might have sounded sarcastic, but even if it sounded cheesy, he meant it. She’d given him something, something of hers, and it felt like a piece of her
heart, and confirmation that she liked him. He didn’t know where else to put it for the moment, so he placed Sexy Gran’pa on his dashboard, between his eyes and the road, and it glowed under the passing lights.

The radio was playing “Super Bon Bon” by Soul Coughing. He turned up the volume way past where his dad had left it. He rolled down the driver’s side window and stuck his hand out into the night air, the song’s deep upright bass riff blasting through their bodies and bouncing off the passing trees and fenceposts and mosquitoes toward the sky. Then she rolled down her window and stuck her arm out as well, and he smiled, and maybe she smiled at him, too.

 • • • 

The Steamboat Inn, a docked steamboat attached to a full restaurant on the shoreline of the St. Croix River, was even fancier than he expected; they had cloth napkins and candles on the tables and no TVs anywhere. He had made a reservation, which he had never done before, and he’d hoped that was as impressive to Eva as it was to him.

It came out while they were parking that Eva had only eaten out twice all year until then, both times during her family’s move from Mankato to River Falls, while their kitchen implements were packed in a box in a U-Haul. She had rarely even eaten in restaurants while growing up—just for birthdays and special occasions, she said—except for a trip to Chicago she’d taken at age eleven where she ate out for almost every meal. The way Eva’s eyes glimmered when she recounted that memory assured Will Prager that he’d done the right thing for their first outing and certainly taken her to the right place.

They got a nice table not too far away from the windows with a view of the river, though at dusk they could mostly just see the reflection of the interior of the restaurant. They were definitely the youngest people there who weren’t there with their parents, and that felt positively badass.

The menu, though, was really expensive, like over fifteen bucks just
for most of the dinners, so it was a good thing he’d saved money from his summer job at Sam Goody. One of the cheapest things was the Caesar salad for seven bucks.

“The Caesar salad looks interesting,” he said.

“Grilled walleye pike,” she said, noting a menu item that cost eighteen bucks. “With dinner salad and your choice of potato.”

Prager was used to restaurants where college students or even high schoolers worked as servers. At the Steamboat Inn, they got a woman who was probably in her mid-twenties; an official adult. She came to their table and asked if they wanted anything besides water. “Do you have root beer?” he asked. They did.

“I’ll stick with water, thanks,” Eva said.

“Do we order now?” he asked the waitress. She said sure, if they’re ready, and asked them if perhaps they wanted to hear the specials first?

“Absolutely,” Eva said.

The special was roasted maple-glazed Canadian duck over a bed of saffron wild rice, served with Savoy cabbage, for twenty-eight dollars. Prager’s palms were sweating. His dad didn’t let him have a credit card, and he’d only brought thirty-five bucks with him for the whole date.